Hi All, I have a new client who has a very large site that has been online for a while. Part of his service includes hosting sites for clients on subdomains. The site is an international trade portal, and so many advertisers do not have a website - they rely on this service to host a website for them on a subdomain. For example, if the site is domain.com then their clients would be hosted on client1.domain.com, client2.domain.com .... client734.domain.com Now, the problem is that a number of clients are no-longer using this service and so there are client.domain.com subdomains that are simply a mirror of domain.com - I want to suggest that they use 301 redirects to point those old subdomains to their homepage. I'm not sure how many old subdomains their are but I think there may be quite a few. What do people think about using the 301 redirect in this way? I am worried that Google may see it as spam if there are a number of these subdomain redirects set up but there is no intention other then to make sure these subdomains are not homepage mirrors and also if any traffic comes to these subdomains it is not lost. Cheers
Could be dangerous to redirect lots of subdomains, and also a redirect would not help you too much. I would say the better way would be a kind of redirection invisible for Google and a page saying the site has been deleted.
I thought I read somewhere that multiple redirects to another domain, even 301 redirects, caused problems for the target domain. The subdomains could always be deleted.
Hi, I would use 301's, but only for the subdomains that are indexed by the search engines. In my understanding of the Google recommendations, it is legitimate to use 301 to point to your main home page, which becomes the new permanent address that replaces the obsolete subdomains. Jean-Luc
Thanks Guys. Calivad, I'm not sure any kind of redirect that is 'invisible' to Google is such a good idea. The first kind of redirect I think of when you mention this is one that uses external javascript which many people consider spam. I want to make sure Google will not consider whetever I do as spam. Any more ideas? I will see if I can find out how many subdomains we are talking about. Cheers
I've been checking and some of these subdomains are not cached by google. I think this is because Google sees them as a mirror of the homepage. Is this going to cause me problems? I want to be sure these old subdomains are not going to jepordize rankings for the main site. Cheers