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We own two root domains in the .edu space. According to Open Site Explorer, one has a domain authority of 76, while the other has a DA of 94.

We operate a collection of degree microsites as subdomains of the lower-ranking root domain, e.g. www.degreename.domain76.edu. All other things being equal, would these sites benefit if we migrated them to www.degreename.domain94.edu?

The question seems to hinge on whether subdomains inherit any of the root domain's authority, and the answers I have seen to that question are "sometimes" and "maybe".

Lastly, as an alternative, would we realize greater SEO improvements by moving the degrees to a directory structure under domain94, i.e. www.domain94.edu/degrees/degree-name?

Thank you for your help!

I definitely looked in to using the canonical tag, but the question is, which version of the application page would they all point to? The application pages are going to be constantly rotated out, so there isn't one version that will always be live, and asking our web editors to change that canonical tag once or twice a year for 300+ programs wouldn't go over well.

I work on an education website. We offer programs that are offered up to 6 times per year. At the moment, we have a webpage for each instance of the program, but that's causing duplicate content issues. We're reworking the pages so the majority of the content will be on one page, but we'll still have to keep the application details as separate pages. 90% of the time, application details are going to be nearly identical, so I'm worried that these pages will still be seen as duplicate content.

My question is, should we deindex these pages? We don't particularly want people landing on our application page without seeing the other details of the program anyway. But, is there problem with deindexing such a large chunk of your site that I'm not thinking of?

Thanks, everyone!

We're working on it!

Yes and no. There are certain pages on the old domain that still exist, but very few, and we're trying to convince the higher-ups that we should move those pages into our new site. The majority of the old website, though, 301 redirects to our new domain.

Our old domain was a sprawling behemoth of a website (we completely redid our website when we changed domains), which is a big part of the reason why we're itching to take it down - not so much the cost issue. But you make a good point, thanks!

Our website moved to a new domain a year ago, and we have our original domain to redirect to our new domain. We're working on contacting people who still link to our old domain to ask them to update, but 7% of our traffic is still coming as a redirect from our old domain.

My question is, when should we just shut the old domain down entirely and stop redirecting people to our new domain? Or should we just keep it up indefinitely? What would be the positive or negative impact on our new domain's SEO if we shut the old domain down?

Thanks!

Thanks, Rand - I wasn't able to find those articles on my own. They're really helpful.

I think one of the subtleties of our question is, is there a higher chance of gaining value from a strong root domain beause you're only one subdomain away? We're worried that, by creating subdomain.subdomain.root-domain.edu, we're completely losing any chance of value from our root domain.

Our website is a continuing education website that is linked to a large university, and our URL is a subdomain of that larger university domain. We offer degrees as well, but because of the modifications we'd like to make to the degree webpages, our content management system won't let them be a part of our website.

Now we're trying to figure out if we should create a separate subdomain for all degrees, and put the individual degrees in separate folders (so, all degrees' URLs woudl be degrees.us.university.edu/degree-name/), or if we should give each its own URL, which would be completely separate from ours (degree urls would be degree-name.university.edu).

So our question is, how well do subdomains carry the value of the domain? Is it better to have twenty websites that are all separate subdomains of a strong domain, or one subdomain in a subdomain that houses all twenty websites in folders?

And, as a side note, will housing the degrees in degrees.us.university.edu pass value to us (us.university.edu)?

Thanks!