User Created Subdomain Help

[breezi]

Have I searched FAQ: Yes

My issue is unique because of the way our website works and I hope that someone can provide some guidance on this.Our website http://breezi.com is a website builder where users can build their own website. When users build their site it creates a sub-domain route to their created site, for example: http://mike.breezi.com. Now that I have explained how our site works here is the problem: Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools are indexing ALL the user created websites under our TLD and thus it is our impression that any content created in those sub-domains can confuse the search engine to thinking that the user created website and content is relevant to _OUR _main sitehttp://breezi.com. So, what we would like to know if there is a way to let search engines know that the user created sites and content is not related to our TLD site. Thanks for any help and advise.

[JesseCWalker]

hmmm...  That is a tricky one.  One place to look for answer might be to talk to SEO people that have worked with a similar service such as Ning or wordpress.com .

I'll be curious to hear of your findings.

[rmontanez]

Navid,

Using the Robot.txt to block the sub domains might not be the best route.

The only way I would think you can do that is by telling GWT to remove the URL (in this case your subdomains).

On Webmaster tools, click on "Site Configuration", then "Crawler access" then "Remove URL". Here click on "New Removal request". You will then see a option to remove whole site. You can use this option to remove "subdomain.domain.com" from SERP.

[breezi]

Robert,

The suggestion you make is not an option. I don't want to remove any sub-domain urls because these are user generated sites that could generate their own respective ranking.

[JustinTaylor88]

Subdomains generally don't pass any authority, link juice etc to the TLD, Rand did a Whiteboard Friday that briefly covered this a while ago (see http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday)

I am curious, if you didn't want user created sites to be associated with your TLD why didn't you set up a different domain for user created sites?

I personally think it is morally wrong to try and stop Google indexing them. So, if you don't want these associated with you or your TLD I would set up a new domain eg yourbreezi.com and 301 any sites that have been set up to the new domain and make sure that any new user sites are set up under the new domain.

In truth I'm not sure it is too much to worry about, after all Wordpress.org uses subdomains for most of its hosted blogs and it doesn't seem to have done them too much harm!!

Hope that helps