Has anyone successfully merged their subdomain for LPs to their parent domain for SEO purposes?

[Anonymous]

Resurrecting this oldish topic, I'd like to read more about this reverse proxy on your blog. I googled your name and found your blog hoping you would have covered the subject there but couldn't find it. (Very interesting blog though).

This subdomain issue is quite puzzling to me actually because landing pages are designed to support SEO are they not but with the subdomain being potentially (still conflicting opinions on this around the interwebs) less ranking in google I wonder that this is still an issue. I mean the only option to not compete with yourself would be the no indexing and that just seems so counter-intuitive to me

[SanfordWhiteman]

Hi Wiebke,

Thanks for looking it for it. It's a firm draft (blog post #106!) and even has this super-awesome diagram:

But I need to finalize the copy. Let's say 2 weeks?

[Anonymous]

Looking forward to read your blog.  I came to this topic because first we wondered if subdomains or folders rank better in google and I have yet to see a convincing answer...the interwebs to disagree a bit there. And then the question is also do the subdomains have to be merged to the parent domain or is it actually possible to add canonic tagging to the landing pages ensure google understands what and how to treat them. It's strange that this doesn't seem so much ingrained into the products as one of the purposes of landing pages is to help SEO ranking.

So essentially I might broaden the scope to two questions

1. Is it possible to merge landing page subdomain to parent domain (folder) and how?

2. Is this even necessary or could we avoid 'competing' in terms of google rankings between landing pages and main pages through canonical tagging.

Or 3. Am I looking at this somehow wrong?

I hope the things I wrote make sense, it's late here.

Cheers from snowy (yes!) Finland.

[SanfordWhiteman]

I steer clear of saying unifying LPs with your corporate domain will solve an actual SEO problem.

Like you said, there's rampant disagreement about whether it helps, with Google reps themselves saying it doesn't at certain points, only to be ignored later as their quotes are possibly obsolete. But the uncertainty itself is a problem, and I'm certain that unifying the two will not hurt ranking!

rel="canonical" I don't believe can help here, since a given LP has no other canonical representation if it's only available via a single URL (you can't just canonicalize stuff to other content).

[Erik_Heldebro2]

Hey Sanford!

I tried looking for your blog post you mentioned was in the works, did you end up posting one?

[Josh_Hill13]

I agree.

But here's the thing - I wouldn't think of it as merging. You either post your landing pages and forms on the main site, or you don't. We made a conscious decision to post all SEO potential pages on the main site and only use Marketo for ephemeral events, webinars, things that need rapid deployment and won't hang out long.

Then we set redirects to the new pages on the main site.