: Can I put content on a subdomain for search engines to index while leaving the main domain parked? I registered a domain example.com. I created a subdomain sub.example.com. I submitted this site

@Shakeerah822

Here's how consumer facing domains were originally meant to work:


domain.com didn't serve anything necessarily.
mail.domain.com hosted your email server.
ftp.domain.com hosted your FTP server.
irc.domain.com hosted your Internet Relay Chat server. domain.com hosted your World Wide Web server.


All of these are subdomains. The World Wide Web was expected to be only one of many services you might serve. Nobody imagined it would take over everything and become the only one anyone cares about. Besides Twitter.

Hence, "www." is already a subdomain. So you are asking if you can put your web content on a different subdomain. Of course you can, www is a convention, not a rule.

Now what content do you want to serve on domain.com and domain.com? Because as your business grows, you will get users typing that navigationally (i.e into the address bar not the search bar). Is it really better for your business for them to land on a parking page? I am skeptical.

Remember the 'don't move URLs' rule: don't build buzz, depth of crawl and link juice at one set of URLs and then move them. Where do you want your pages to be finally? If you're not ready for that move, if you're staging/testing, you don't need Google yet.

I mean it doesn't hurt if you move before your business takes off, but once underway, stay put.

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@BetL925

Search engines have "parked domain detection" algorithms. When they detect that the home page for a domain is with a domain parking service, they exclude the domain from the index. If they didn't do this, the search results would be littered with parked domains.

Your sub-domain may be able to rank even when the main domain is parked, but I see little reason to risk it. Creating a single page of content for the main domain, or redirecting it to the sub-domain means that you shouldn't have to worry about this problem at all.

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