If your IT folks are concerned about SEO rankings for the root domain, there are two points in your favor:

1. Google and Bing (and therefore Yahoo) treat subdomains differently than the root domain. They are crawled and ranked as separate domains. If they weren’t, TLD’s like wordpress.com or blogspot.com would suffer from penalties racked up by spammy subdomains.


2. You can simply check the box in Unbounce to prevent search engines from crawling/indexing your landing pages. 
   
   If that fails, I’ve had a lot of luck with bringing our devs donuts and/or beer. Bribery goes a long way.

I think you should get a new domain, maybe the same one but .net or .me or .info, etc. It will be much easier and faster to set up your own domain or subdomain with Unbounce than convincing the IT people.   One of the main reasons I use Unbounce is because I don’t have to deal with IT, particularly because of those type of issues. IT and Marketing usually have different priorities.   

Hi Chris,

Using cnames is common practice, I’m unsure what your I.T guys are worries about? Can they be a bit more specific?

I’ve checked and unbouncepages.com / unbounce.com don’t show up on any blacklists  as a contributor to spammy links or emails, the platform isn’t going anywhere so you don’t risk unavailable indexed content (although as Andrew suggests you can get around that concern not that it’s difficult to fix with redirects anyway) so the major concerns are unfounded.

It seems a little over protective unless I’m missing something, that’s my personal opinion on your situation… definitely go for the beer and donuts option 🙂

Cheers

Stuart.

Andrew and Stuart, Thanks for the prompt response and insight. I assumed our IT folks were being over protective. I’ll see if I can get them to more clearly articulate their concerns and re-post if I have more information. Thanks again

Thanks Andrew and Stuart for your awesome answers 🙂

@Chris, I wanted to chime in and also emphasize there should be no problems using a subdomain in Unbounce.

That said, if you find your IT folks are still not convinced, please feel free to get in touch with our delightful Customer Success team via support[at]unbounce[com].

We’d be more than happy to address any concerns your team may have.

Thanks Chris!