I have consolidated my subdomains into subfolders; should i remove the subdomains also?

[McCaldin]

Hi,

I have consolidated my website's many sub-domains into sub-folders.  We had ~20 sub-domains.  The sub-domains and the root domain shared the same code-base and sub-domain specific features were controlled using Apache's SetEnv directive in the httpd.conf includes.

Now they are consolidated.  I have redirected all of the sub-domains to the relevant sub-folder; so http://sub1.mysite.com now 301 redirects to http://www.mysite.com/sub1.The redirects happen in the htaccess file and all sub-domains and the root are still pointing to the same code-base.

However, the Moz campaign tracker still occasionally tells me that i have optimisation opportunities at http://sub1.mysite.com and in both Bing and Google webmaster tools traffic to those sub-domains is mentioned.

Should i delete the subdomains?

Cheers

[DSM_UK]

Hi,

To avoid any duplicate content, not having the subdomains is the safest way to do so.

Check the subdomains with something like the screaming frog, for what is returned, if there is content then you will need to redirect that content.

Kind Regards

Jimmy

[McCaldin]

Hi Jimmy,

Thanks for responding and for the advice.  When i hit the old sub-domain with Screaming Frog i get 301 moved permanently and nothing further is crawled.  I Frog-crawled a number of the old URLs and they are all redirecting correctly with 301s.  It looks like there is no duplicate content but i am still a bit uneasy that the old sub-domain shows up in Moz and the webmaster tools..

[MattRoney]

If everything is redirecting properly, you shouldn't have an issue, and the subdomain still being present will actually be helpful to any folks with an outdated link or bookmark.

You may want to add noindex to the pages on those subdomains, or block them with robots.txt. Over time, that would get them out of the search results in favor of the new, up-to-date subfolders. Removing them, though, isn't necessary.

[McCaldin]

Robots.txt!  That makes sense.  I'll do that.

Thanks for your response.