Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey there -

What a great question! It's definitely a very involved one and not a decision to be taken lightly. In fact, I was just having a similar conversation with a group of people recently when one of them posed it as well.

First of all, let me make a few comments around Domain Authority and how you should be thinking about it. Domain Authority is a metric created by Moz that correlates to how likely a website is to rank. That said, it's still unclear how the search engines are treating subdomains as they can be on different servers, be completely different technologies, and targeted to different countries as you well know.

That said, I am always a fan of consolidating link equity. If you move from a ccTLD to a country-specific subdomain and do all of the permanent redirects correctly, two things will likely happen:

1. You will consolidate link equity from many different domains to your one overall domain, which should help with rankings/traffic
2. You can consolidate your brand, which may help with conversions.

That said, you need to do your customer research and see if they'll trust eg france.site.com as much as they trust site.fr. There are definitely ways to make country-specific subdomains work very well for SEO, but this migration should not be done solely for SEO reasons in my opinion.

Hope that helps.

John

Hi Olivia -

Thanks for the question. It's definitely a good one to wrap your head around as anytime you change URLs it's a large undertaking and a lot that can go wrong.

What should happen when you move from HTTP -> HTTPS and have done everything correctly (not chaining redirects, etc) is that your HTTP pages will stop ranking in favor of your HTTPS pages which should take their place. Some people have seen a small improvement in rankings from moving to HTTPS, but for the most part people just saw a swapping out of the ranking URL to the HTTPS URL.

Make sure you annotate Analytics when this goes live so you can make some correlations from the move. Sometimes people have seen an increase in clickthrough rate because users subconsciously trust HTTPS sites more.

Good luck!

Thanks Thomas! So canonicals should be self-referencing, if I'm reading that image correctly.

Hey MV -

What you say here I don't think is the correct way to be thinking about it:

"My thought would have been that the sub domain is only as good as the main domain and in this case the main domain isn't strong because little or no content is hosted on it."

As I said in my original comment, there isn't really a "main domain" with a technical implementation. Your subdomain should be able to rank just fine as long as it is the canonical, has links to it, and the migration was done correctly from the old to the new. I still suspect that there are a lot of links left to the old site setup that are not yet benefitting where your site is now.

A subdomain is a separate site from another subdomain, so site.domain.com is different from www.domain.com and has its own ranking potential. Links to www.domain.com may have a knockon effect for ranking site.domain.com, but you also need links to site.domain.com to really be able to rank.

With the right setup (which you put), yes indeed. What the HREFLANG does is specify the country that different parts of the site should rank for.

So you'll have site.com/ with hreflang for gb-en and site.com/ch/en/ with hreflang to ch-en. Do note that you'll have to have hreflang for every page. So if you have site.com/blue-widgets and target that to gb-en with hreflang, you'll have site.com/ch/en/blue-widgets targeted with hreflang to ch-en.

Make sense?

It's been a bit since I've done hreflang with canonical tags as well, so definitely look into what is required there.

I think Patrick has asked a lot of fantastic questions around this, but let me just say that it's highly improbable that just one link will cause massive ranking fluctuations like this. Have you done the analysis to see if there are others that have been built that you were not aware of as well?

I'm also a bit confused on your question of "Why Google is not stopping them even though they claim that such back-links will be taken care of?" First off, Google says that they are just devaluing bad links not penalizing, even algorithmically, for them. I don't buy it. I think they're heading in this direction, but they're definitely not there yet.

If you're really concerned about this one link, disavow it and keep moving. Go build good links and develop great content that you can do outreach around in order to get the links that will help you rank.

John

Hey there -

Great question. If that's what's happening, then someone definitely bought the old domain with links to it and redirected it. I've also seen this done TO people in order to pass an algorithmic penalty onto a competitor. Nasty stuff.

That said, while this isn't strictly whitehat, it can be super effective to buy old dead domains with links and redirect them into your own site. It actually works very well for SEO purposes! But, it comes with its risks as you have to do a lot of due diligence on the domain you want to redirect as there could have been some dodgy things going on and you don't want to risk passing along a penalty to your own site.

That said, I wouldn't undo the redirect unless you think it's hurting you. Move on and focus on other things to build new links.

The better thing to do, IMO, is to find these dead sites and pull their backlink profiles, then go and do outreach offering your site as a replacement for that site that is now dead. It's called broken link building and it works really well!

Hope that helps.

John

Hi there -

I'm a bit confused about your question. When you say "sub folder" there at the end, do you mean "subdomain"? If so then the question makes sense and that is what I will answer.

First of all, technically www.site.com is a subdomain that is treated the same as subdomain.site.com or othersubdomain.site.com.

So, in my opinion and experience, their rankings shouldn't be terrible just because they're on eg a www2.site.com subdomain. I do wonder though, since they had their main site on another part of the domain and then moved to this one that was originally a test subdomain, if there were issues with the migration to the site that was built on this other subdomain than the original site. You need to go back and do a forensic SEO analysis (or hire someone to do it) to see if 301s are correct, if a lot of links were not redirected, and the like before you even consider moving everything back to where it was before. If you don't do your due-diligence, you're likely going to do more harm than good.

Hope that helps.

John

I'm with EGOL on this one. It has to be a local ranking, as I am in Denver and don't see them in the top 100 for the [custom sign] query (I used to work in that space, actually). I see local sites and way down in deep pages I see random sign companies in random cities.

I bet all of the following is coming into play, beyond what EGOL said:

• Results are likely personalized to you since you have obviously been watching this site and been to it, I would guess, more than a few times.
• Localized results and they have citations squared away well. Check for local listings etc to see if they have those. If they're hyperlocal and you're local, this would explain a ton.

I do see one redirected domain into this one, so I actually wonder if they are doing something like that (buy dead domains with links, redirect them in) that is kind of undercover, if you will, but really works. Could be something else to investigate.

Hope that helps.

Don't do it. I have friends who have owned PBNs but came under so much heat from Google and others that they ended up selling them and getting out of it.

Things like this are always caught eventually. It may work for you short term, and if you're in that business of churn-and-burn sites and they're your own (not a client's) then I see no harm in it really. It's your own choice.

But if you are building a longterm business, this is a short term tactic that will only hurt you in the long run. Time and money better spent doing real marketing activities to build your traffic and brand over time.

Good luck.

Hey Danny, sounds like you have a big migration project ahead of you! As others have said, you're going to have to do mass 301 redirects to the site you want everything to live on moving forward. You should also engage with an international SEO consultant to help you out with this, because you're likely going to need country-specific subfolders and use HREFLANG to send the search crawlers for the right languages to the right pages and rank them accordingly.

Happy to recommend some if you'd like.

Hey Andrew, thanks for putting this question to the community! Definitely a good one to dig into and remind a lot of people as to some of the basics.

It sounds like you've done a bunch of the things you should do to migrate your traffic. But, I've found a few things with just a quick glance that are definitely hurting your new domain's ranking ability. Here we go.

1. Your HTTP from your old domain redirects to the HTTPS of the old and then to the HTTPS of the new. Often I have seen that Google will treat chained 301 redirects like this as a 302 redirect, which may mean that some of your important citychurchfamily.org pages are not dropping out of the index. What you want to do is change the logic so that it works like this:

2. http://citychurchfamily.org -> https://citychurchbloomington.org

3. Your www.citychurchfamily.org (non HTTPS) redirects correctly, as does your https://www.citychurchfamily.org.

4. You still have a lot of pages from citychurchfamily.org that are indexed. Check out this site: search for your domain. You need to redirect all of those as I bet there is link equity there.

Another trick you can do to get your old pages that are redirected, but haven't dropped from the index yet out of the index is to create a static XML sitemap with those old URLs and submit that to Google through Search Console. Monitor the indexation (it should drop pretty quick if your 301s are correct) and once they're all out (or very close to it) then remove the sitemap.

Finally, did you do the site migration in Search Console for both http and https version of your old site? That may help as well.

Hope all that helps!

John

I definitely agree with EGOL and Julie that both of those would happen.

HOWEVER, I do think there is a way to make this super useful to people and have it not be spammy. Charge for it. You'll have to figure out how to initially seed the community (it will be a community after all) with links and how to divide them up according to verticals/types of links, but if you don't let people be anonymous then you can keep it high quality (seeing Rand upvoted a link as opposed to Linksinator757 is super valuable) more easily.

Fun thought experiment for sure!

John

Does it work? Yeah, probably. For now.

Should it work? Probably not. I obviously haven't seen the sites, but if they're hosted on the same hosting account with the same IP address, then it wouldn't surprise me if this was eventually hit. And if it was reported, it definitely would not pass a manual review by the Google spam team IMO.

As others have said, it's super risky. Just a few weeks ago I didn't let someone join my platform to provide local SEO services specifically because they are doing this sort of thing as their main link acquisition tactic for their clients, and while it works right now it's definitely very grey hat and will stop working at some point. I've spoken with people who used to operate Personal Blog Networks like this, and they always get hit eventually.

I'd also hate to be the SEO brought in to clean this sort of thing up and get the clients that this company loses ranking again. Lots of small businesses sound like they'll be harmed because of this, unfortunately.

Hope that helps!

John

Oh boy this is a fun one! Full disclosure: I used to run marketing/growth on HotPads.com for about 18 months and we targeted some Section 8 queries, though as you say the space is very opaque and full of spam. It's also a hard space to monetize because Section 8 is low-income and most of these landlords are not making much money from their properties, so they in turn don't have much to spend on marketing etc.

Tough space, as I said.

A few things I take exception to in your original post that I'd like to clear up first:

• Don't be looking for "link exchanges". That tactic died in 2010. Instead you could look to establish relationships with other bloggers talking about low-income ways of living and exchange posts on each other's sites. This is a totally whitehat way to do it.
• You can absolutely get .gov links. Why not? They link to good resources as much as anybody else.
• Look at local chambers of commerce and places that have low-income housing pages and reach out to them asking them to link to some of your articles, or share via social media, or in their email newsletters. It's much easier to get links once you've established yourself as an authority, but of course it's an old chicken-and-egg problem.

If I were you, I'd take your main competitors and see where they are getting links from then figure out how you a) get those links and b) where the gaps are. If you identify, for example, that .edu sites are awesome link acquisition then go crazy getting a big old list of them and doing your outreach. Sure you'll get some of the same links, but I bet you'll get a bunch that your competitors don't also have.

Hope that helps!

John

Hey Matthew, there is really no good way to know if they are negatively impacting you or not. And 15 links really isn't that many, so if you have even a halfway decent sized link profile I honestly wouldn't worry about them and instead would just keep on doing what you're doing to build good links.

It's not much work at all to disavow the entire domain, so I'd take the 20 minutes to do that if you're really worried and then keep on going.

They're likely showing for your site in the tools you're using because of outdated indexes, whether any of the main link tools or even Google's Search Console data. When doing link removal work in the past I've received full link reports from all the major link indices and then de-duplicated. Doesn't sound like you really need to do that in this case, but this would be why you're still "seeing" them.

Hope that helps!

John

Hey Rahul! Definitely a big question here, but let me give it a stab. I've looked at the provided site in both OpenSiteExplorer and SEMrush. Here's what I see with a quick cursory look:

• Your site seems to have done well in late 2011/early 2012, but it has since been hit with what looks to be a combination of Penguin and Panda algorithm updates. So they're seeing your site as relatively low value.
• You have very few links pointing to your site, and they look to be pretty low quality as well. In the space you're trying to operate in, you're going to need many more high quality links pointing to your site to be able to rank well for the terms that will drive you revenue and traffic.
• You've done very little in the last few years (probably because traffic was taking a hit so hard) so you're not really giving yourself the chance to earn new links and get traffic in other ways (social, referral, etc) which can be a good way to build traffic sustainably and longterm as well, which also helps guard you against algorithm updates like the ones you experienced.
• I ran a quick crawl with ScreamingFrog and didn't see any glaring issues (no robots.txt issue, not many non-2** status code pages). Some of your content is 4+ clicks from the homepage, which is something you should look at with your site architecture and will be exacerbated as you start to create more content on your site.

So if I were you, I'd figure out your content strategy (and with that your keyword research strategy to identify your keywords) and with that your link acquisition and promotion strategy. There is a lot of content on Moz and other places on how to do all of this!

Hope that's helpful.

John

Hi there! Does your site have subfolders or subdirectories targeted at your specific countries and their languages? Because the best and right way to do it is with a subfolder like site.com/ch/en/ targeted with HREFLANG for ch-en.

Some links I found that might help - https://www.brightedge.com/blog/seo-for-multiregional-websites/ and http://www.amazeemetrics.com/en/blog/seo-tutorial-geo-targeting-with-hreflang-tag

Hope that helps!

Absolutely. I definitely do not believe that Google is just ignoring bad links now, and Penguin can be a really hard one to debug once you think you have been affected especially since they aren't really (from what I have seen) announcing them anymore because they folded it into the main algorithm.

When you have a manual penalty for manipulative links, sometimes you have to go the hard way of disavowing after you've tried rounds of getting them removed and it's still not enough. This may be the main reason, along with negative SEO, that Google has left that tool in Search Console. I don't expect it to go away anytime soon.

Interesting times we live in.

Hey there -

Assuming you are talking about an XML sitemap, not an HTML sitemap, you shouldn't need to Fetch your site when you do this. You're literally telling Google about your pages through your XML sitemap, so they should crawl that sitemap pretty fast.