Subdomain for ticketing of a client website (how to solve SEO problems caused by the subdomain/domain relationship)

[Adam_RushHour_Marketing]

We have a client in need of a ticketing solution for their domain (let's call it www.domain.com) which is on Wordpress - as is our custom ticket solution.  However, we want to have full control of the ticketing, since we manage it for them - so we do not want to build it inside their original Wordpress install.

Our proposed solution is to build it on tickets.domain.com.  This will exist only for selling and issuing the tickets.

The question is, is there a way to do this without damaging their bounce rate and SEO scores?
Since customers will come to www.domain.com, then click the ticketing tab and land on tickets.domain.com, Google will see this as a bounce.  In reality, customers will not notice the difference as we will clone the look and feel of domain.com

Should we perhaps have the canonical URL of tickets.domain.com point to www.domain.com? And also, can we install Webmaster Tools for tickets.domain.com and set the preferred domain as www.domain.com?

Are these possible solutions to the problem, or not - and if not, does anyone else have a viable solution?

Thank you so much for the help.

[LynnPatchett]

HI,

If technically that is the best solution for your needs then a couple of things to keep in mind:

1. If you are using Universal Analytics subdomain tracking is included by default so if you put the same analytics code on your subdomain pages then you should not be seeing any 'bounces' -  google should be able to figure this out also.

2. You can install GWT for the subdomain also. I dont think you can set the preferred domain for a subdomain setup but you can use GWT to monitor issues and make sure that duplicate pages for the subdomain are not getting indexed.

3. To avoid indexing of the subdomain pages (which I assume you don't want) you could canonical them to their equivalent on the www domain. You could also meta robots no-index them all. If they creep in anyway you can use GWT to remove them.

If the subdomain is a complete clone and the experience is seamless then why not make all links on the subdomain go back to the www domain pages. That way the only pages available on the subdomain would be the ticketing pages and the rest would be on the www as normal.

Hope it helps.

[Adam_RushHour_Marketing]

Hey Leo!

Thanks for the taking the time to answer me. I am going to set this up exactly as you recommend.

1. I will install the same GA code from domain.com on tickets.domain.com

2. Do you think I need to set the canonical URL on the various ticketing pages all back to the main domain?
e.g. tickets.domain.com ---> canonical to domain.com
e.g. tickets.domain.com/event1 ---> canonical to domain.com
e.g. tickets.domain.com/event2 ---> canonical to domain.com
e.g. tickets.domain.com/event3 ---> canonical to domain.com
and so on?

3. We did make all the header links of tickets.domain.com point straight back to their counterpart on domain.com.

Does this seem like I basically got it all correct?

Thanks again
Adam

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Adam,

Are the ticket pages on the sub domain the same as the event pages on the main domain except with the ticketing system included? If yes it would make more sense to canonical each event ticketing page back to the same event page so: tickets.domain.com/event1 -> domain.com/event1.

If the ticketing pages are not meant to be indexed at all then I would put the robots no index tag on them also (or a robots file on the whole subdomain) and keep an eye on GWT to make sure none of them creep in. Canonical tags are a 'recommendation' not a rule so if your plans are for these pages to not be indexed at all best to ensure that as completely as possible.