Old subdomains - what to do SEO-wise?

[e.wel]

Hello,

I wanted the community's advice on how to handle old subdomains.

We have https://www.yoursite.org. We also have two subdomains directly related to the main website: https://www.archive.yoursite.org and https://www.blog.yoursite.org.

As these pages are not actively updated, they are triggering lots and lots of errors in the site crawl (missing meta descriptions, and much much more). We do not have particular intentions of keeping them up-to-date in terms of SEO. What do you guys think is the best option of handling these?

I considered de-indexing, but content of these page is still relevant and may be useful - yet it is not up to date and it will never be anymore.

Many thanks in advance.

[willcritchlow]

Hi there. Sorry for the slow follow-up on this - there was an issue that meant I didn't get the email alert when it was assigned to me.

There is increasing evidence that culling old / poor performing content from your site can have a positive effect, though I wouldn't be particularly confident that this would transfer across sub-domains to benefit the main site.

In general, I suspect that most effort expended here will be better-placed elsewhere, and so I would angle towards the least effort option.

I think that the "rightest" long-term answer though would be to move the best content to the main domain (with accompanying 301 redirects) and remove the remainder with 410 status codes. This should enable you to focus on the most valuable content and get the most benefit from the stuff that is valuable, while avoiding having to continue expending effort on the stuff that is no longer useful. The harder this is, though, the less I'd be inclined to do it - and would be more likely to consider just deindexing the lowest quality stuff and getting whatever benefit remains from the better content for as long as it is a net positive, with an eye to eventually removing it all.

Hope that helps - I don't think it's a super clear-cut situation unfortunately.

[e.wel]

Thanks for replying Will.

You have mentioned a few ways to deal with this there - and they all seem to point out to the fact that this should not really be a high-priority issue for us at the moment. Especially, if you think that sub-domains do not really have a major effect to the main site (I would not even think it's even worth us deindexing to be honest as it may be relevant to some people and we can just allow Google to continue indexing as it is).

Surely, all considerations point to this: we can come to the conclusion that we won't be doing any SEO-related work on these pages.

Therefore, how do I set up MOZ to ignore these two sub-domains and only show crawl errors related to the main site? We just don't want these pages to be crawled at all by MOZ given we won't do any work on them.

Thanks