Will Links to one Sub-Domain on a Site hurt a different Sub-Domain on the same site by affecting the Quality of the Root Domain?

[ifbyphone]

Hi,

I work for a SaaS company which uses two different subdomains on our site. A public for our main site (which we want to rank in SERPs for), and a secure subdomain, which is the portal for our customers to access our services (which we don't want to rank for) .

Recently I realized that by using our product, our customers are creating large amounts of low quality links to our secure subdomain and I'm concerned that this might affect our public subdomain by bringing down the overall Authority of our root domain.

Is this a legitimate concern? Has anyone ever worked through a similar situation?

any help is appreciated!

[NakulGoyal]

Are the URLs, pages/filenames 100% in sync between the secure subdomain and the main/public site ? If that's the case (and if it makes sense, you add a canonical on your secure.subdomain.com to public.subdomain.com pages). This way your secure.subdomain.com will not get indexed in the SERPS and will act as a 301 redirect.

P.S. Only do this if the pages are 100% in SYNC and the only difference is price etc. This way only 1 version of the pages get indexed. Users linking to your secure site will NOT get redirected, they will still see the secure site. But when the bots follow the link, they will see the canonical link as a strong directive not to index this page but your public equivalent of the same page.

[ifbyphone]

Hi Nakul,

Thanks for the reply.

Sorry I wasn't a little more specific in my initial question. Anyhow our secure site is not at all the same as our public site. The secure site is used by our customers to access their accounts and use our applications. An example would be a click-to-call. If one of our customers uses our click to call service on every page of their website, then we will have several links from that customer's site back to our secure site. My concern is that this could be negatively impacting our public site since both use the same root domain.

Any thoughts on whether or not this could be a problem?

Thanks again for your help!

[Carson-Ward]

Firstly, I wouldn't worry about your customers creating "low-quality links" unless your customers are exclusively spammers. Low authority links and spam links are two very different things in Google's eyes.

If the links point to pages that a user could not see without logging in, simply use a meta robots noindex to ensure the pages won't appear in search results. This isn't especially critical, since the page would be unlikely to appear in results anyway, but you can follow the best practice of blocking content behind a wall if you're worried about it.

If you do have a lot of customers running sites Google might consider spammy, let me know and we'll talk about it from there. Otherwise you don't need to worry.

[ifbyphone]

Thanks for the advise Carson!