Using a Sub Domain as a Main Domain?

[MVIreland]

Hi,

I'm working on a site at the moment and the sub domain is acting as the main domain. This occurred when the site was redesigned and built on a sub domain for testing but it was never moved to the main domain when it went live (a couple of years ago). So little or no pages are live on domain.com but all on sub.domain.com. It's a large company but they have very poor rankings. Would you recommend that they move the sub domain back into the root folder? Does this involve renaming/re-pointing URLs?

Thanks

Louise

[dohertyjf]

Hi there -

I'm a bit confused about your question. When you say "sub folder" there at the end, do you mean "subdomain"? If so then the question makes sense and that is what I will answer.

First of all, technically www.site.com is a subdomain that is treated the same as subdomain.site.com or othersubdomain.site.com.

So, in my opinion and experience, their rankings shouldn't be terrible just because they're on eg a www2.site.com subdomain. I do wonder though, since they had their main site on another part of the domain and then moved to this one that was originally a test subdomain, if there were issues with the migration to the site that was built on this other subdomain than the original site. You need to go back and do a forensic SEO analysis (or hire someone to do it) to see if 301s are correct, if a lot of links were not redirected, and the like before you even consider moving everything back to where it was before. If you don't do your due-diligence, you're likely going to do more harm than good.

Hope that helps.

John

[EGOL]

You need to go back and do a forensic SEO analysis (or hire someone to do it) to see if 301s are correct, if a lot of links were not redirected, and the like before you even consider moving everything back to where it was before. If you don't do your due-diligence, you're likely going to do more harm than good.

I strongly agree with John on this.  Who knows what these olther folks did and what they didn't do.

If would be best to evaluate the site from top to bottom to eliminate any problems.  Better to do this now than to realize five years from now that the site was only 50% effective.

[ThompsonPaul]

Just reinforcing what John and Egol have said. The non-standard configuration you have could work fine, but only if it was set up very carefully by an experienced SEO to take account of the special circumstances. (As an example - I suspect people who try to visit the main domain URL still land on an active page, as opposed to being 301-redirected to the subdomain's home page, yes? This would be just one example of the kind of issue that would be killing your current site's ranking power.)

And changing up to the more standard configuration is now going to take someone with extensive SEO experience to find and correct all the pitfalls in the process of migrating to a more standard configuration.

Paul

[MVIreland]

Hi all,

Thanks for your replies. Firstly, yes there was an error at end of first question (edited to sub domain now).

Any pages that were on the main domain prior to the redesign do correctly 301 to the sub domain. There are a couple of pages still live on the main domain as there is no equivalent page on the sub domain.

As with most sites there are many factors influencing their poor rankings but I'm just interested to know how much of an impact this could be having? My thought would have been that the sub domain is only as good as the main domain and in this case the main domain isn't strong because little or no content is hosted on it. The sub domain is effectively acting as the main domain (hosting all core product pages) however it seems you're saying Google will treat them the same and it's not worth the risk or the work involved to move it? They actually have a couple of sub domains, as below.

example.com, 1sub.example.com (effectively acting as the main domain by hosting all core product content), 2sub.example.com, 3sub.example.com, 4sub.example.com, 5sub.example.com

Louise

[dohertyjf]

Hey MV -

What you say here I don't think is the correct way to be thinking about it:

"My thought would have been that the sub domain is only as good as the main domain and in this case the main domain isn't strong because little or no content is hosted on it."

As I said in my original comment, there isn't really a "main domain" with a technical implementation. Your subdomain should be able to rank just fine as long as it is the canonical, has links to it, and the migration was done correctly from the old to the new. I still suspect that there are a lot of links left to the old site setup that are not yet benefitting where your site is now.

A subdomain is a separate site from another subdomain, so site.domain.com is different from www.domain.com and has its own ranking potential. Links to www.domain.com may have a knockon effect for ranking site.domain.com, but you also need links to site.domain.com to really be able to rank.