Homepage & Subdomain Love Story...

[Yoav_Vilner]

Hi,

Here's the situation:

There's this website URL.com which is a search engine for a certain purpose (android developers).

In fact, the homepage and maybe the "about" page are the only pages sitting on URL.com, all of the other inner pages (hundreds of thousands) are generated within one main Sub-Domain - X.URL.com

Also, the analytics is tracking only X.URL.com because those inner pages are the only ones to attract organic traffic.

So, in Analytics we see URL.com as referral traffic to X.URL.com

Also, in WebmasterTools under "Links to your site" we see like half a million links from URL.com to X.URL.com

Is this situation normal, do you think it may impact SEO in any way?

Last remark, organic traffic is growing in a great way to the inner pages generated by the search engine, which as said sitting under x.URL.com

Thanks

[danwebman]

Google treats 'most' subdomains as separate websites, GA allows you to use the same account to monitor more than one domain/sub-domain, however Google sees them as separate. What Google also checks is where the domains are hosted if they are on the same range of IP Addresses etc.

I can't see Google penalising you for having the x.domain.com pointing to the main domain as it's all to one page, if however you had the main domain pointing to all pages from a single sitemap style page Google would think that you're trying to spam it and would penalise you heavily possibly even ban.

I have 10 different websites within the group to look after most of the pages all link back to http://www.eriks.co.uk to pass juice back to the most important site

[JaneCopland]

Hi Yoav,

I doubt this impacts your SEO as long as it isn't being seen as manipulative. I doubt that though, since the set-up is very transparent. If you want to exclude URL.com as a referrer, check out this guide.