We had our website setup by a third party. We have blogs and pages on the subdomain www. and landing pages and email pages on content. subdomain. We have been told it would be best to have all pages on one subdomain, but we are unsure of the implications change how it is already setup.
First question is, is there any specific reason why the 3rd party seperated the landing pages and email content like this to a subdomain? Are there any benefits for keeping the areas seperate?
Second question, can landing pages and email content be transferred / moved to the www. domain and what is involved to do this?
Websites and landing pages are commonly hosted in multiple environments (ie: CMS website on AWS and Marketing Automation LP at Hubspot). In that case, you would need a subdomain because the subdomain (www and content) are actually pointing to 2 different servers to deliver content from your top-level domain (TLD). To put it in perspective, this community is community.hubspot.com which is a lithium community forum whereas the main hubspot domain lives on www. It's possible this is separated this way as the forums may be hosted by the third party provider whereas Hubspot may have a different server for the www web pages.
If you want the landing pages and everything to live together on www, then you would need everything hosted together which likely is not possible in your setup.
With regards to email pages, I am not sure what you are referring to there.
Overall - I would say your setup is fine and to continue using it as is.
Websites and landing pages are commonly hosted in multiple environments (ie: CMS website on AWS and Marketing Automation LP at Hubspot). In that case, you would need a subdomain because the subdomain (www and content) are actually pointing to 2 different servers to deliver content from your top-level domain (TLD). To put it in perspective, this community is community.hubspot.com which is a lithium community forum whereas the main hubspot domain lives on www. It's possible this is separated this way as the forums may be hosted by the third party provider whereas Hubspot may have a different server for the www web pages.
If you want the landing pages and everything to live together on www, then you would need everything hosted together which likely is not possible in your setup.
With regards to email pages, I am not sure what you are referring to there.
Overall - I would say your setup is fine and to continue using it as is.
However, we have been advised from an seo perspective that Google does not really like seperate subdomains, so looking to bring everything together.
Is it common practice to have google not crawl the sub domains only allowing search engines to crawl the main website. If our content.concise.co.uk subdomain contains landing pages e.g. thank you pages etc and would not normally be found organically, would it be beneficial to stop google from finding them organically? What imact would this have on Google analytic goals?
the seperation of the the www. subdomain and content. subdomain was when we had a different level of hubspot product and had a 3rd party doing regular marketing for us using hubspot.
We want to simplify things a little and so is it possible to bring the pages together if we wanted to?
Google has no problems with subdomains. But if you have separate subdomains you don't want them working against each other. It's not common practice at all to tell Google not to crawl subdomains unless there is a reason you wouldn't want them to (ie: Hubspot's portal for customers is not to be indexed). For instance, using Hubspot as an example, if you search for Hubspot, you will see results for their www, knowledge subdomain and also the community subdomain here. They have different iniatives for each subdomain about what they need to rank for and are not necessarily competing so they are fine.
To your question about landing pages and thank you pages, I would always recommend if you are creating unique thank you landing pages (ie: an actual page and not just a message at the time of submission) then yes, that should be set to not index.
What it sounds like to me is the root concern is when to publish landing pages on an automation platform like Hubspot as opposed to hosting them on your site. Having worked with many clients in the past, my suggestion is usually to ask what purpose the page serves. It is something you want to rank for organically that should be integrated with your site's content. However, if you want to create a page for a specific campaign that isn't going to be live for a long time and is not something you want to focus on ranking for, then host it on your automation platform and retire the page when it's done.
Also for consideration is the flexibility of your CMS to accomplish what you need. Many times, and I have found this especially true in larger businesses, is that you would want to build in your automation platform is because it offers greater flexbility in code and design to accomplish what you want whereas a CMS could have strict limitations with the templates you can put on the site.
So, while it is possible to bring your landing pages out of Hubspot to your CMS, the question being asked really isn't whether you could, but rather whether you should because moving everything from Hubspot back to your site means a lot of setup work as you eluded to with potentially having to setup your goals again in your analytics.
Our website is hosted with Hubspot, designed by a developer (who we no longer have a relationship with) and it is proving difficult to manage. content. and www. are competing so we want to make sure that all are eggs are in the basket of www.
We are wanting to make changes based upon an SEO experts advice.
Just to clarify what you are saying
- Landing pages tend to be for temporary campaigns
- Thank you landing pages could be noindex-ed or archived depending on the campaign
- Landing pages should be noindex-ed or archived once no longer in use
Questions
Should each landing and thank you page have a noindex meta tag?
Should content.domain.co.uk be 301 redirect to www.domain.co.uk, as there is no index page/homepage at content.domain.co.uk?
Should the content.domain.co.uk have a robots.txt with nofollow?
1. Thank you page yes, Landing Page maybe. Thank you pages should not be indexed because let's say you are offering an asset on the thank you page. If it is indexed then it can be found via Google without having to submit your form.
2. Not necessarily. The reason for this is that the content subdomain, from your description, is hosted at Hubspot and when there's a platform like this involved, you typically don't need to setup that redirect. This is because there is not an index URL for the search engines to pick up so it typically won't be found to need a redirect.
3. Again not necessarily. This really depends on the landing page and what you are linking too.
