No Control Over Subdomains - What Will the Effect Be?

[Jeff_Bender]

Hello all,

I work for a university and I my small team is responsible for the digital marketing, website, etc. We recently had a big initiative on SEO and generating traffic to our website.

The issue I am having is that my department only "owns" the www subdomain. There are lots of other subdomains out there. For example, a specific department can have its own subdomain at department.domain.com and students can have their own webpage at students.domain.com, etc.

I know the possibilities of domain cannibilization, but has any one run into long term problems with a similar situation or had success in altering the views of a large organization?

If I do get the opportunity to help some of these other domains, what is best to help our overall domain authority? Should the focus be on removing similar content to the www subdomain or cleaning up errors? Some of these subdomains have hundreds of 4XX errors.

[effectdigital]

It all depends upon how intensely these domains and sub-domains are networked together. If they're very strongly interlinked, Google will likely consider them to be a single website. That brings benefits such as the pooling of SEO authority, but also weaknesses such as the transference or spread of Google penalties. That being said, if one sub domain really doesn't have their sh*t together but other departments have created genuinely useful resources, Google will be loathe to impact useful pages just because 'someone else in the same family' doesn't really know what they're doing.

The largest problem will be lack of vision and operating within the confines of an organisation where, people all have different ideas instead of letting data do the talking. All decisions should be data-led. If the data says, this area of your site is the most important and it also has the biggest opportunities - all efforts should be focused there. If you fundamentally lack the ability to direct all of the things which impact marketing (content, UX, CRO, SEO, design) across all sub-domains with one unified vision, you'll always be limited in terms of the gains you can make. On the other hand within such an organisation, that may be well understood and respected (thus alleviating some tensions)

Domain authority does not come from you, your resources or anything that your organisation does. Authority is a reflection of how popular and useful, the rest of the web finds your websites, pages, resources and content. Editorial (not advertorial or ad-based) links to your live pages from recent, authoritative sources garner your domain (and pages) additional authority. What you're struggling against is the shell of academic culture. It's a sector where, if people do X and teach Y they earn Z. They are happy to be institutionalised (sorry if that offends anyone but it's true) so they seldom consider the impact which the views of others have upon their success

I remember I had a debate with a uni tutor once who got on my case because I complained about their attendance (in terms of being a lecturer). They said academia is not a business and that I shouldn't hold it as a service I was paying for. Further down the line I was unable to finish an essay within the specified time limit and was told "well in the future, when you are employed - your employer will expect you to be able to cut to the chase. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge isn't worth anything" - **small wonder **I went ballistic at the double-standards which had been put across to me

The point is, your organisation's authority isn't determined (in SEO or real-life terms) by their arbitrary academic choices. It's determined by performance, and how useful people find the specified website or organisation. Everyone in life asks "what's the ROI on that?" - especially since tuition fees are pretty high in the USA and creeping up in the UK too

When you get good, non-manipulative, editorial links from external sources (of high relevance and repute), which Google doesn't think have been produced 'for SEO alone' - your SEO authority grows larger. With more authority in a given area, you have more power to rank (as long as errors and crawl barrier don't inhibit that authority from cascading down to the relevant sub-pages). Removing roadblocks like errors, could make you rank much better. But if your authority is low, it'll do jack diddly squat

You need to engage your organisation from a more PR-esque perspective, then when you have built up some good links - tackle the errors much more aggressively. That's my 2pence anyway

[Jeff_Bender]

Thank you for that reply. As you mentioned, I think I am more struggling with my task and that unified mission across all subdomains in an industry where only a handful of institutions can make that happen.

There was lots of good information to take from this. Thank you.