Hi there!
Could someone tell me what is the best way to handle subdomains in terms of SEO? The site I’m building will assign new subdomain for each user, just like in Wordpress.org ( i.e. mywebsite.wordpress.org ). But I wonder what happens after user decides to delete himself and thus the subdomain? Should I show Google 404 Error page or is there some more appropriate response? I am afraid that having lots of 404 error pages will hurt website’s SEO.
The only way to avoid the 404 is to leave a page there - in which case the delete instead of removing the page would just replace the page content with a deleted message.
what is the best way to handle subdomains in terms of SEO?
There are no special considerations for subdomains in terms of SEO. Search engines are not interested in domains or subdomains. They are only interested in pages (or, more exactly, URLs).
I am afraid that having lots of 404 error pages will hurt website’s SEO.
404s won’t cause any problems in terms of SEO. The pages will simply disappear from the search engines’ indexes, which is correct (because they contain nothing that will answer a searcher’s queries). But 404s are a nuisance for your visitors - and they reflect badly on your site as a whole. If the content of the pages is still relevant, either do as Felgall suggested, or just leave them in place.
I’d also question why you are allowing users to delete entire sections of your site. It doesn’t seem like a sensible approach, either for SEO or otherwise.
Mike
Hi felgall and Mikl, thanks for your responses! The website is a builder for other sites. Imagine now that user comes to Tumblr.com or Wordpress.org and signs up creating subdomain so now their site looks like kitties.tumblr.com . A couple months later user gets bored of his website and decides to delete it entirely. Here you go, kitties.tumblr.com contains nothing anymore. And I saw myself many cases where that happened in Tumblr for example.
It’s good to hear that 404 error in itself doesn’t hurt SEO. So it sounds that as long as I make users are happy, all will be fine.