To avoid errors in our Moz crawl, we removed subdomains from our host. (First we tried 301 redirects, also listed as errors.) Now we have backlinks all over the web that are broken. How bad is this, from a pagerank standpoint?

[KristyFord]

Our MOZ crawl kept telling us we had duplicate page content even though our subdomains were redirected to our main site. (Pages from Wineracks.vigilantinc.com were 301 redirected to vigilantinc.com/wineracks.) Now, to solve that problem, we have removed the wineracks.vigilantinc.com subdomain. The error report is better, but now we have broken backlinks - thousands of them. Is this hurting us worse than the duplicate content problem?

[Schwaab]

Were the redirects tested and working?  I'm confused why Moz would not be picking up the redirects.  Do you have any specific examples of the pages that Moz was reporting as duplicate content?

Is it possible you just redirected the root of the subdomain, rather than every page on the subdomain?

I think it's something that should definitely be addressed.  The massive amounts of broken links, and subsequent loss of link equity, could have a more negative impact on your site than the Moz errors that were being picked up.

[KristyFord]

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[Cyrus-Shepard]

Not really sure what to make of this. If you want to provide a little more information, perhaps we can help.

What do you mean by a "broken backlink"?  How do you know they are broken?  Finally, can you provide an example of one?

Thanks.

[Schwaab]

So did commercial.vigilantinc.com/wine-refrigerators.php have a 301 redirect to vigilantinc.com/commercial/wine-refrigerators.php; or did you just have one redirect from commercial.vigilantinc.com to vigilantinc.com/commerical thinking it would also redirect all the subfolders?

If the latter is the case you need to put a 301 redirect on every subfolder of the subdomain, or place a site wide redirect on the subdomain.

[KristyFord]

We had a sitewide 301 redirect for the subdomain. This was tested and worked fine, but MOZ considered every page that was redirect as duplicate page content error. So then, we simply deleted the subdomain on the host server. Our error count went down dramatically.

Broken backlinks - which we found through Webmaster Tools - are still going to the subdomain, commercial.vigilantinc.com, and are broken because that no longer exists on our host server. I guess my question is, should we re-establish the subdomain with 301 redirects (which MOZ apparently doesn't recognize) or live with the broken links to our site?

Thanks, everyone, for responding.

[KristyFord]

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