Do I need to worry about sub-domains?

[vtmoz]

Hi Moz commnity,

Our website ranking was good and dropped for couple of recent months. We have around 10 sub-domains. I doubt them if they are hurting us. Being said all over in SEO industry like the sub-domains are completely different websites; will they hurt if they are not well optimised? And we have many links from our sub-domains to website top pages, is this wrong for Google? How to well maintain the sub-domains? Do I need to worry about them?

Thanks

[ConclusionDigital]

Hi,

What is blocking you to optimize the subdomains? Especially when you're having so many links from your subdomains to your website top pages.

My suggestion would be to investigate if it is possible for you to move from sub domains to sub folders, so you can benefit from your top domain's authority. In that case it is not needed to maintain different sub domains (websites) that all need their own sitemaps and robots.txt's. When moving to sub folders it is advised to optimize those pages too.

But when you want to know more about domains, MOZ has a pretty good piece of content for that https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain

Andre

[vtmoz]

Hi Andre,

Our sub-domains has the activity like forums where lot of users are participating. It's hard to control it with broken links, external links and some spammy content. So we are interested to move the "optimised" sub-domains to sub folders and leave the others. And if the page title repeats in pages of sub-domain, is that bad  and dilutes the website transparency? For all our website pages we have give "topic name | brand & keyword" and same for sub-domain pages like "topic name | brand & keyword". Is this hurting us? Having keyword along with brand name across the sub-domain pages hurt rankings?

Thanks