Subdomained White-Label Sites

[RosemarieReed]

Wanted to pass along a specific use-case that I'm thinking through in the technical setup for a client.

Site: http://www.abc.com is an ecommerce company that offers the ability to white-label a site so an affiliate can join and get access to the site, and ultimately get a cut of whatever is sold through that affiliate.

So I join the site and get access to scott.xyz.com and can handle my business through that. From a technical standpoint, this is the proposed technical setup of the site.

• Canonical URLS will be set to www.xyz.com
• Pages on scott.xyz.com will be set to noindex, while the main www.xyz.com will be set to be indexed
• Webmaster Tools for scott.xyz.com will be set to have preferred domain of www.xyz.com
• scott.xyz.com will have separate robots.txt instructing to block crawl

Questions

1. Am I missing any steps in properly setting up the technical background of the subdomain sites? The use of subdomains isn't something that I am able to move away from.
2. Will any links in to scott.xyz.com pass juice and authority to www.xyz.com, or does the noindex/nocrawl block that from happening?
3. Is there anything else that I am missing?

Thanks!
Scott

[RuthBurrReedy]

Hi Scott,

1. That looks good to me! An additional factor you'd want to consider is how you're treating visits from the subdomains to the main site, and vice versa, in analytics - do you want those to be treated as referrals, or as part of the same session? - and configure accordingly.

2. If you've marked the subdomains "noindex, follow" Google will likely pass some link juice, but as usual in Moz Q&A the answer is "it depends" In this case, it depends on whether or not Google crawls the pages on the subdomain in the first place, and how closely-related Google perceives the subdomains to be to the main domain. So the answer is "some, probably, but probably not as much as links from unrelated sites that aren't noindexed."

3. From your question, it sounds like you're pretty familiar with the subdomains-vs-subfolders conversation in SEO, so I won't go into it here. Again, you're going to want to be really intentional when it comes to tracking on these sites to make sure you're properly tracking traffic between them.

This sounds like it could make a really interesting blog post once you've got it all set up!