Learn/Multiple-Subdomains:-Classic-SEO-Mistake

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 By Michael Cottam on September 27, 2010

About the Author
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My Website:
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Michael Cottam is an independent SEO consultant in Portland, Oregon, and an associate at SEOmoz in Seattle, Washington. Michael co-founded TheBigDay honeymoon travel and registry company in 2001, and was responsible for the website and SEO for that company. Prior to that, he was director of technology and innovation at STEP Technology in Portland, and worked on desktop applications, server applications, and websites for clients in the banking, real estate, and transportation industries. Michael has also taught classes in database and Microsoft programming.

Did you know that if you own www.mywebsite.com, you also own:

  • blog.mywebsite.com
  • store.mywebsite.com
  • and anythingelse.mywebsite.com?

Each of these is a subdomain of mywebsite.com. You might think – and many web designers do think – that subdomains are a nice way to organize your website. People often put the company blog on blog.mywebsite.com, the product catalog and shopping cart on store.mywebsite.com, and job listings on career.mywebsite.com.

Subdomains pose problems for SEO

While this seems like a reasonable way to structure a website, it's a real problem for search engine optimization (SEO). Google treats each subdomain as if it's a completely different website, rather than a subsection of mywebsite.com. That means any links that point to one of your subdomains – for example, your blog – won’t help your product pages rank well in search results.

Let’s back up a moment. It’s common knowledge that links to a given website are one of the most important factors Google uses to rank that site in search results. If the links pointing to mywebsite.com come from high-authority websites, and they’re tied to words that are relevant to mywebsite.com, then Google regards mywebsite.com as more important than sites that lack these high-authority, relevant links.

Let’s say you’ve created some great content at blog.mywebsite.com – content so good that lots of people are leaving comments there, and linking to your posts. That’s great – but because blog.mywebsite.com is seen as a distinct site, totally different from store.mywebsite.com, all the comments on your blog and links to it do nothing to help your product pages rank well in search results.

Instead of putting your blog on blog.mywebsite.com, put it on mywebsite.com/blog. This tells search engines that your blog is in a subdirectory of mywebsite.com, and is therefore part of that website. The same rule should be applied to your product catalog, your shopping cart, and your jobs page.

There’s another good reason to use the directory structure: It’s familiar to most people. It’s a lot easier for someone to recognize quickly which website they’re on, and to see that they’re in the blog section, or the jobs section, or the store section of that website.

Don’t Forget About the WWW

Website owners and designers often forget to make sure that typing either mywebsite.com or www.mywebsite.com will take someone to your website. [link to Kristina’s article]

There's ONE and ONLY one way to do this properly. You must use a single 301 redirect to take people to the address you want to use as the location for your website. If you want your website address to be www.mywebsite.com, using a 301 redirect when someone types mywebsite.com tells search engines and web browsers that there really is just one site, and it’s at www.mywebsite.com.

You should not use a 302 redirect – it’s like saying that there really are two different websites at the two addresses.

Think of it this way: A 301 redirect is like forwarding calls made to your office phone to your cell phone. The caller doesn’t realize they’ve been forwarded – they just get to you on your cell phone.

A 302 redirect, on the other hand, is like someone calling your office phone and getting a voicemail telling them to call your cell phone. Now they think they have two valid numbers for you, and that they should sometimes try your cell phone. It would be much simpler for them to have just your office number programmed into their phone as the single reliable way to reach you.

Other common errors:

  • Not remembering to configure the web server to respond to both www.mywebsite.com and mywebsite.com. This means someone who types mywebsite.com gets a “page not found” error message.
* Allowing the web server to serve up pages from BOTH www.mywebsite.com and mywebsite.com without a redirect. This makes it look like two identical websites exist at the two addresses. The value of any links to either of address is diluted.
* Redirecting from one address to the other with Javascript.  Search engines mostly don’t follow Javascript, so as far as they’re concerned, it’s as if you’d never created a redirect at all.

•Redirecting from one to the other with META REFRESH. Google doesn’t regard this as a redirect.

Some hosting companies have settings to do the subdomain consolidation for you, but I recommend against using that feature. One of the largest hosting companies in the world does the redirect with a chain of 302 and 301 redirects. Each successive 301 redirect dilutes the value of any links to the website, and a 302 redirect completely wastes the value of all links to the site.

Which just goes to show you that even the professionals can get it wrong.

Resources

  • This article shows sample syntax for doing your 301 redirect in many languages.
  • Matt Cutts, Google’s chief spam engineer, explains some of the rare cases where using a 302 redirect (instead of a 301) is the right thing to do.

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