Any SEO penalties for hosting a site on a sub-domain.

[ThisisPlanB]

Hi,

A client of ours has previously been hosting their main website on a sub-domain of their primary URL. They currently have a training application being hosted on the main domain. They also currently have a redirect in place so when you go to www.xzy.com, you're redirected to xzy.xzy.com.

If need need to stick with this set-up for the website relaunch later this month, my question is: are there any SEO drawbacks to having the entire site hosted on a sub-domain? Should we fight to get the training application off the main domain, at which point we can host everything on the main domain?

Many thanks!

Dan

[Anti-Alex]

There's no penalty for running a website on the subdomain. That's perfectly fine but all the redirecting might be confusing for regular users. The most important part for any website is to make it simple for the end-user. If it's simple for the user, Google won't have a problem with what you're doing. You'll also want to take a look at any backlinks. In terms of SEO, Google will pass a tiny bit of juice but for the most part, they treat a subdomain as a completely different site from the root domain. www.xyz.com is not the same site as subdomain.xyz.com, and both domains will need to be individually handled. They can work together but your backlinks will be split between the 2.

[Thriveworks-Counseling]

Dan,

Just a thought for natural incoming links:

As a user (taking my SEO glasses off for a moment), if I did like the site - and know nothing of the importance of links, aka.. the everyday users, I would probably link to domain.com and not subdomain.domain.com - unless I came directly off a blog article...

That may be what the company wants: for users to link to the training application (not really sure)?  It seems as if they have the www. redirecting to subdomain (so all www.domain.com links would actually hit the subdomain) but everything else would steer clear of the domain.

Hope this helps,

Eli

[KristinaKledzik]

I disagree, actually: one thing I have learned from my friends outside of our online or development world is that most people see URLs as a vaguely incomprehensible string that they copy exactly. There is a tendency to add "www" if there isn't one to the beginning of a URL, but generally visitors are just going to copy and paste whatever is in their address bar when sharing.

So, I would just make sure that any "www"s are 301 redirected to their non "www" version of the URL.

Good luck!