Sub-domain such as http://blog.example.com is considered a part from http://example.com or it is concerned as different domain by Google?
Google consider it to be part of the same domain. For example, blog.example.com is 'linked' to example.com. A good example is Wikipedia. Do a quick Google search for a well known entity or topic (i.e. 'England'). The second result is en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England - a subdomain of Wikipedia.
Long story short: using a subdomain shouldn't affect your search ranking.
Related
My subdomains are going to be city names:
miami.mysite.com
newyork.mysite.com
I don't know how most sites handle subdomains. My idea is simply to point them all to mysite.com and somehow get the subdomain name with PHP so that I echo the city posts and content with PHP.
Providing all subdomains have different Titles and Description. Will google index each subdomain as a different website?
Yes, Google will index each one as a separate site. However make sure you consider the pros and cons. Here's a good starting point: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites
My opinion is go with subfolders (e.g. mysite.com/miami) instead of subdomains, mainly because consolidating inbound links to a single hostname will build more authority over time than if the same link juice is diluted among hundreds of subdomains. Also I think it would be hard to build enough unique content on each subdomain to support or justify having a separate site.
If my website only responds to www.example.com, and not example.com, does this affect search rankings at all? I haven't found anything to confirm or deny this for any major search engine, and I'm curious.
i was reading an article on this a while back from ScottGuthrie that relates to IIS SEO Toolkit - the main points are as follows:
4 Really Common SEO Problems Your Sites Might Have
Below are 4 really common scenarios that can cause your site to inadvertently expose multiple URLs for the same content. When this happens external sites linking to yours will end up splitting their page links across multiple URLs - and as a result cause you to have a lower page ranking with search engines than you deserve.
SEO Problem #1: Default Document
IIS (and other web servers) supports the concept of a “default document”. This allows you to avoid having to explicitly specify the page you want to serve at either the root of the web-site/application, or within a sub-directory. This is convenient – but means that by default this content is available via two different publically exposed URLs (which is bad). For example:
http://scottgu.com/
http://scottgu.com/default.aspx
SEO Problem #2: Different URL Casings
Web developers often don’t realize URLs are case sensitive to search engines on the web. This means that search engines will treat the following links as two completely different URLs:
http://scottgu.com/Albums.aspx
http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx
SEO Problem #3: Trailing Slashes
Consider the below two URLs – they might look the same at first, but they are subtly different. The trailing slash creates yet another situation that causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and so split search rankings:
http://scottgu.com
http://scottgu.com/
SEO Problem #4: Canonical Host Names
Sometimes sites support scenarios where they support a web-site with both a leading “www” hostname prefix as well as just the hostname itself. This causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and split search rankling:
http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx/
http://www.scottgu.com/albums.aspx/
full article at http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/04/20/tip-trick-fix-common-seo-problems-using-the-url-rewrite-extension.aspx
Google treats www.example.com and example.com as two separate domains (since 'www' is technically a sub-domain). Neither is better than the other in terms of SEO, as long as you don't mix and match links - i.e. some links point to example.com while others point to www.example.com.
If you don't have any redirects from one to the other, then links into the site (and so visitor traffic) may be split between the two sub-domains, effectively meaning you're competing with yourself in search engine rankings. It's probably a good idea to pick one (either example.com or www.example.com) then set up redirects on the other domain, and/or add canonical links to pages so that search engines know that the pages should be treated as the same site.
See here for more on canonical links in www vs non-www links.
When I searching our web site on Google I found three sites with the same content show up. I always thought we were using only one site www.foo.com, but it turn out we have www.foo.net and www.foo.info with the same content as www.foo.com.
I know it is extremely bad to have the same content under different URL. And it seems we have being using three domains for years and I have not seen punitive blunt so far. What is going on? Is Google using new policy like this blog advocate?http://www.seodenver.com/duplicate-content-over-multiple-domains-seo-issues/ Or is it OK using DNS redirect? What should I do? Thanks
If you are managing the websites via Google Webmaster Tools, it is possible to specify the "primary domain".
However, the world of search engines doesn't stop with Google, so your best bet is to send a 301 redirect to your primary domain. For example.
www.foo.net should 301 redirect to www.foo.com
www.foo.net/bar should 301 redirect to www.foo.com/bar
and so on.
This will ensure that www.foo.com gets the entire score, rather than (potentially) a third of the score that you might get for link-backs (internal and external).
Look into canonical links, as documented by Google.
If your site has identical or vastly
similar content that's accessible
through multiple URLs, this format
provides you with more control over
the URL returned in search results. It
also helps to make sure that
properties such as link popularity are
consolidated to your preferred
version.
They explicitly state it will work cross-domain.
When users entering domain www.example.com, it has to check for the country from the IP and should redirected to some other language specific domain eg: www.example.co.in. Will the search engine crawler recognize both www.example.com and www.example.co.in? Will this effect the search engine ranking?
Someone could guide me on the disadvantages of using IP masking.
Thanks & Regards,
Kavitha
I think it is interesting to note that Google returns HTTP/1.1 302 Found to redirect you to your country specific domain when you visit google.com from any country outside the US.
I suggest reading Matt Cutt's article (a Google software engineer) on how Google handles the 302 Redirect: SEO advice: discussing 302 redirects.
Different search engines handle the 302 redirect in a different way. Google also makes a distinction between redirects towards the same domain, and off-domain redirects. In general, using redirects will make your SEO more complicated and very tricky, and you risk having your original domain ignored by search engines.
You may also want to check out the following article on how the Google crawler handles the various HTTP status codes: Google Webmaster Central - HTTP status codes.
HTTP/1.1 302 Found code is used for temporary redirects, so it could work. However, it is not recommended as Google will be unable to identify domain example.com with any content at other domains - basically, what I am saying is that Google spider will be redirected too based on its IP and only (presumably) English content will be indexed for this domain. If that's OK with you, then you are set.
Please, be advised this is a big no-no(!) from usability perspective and users everywhere hate this behaviour. Google offers alternative link to go to google.com even after redirection.
I'm setting up a number sites right now and many of them have multiple domains. The question is: do I alias the domain (with ServerAlias) or do I Redirect the request?
Obviously ServerAlias is better/easier from a readability or scripting perspective. I have heard however that Google likes it better if everything redirects to one domain. Is this true? If so, what redirect code should be used?
Common vhost examples will have:
ServerName example.net
ServerAlias www.example.net
Is this wrong and should the www also be a redirect in addition to example2.net and www.example2.net? Or is Google smart enough to that all these sites (or at least the www) are the same site?
UPDATE: Part of the reasoning for wanting aliases is that they are much faster. A redirect for a dialup user just because they did (or didn't) use the www adds significantly to initial page load.
UPDATE and ANSWER: Thanks Paul for finding the Google link which instructs us to "help your fellow webmasters by not perpetuating the myth of duplicate content penalties". Note, however, this only applies to content ON THE SAME SITE, exemplified in the article with "www.example.com/skates.asp?color=black&brand=riedell or www.example.com/skates.asp?brand=riedell&color=black". In fact, the article explicitly says "Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content."
Redirecting is better, then there is always one, canonical domain for your content. I hear Google penalises multiple domains hosting the same content, but I can't find a source for that at the moment (edit, here's one article, but from 2005, which is ancient history in Internet years!) (not correct, see edit below)
Here's some mod-rewrite rules to redirect to a canonical domain:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.foobar\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://www.foobar.com/$1 [L,R=permanent]
That checks that the host isn't the canonical domain (www.foobar.com) and checks that a domain has actually been specified, before deciding to redirect the request to the canonical domain.
Further Edit: Here's an article straight from the horses mouth - seems it's not as big an issue as you might think. Please read this article CAREFULLY as it distinguishes between duplicate content on the same site (as in "www.example.com/skates.asp?color=black&brand=riedell and www.example.com/skates.asp?brand=riedell&color=black") and specifically says "Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content."
SSL certificates can also be an issue (wild card certs mitigate this but are more expensive).
So if the cert is only bound to www.example.com, it won't validate for example.com. If this circumstance applies to your case, then carefully handling, redirects and hyperlink references in your html and javascript is very important.
If they are entirely different domain names, you will want to redirect because otherwise cookies can not be shared between the two. If a user logs into your website at example1.com, they will need to log in again if they visit example2.com.
If they are just different subdomains (example.com vs www.example.com) this won't matter.
Server aliasing can cause problems with CGI session continuity: since cookies are attached to the domain they were served from, CGI scripts have to be carefully written so that they are aware of the aliasing, or all links within and into the site have to be relative, or both - it is much harder to avoid niggly little hard-to-debug problems due to the browser serving you different cookies based on whether the user last entered your site through name.tld or www.name.tld.
Nowadays I doubt it matters. If you see both entries in google, then you know you're doing it wrong.
If half the links to your site refer to one URL and half refer to another, each URL is only going to get half the pagerank. Even if Google doesn't penalize your rank for having duplicate content, you're going to suffer.