forward subdomain to domain to improve SEO ranking?

[Smile]

Hi, I have mydomain.com as my main site. I also have set up sections and categories on my site to become something like mydomain.com/myservice/plumbing.html

Now would like to improve the service ranking in google search. If I create sub domain like
plumbing.mydomain.com that uses 301 .htaccess redirect to mydomain.com/myservice/plumbing.html

Code: Select all

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) mydomain.com/myservice/plumbing.html$1 [R=301,L] 

Will this improve my search ranking is the .htaccess redirect correctly written? The plumbing.com is obviously taken ages ago so by using plumbing.mydomain.com I hope to increase my rating.

[djohnson1215]

Smile,

The only way redirecting plumbing.mydomain.com will help mydomain.com/myservice/plumbing.html is if there is some SEO value in plumbing.mydomain.com. By value I mean external links of reasonable PR value pointing to it.

But if there are no links pointing to plumbing.mydomain.com then it will provide ZERO value and you are wasting your time.

As a side note, a sub domain strategy is always better than having one big portal website for one reason only. The reason is that those who would link your plumbing page are much more likely to use the subdomain as the target than a path as a target. What I mean to say is that most webmasters are likely to link to the "home" page of a website than an interior page. And technically speaking, a subdomain like "plumbing.mydomain.com" is its own home page.

I am not saying that "deep linking" to interior pages is not possible. I am saying that natural external links are more likely to be to a home page than an interior page (all else being equal).

[Smile]

What happened to my reply??? Was forum restored from backup or something?

Anyway, I wrote that if this is true then how come websites like "gallery.menalto.com" use subdomain gallery and rank on 1st place. I doubt this would be true for subfolder.

Furthermore I what about subdomains for every major category (if it's a service for example), like "toptenreviews.com" has subdomain for every category forwarded to main site article like this

"fantasy-sports-software-review.toptenreviews.com"

Why bother if subfolders are better. I also read that google penalizes your maindomain if you have like other 10 domains forwardd to it. But how can this be true if "toptenreviews" has such good rating? Their main domain seems ok

[Ace2110]

A 301 redirect will pass any SEO value to the new domain, if done correctly.

A lot of it depends on your internal linking structure and such though.

1-2 redirects is about all you can ask the bots to manage, more then that and you are asking for problems.

[Smile]

A 301 redirect will pass any SEO value to the new domain, if done correctly.

A lot of it depends on your internal linking structure and such though.

1-2 redirects is about all you can ask the bots to manage, more then that and you are asking for problems.

So can anyone comment on "toptenreviews.com" ? How do they do it?

[Fabbritzio]

This is a very interesting subject. I would like to redirect my site tags to sub-domains via htaccess.
User click on an tag he is redirected to tag.mysite.com.

All must be dynamic and virtual.

I have added in to htaccess:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com$
RewriteRule ^tag(.*)$ http://tag.mysite.com$1 [R,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^tag.mysite.com$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/tag
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ tag/$1 [L]

with no luck.

Any advices?

[djohnson1215]

Hi Fabbritzio,

I am not very good at htaccess re-writes but I do know that the server OS does make a big difference. What OS is your hosting server? (Windows or Linux)

[Fabbritzio]

Hi,

Linux, probably centos...

[djohnson1215]

Hi,

Think your "$" at the end of the first line is messing things up. Not sure but think the "$" at the end is saying the rule only applies to an exact match of 'mysite.com' (without single quotes). Removing the "$" would allow for any ending so long as the URL starts with mysite.com. But you will also need to worry about www version and write a rule for www url conditions. Or you could force everything to non-www.

Also, think you need [R,L] in your last line.

But I have to admit, I am not sure why you want to write a rule for these 'tags'. If you have control of the URL in the tag, just change the link to your sub.domain. If you don't have control of the URL of the tags, then I could understand why you might want to use htaccess to redirect to a different URL.

What does your Tag URL look like? And what URL do you want the redirect to go to?

[Fabbritzio]

What do you mean by: "change the link to your sub.domain"?

[djohnson1215]

I am presuming that when you use the term "tag" you are referring to a blog or article tag that is associated with a link. Or may be the tag link performs an action of some kind. I am just not sure what you mean by "tag". It is a <a> tag link or an action part of a <form> tag.

If it is an action as part of a <form> tag, then you have to find out how the form is processing the information and what URL it produces. Then apply a redirect to that URL.

Could you be more description of what you mean by "tag".

[Fabbritzio]

ok.

I'm using jtag component, which creates some tags. I want to redirect these tags to a (virtual) sub domain (tag1.mysite.com, tag2.mysite.com.... tag1000.mysite.com).
To be clear, a user clicks on some tag, let's say tag65, it is redirected to tag65.mysite.com instead of mysite.com/tag65.

[djohnson1215]

Have you created every one of these sub domains in advance? Seems to me it would be much easier to modify the jtag php file that generates the URL. Joomla allows you to customize core code without HACKING.

[Fabbritzio]

No, i didn't create any sub domains. This is the point of virtual sub domains.
Can you give more info on jtag.php modification.

An example site, using this type of virtual sub domains: free-press-release.com/news-it-all-comes-back-to-blackberry-contract-phones-1281704060.html , and the tags are redirecting to: blackberrycontractdeals.703901.free-press-release.com

[djohnson1215]

Hi Fabbritzio,

Virtual dynamic sub-domains? I read through the thread again, but I did not see that mentioned. May be it can be done, but I don't think so. Part of my company operates a hosting service. We can not create dynamic virtual sub-domains. They have to be provisioned first through the DNS server and that takes time to propagate. I don't see how this could work for you unless you created and provisioned every sub-domain in advance.

Sorry, I am not a PHP programmer and can not help you with jtag.php modification. But obviously, they have code that creates a URL. And that code could (may be) be modified to a URL format that supports your sub-domain scheme.

[malluscene]

is there is any plugin joomla like all in one seo in worpress