Can "poor" subdomains have negative impact on root domain PR?

Forum Moderators: open

Message Too Old, No Replies

Can "poor" subdomains have negative impact on root domain PR?

ckilgore

1:22 pm on Jul 13, 2011 (gmt 0)

My company implemented a way of showing clients progress on their websites. We do this by implementing "development" subdomains (example - development20.oursite.com).

My question is, since Google is indexing these subdomains, does the fact that they are not necessarily credible have negative impact on our root domain?

We noticed a PR drop from 6 to 4 over the past year and this came to my mind but wasn't sure how subdomains affected the root domain.

Any thoughts are appreciated!

phranque

2:21 am on Jul 14, 2011 (gmt 0)

you shouldn't let google index content on development servers.
i would implement one of the following (in order of preference) methods of robots exclusion:
- use basic HTTP authentication for that subdomain, which will serve a 401 Authorization Required status code to search engine crawlers.
- include a noindex meta robots tag or X-Robots-Tag header in your HTTP response.
- disallow crawling the development content using robots.txt