Migrating login page from website: SEO impact

[vtmoz]

Our current login page looks like www.website.com/log-in/. We are planning to migrate it to a sub directory login.website.com. For years, our login page is the top landing with highest visits after homepage. If we migrate this now, are we going to loose traffic and drop in rankings?

Thanks

[iugac]

Hi! Don't worry. As long as you implement the redirects correctly, you will not have a problem. "A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect which passes between 90-99% of link juice (ranking power) to the redirected page. 301 refers to the HTTP status code for this type of redirect. In most instances, the 301 redirect is the best method for implementing redirects on a website." Read more here -> https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection.

[Alick300]

No If you use 301 redirection you are not going to loose traffic and drop ranking because it is your brand related query and you will always appears on top.

In your case users query might be like this yout brandname + login and other similar search queries.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

[benesmartin]

You might drop in rankings in process of site migration. It depends how well the migration is conducted. Make sure to change as many of those links leading to www.website.com/log-in/ as you can. Where you have a link to www.website.com/log-in/, change it to login.website.com to avoid too many 301's on your website. Also, you should have a good reason for migration to subdomains because you will loose domain authority. Subdomains are treated as a new different websites with zero DA and you need to build it again.

[vtmoz]

Hi Alick,

We meant to move the login page to dedicated server away from website for security concerns. So login.website.com sub-domain will no more part of our website. I wonder the traffic to this separate page counts into website.

[seoman10]

If you 301 properly and phrase the page properly with text and tags it shouldn't be a problem, you may see an initial drop but should recover again.

With branded queries you are normally pretty safe, especially if you have a strong online presence.

Subdomains can cause a bit of a headache if they're not done right, there seems to be a bit of a trend to move away from subdomains of late in favour of putting everything on one domain. Google will sometimes see subdomains as a separate website.

[vtmoz]

We meant to move the login page to dedicated server away from website for security concerns. So login.website.com sub-domain will no more part of our website. Still 301 redirect makes the traffic to be counted as our website traffic?

[vtmoz]

We meant to move the login page to dedicated server away from website for security concerns. So login.website.com sub-domain will no more part of our website. I wonder the traffic to this separate page counts into website. Will 301 redirect will make sure the traffic to login page count as our website traffic?

[seoman10]

Apologies, I'm not entirely sure of got your point.  Do you mean you want the URL locked away so only a favoured few can access it?  I.e. not a general website login.

If you use 301s highly likely Google will find the new login page, If that answers your query?

One point like to throw in here that a penetration tester will tell you that obscurity isn't security.  Meaning that just puting the login form on another URL/Website/IP won't increase the security very much, if at all, especially if someone is determined.

[iugac]

To be honest, I'm not exactly sure what your question is. The subdomain will still be under your domain. It will be the same website but a part of it will be on a different server. The traffic will count for the domain. Even if Google would see this subdomain as a different site (which I don't will be) you still don't have what to worry about because you would have used 301 redirects and all the links will point to the new subdomain. So all you really have to do is change all the links that you can (which lead to the login page) and then do a 301 redirect from the old one to the new one. This is safe in terms of SEO and you don't have to worry about losing your position in the SERPs. Hope this helps!