Long term strategy to retain link 'goodness', I need some help!
-
Hi,
I have a few questions around the best approach to retain as much link juice / authority from transitioning multiple domains into 1 single domain over the next year or so.
I have 2 similar websites (www.brandA.co.uk and www.brandB.co.uk) which I need to transition to a new website (www.brandC.co.uk) over the next 2 years. Both A&B are established and have there own brand value, brand C will be a new website.
I need to start introducing the brand from website C onto A&B straight away and then eventually drop the brands from A&B and just be left with C.
One idea I am considering is:
www.brandA.co.uk becomes brandA.brandC.co.uk (brandA sits as a subdomain on brandC website)
Ultimately over time I would drop the subdomain (brandA) and just be left with www.brandC.co.uk
The other option is:
www.brandA.co.uk becomes brandC.co.uk/brandA...with the same ultimate aim as above.
In both above case the same would be done for brandB, either becoming a subdomain of a folder on brandC website
What I need to know is what is the best way to first pass any SEO goodness from the websites for brandA and brandB to the intermediate solution of either brandA.brandC.co.uk or brandC.co.uk/brandA (I see this intermediate solution being in place for approx 2 years). And then how to transition the intermediate solution into just having brandC.co.uk
Which solution will aid growing the SEO goodness on the final brandC.co.uk website? Does google see subdomains as part of the main domain and thus the main domain will benefit from any links going to the subdomain or is it better to always use /folders as google sees these as more part of one website?
...or is there another option that I haven't considered?
I know it's rater confusing so please give me a shout if you want anymore info.
Thanks
James
-
Hi Nakul,
That is a big help, thanks.
is there a general concensous about how much established SEO benefits gets passed through with a 301? I.e does 100% of link juice etc get passed through from one domain 301'd to another?
thanks
-
James
From between the 2 options you have, clearly the sub-folder is a better option. Sub-domains are almost treated as separate domains, and therefore when you 301 redirect brandA.co.uk to brandA.brandC.co.uk, it does not help build brandC.co.uk, which is what I think you'd want.
If you do brandA.co.uk redirected to brandC.co.uk/brandA, it will build some trust on authority for your brandC.co.uk domain.
I hope this helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Syndicated content with meta robots 'noindex, nofollow': safe?
Hello, I manage, with a dedicated team, the development of a big news portal, with thousands of unique articles. To expand our audiences, we syndicate content to a number of partner websites. They can publish some of our articles, as long as (1) they put a rel=canonical in their duplicated article, pointing to our original article OR (2) they put a meta robots 'noindex, follow' in their duplicated article + a dofollow link to our original article. A new prospect, to partner with with us, wants to follow a different path: republish the articles with a meta robots 'noindex, nofollow' in each duplicated article + a dofollow link to our original article. This is because he doesn't want to pass pagerank/link authority to our website (as it is not explicitly included in the contract). In terms of visibility we'd have some advantages with this partnership (even without link authority to our site) so I would accept. My question is: considering that the partner website is much authoritative than ours, could this approach damage in some way the ranking of our articles? I know that the duplicated articles published on the partner website wouldn't be indexed (because of the meta robots noindex, nofollow). But Google crawler could still reach them. And, since they have no rel=canonical and the link to our original article wouldn't be followed, I don't know if this may cause confusion about the original source of the articles. In your opinion, is this approach safe from an SEO point of view? Do we have to take some measures to protect our content? Hope I explained myself well, any help would be very appreciated, Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fabio80
Fab0 -
When the site's entire URL structure changed, should we update the inbound links built pointing to the old URLs?
We're changing our website's URL structures, this means all our site URLs will be changed. After this is done, do we need to update the old inbound external links to point to the new URLs? Yes the old URLs will be 301 redirected to the new URLs too. Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jade1 -
Social Links through Link Shortners. Does it count?
We use link shortner services like Bitly, Goo.gl, etc. Does the post used while making use of such link shortner services counts as a social signal. Or should we post the complete website url pointing to each page while posting on social sites. Secondly, should we write a new description while posting on Social sites or just copy paste a few lines of original posts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
301 Externally Linked, But Non-Producing Pages, To Productive Pages Needing Links?
I'm working on a site that has some non-productive pages without much of an upside potential, but that are linked-to externally. The site also has some productive pages, light in external links, in a somewhat related topic. What do you think of 301ing the non-productive pages with links to the productive pages without links in order to give them more external link love? Would it make much of a difference? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Help my site it's not being indexed
Hello... We have a client, that had arround 17K visits a month... Last september he hired a company to do a redesign of his website....They needed to create a copy of the site on a different subdomain on another root domain... so I told them to block that content in order to not affect my production site, cause it was going to be an exact replica of the content but different design.... The developmet team did it wrong and blocked the production site (using robots.txt), so my site lost all it's organica traffic, which was 85-90% of the total traffic and now only get a couple of hundreds visits a month... First I thought we had been somehow penalized, however when I the other site recieving new traffic and being indexed i realized so I switched the robots.txt and created 301 redirect from the subdomain to the production site. After resending sitemaps, links to google+ and many things I can't get google to reindex my site.... when i do a site:domain.com search in google I only get 3 results. Its been now almost 2 month and honestly dont know what to do.... Any help would be greatly appreciated Thanks Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniel.alvarez0 -
Digital Strategy For CPA (That Targets CPA's)
I have a potential client who is looking for a digital marketing strategy that targets other CPA's. Essentially, they provide cost reduction/tax services that certain CPA's may not provide. As you can imagine, the CPA's are searching for other CPA's with this type of service. I was thinking social/email marketing to keep my company's brand at the top of mind of some of these other CPA's. They have a national practice and can middle market cpa's around the country. I am also gonna recommend they slightly modify their business model so they can reach out to other industry sectors (b2B). Any insights on how to tackle this strategy? What strategies would you consider for them? Does anyone have any CPA's they do business with? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JQC0 -
How to be a good SEO optimizer while competing with a good ranked Bad SEO optimizer?
My keywords are very competitive. My on page optimization report gives A grade for all the keywords I want to target to my Root domain. But my root domain does not show up on search engines for those same keywords. So thanks to SEOmoz i have managed to understand the place I lack is good link building. My competitors have done lot of link building through spamming, commenting on blogs, directories etc. Now according to good seo, this is not right. What do i do? I get digging more in it, i realized that i am getting traffic mostly for less globally searched keywords. But my competitors get high traffic from well searched keywords. How do i cope with such competition? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiddleEastSeo0 -
I do a lot of on page SEO... I was wondering some basic tactics / strategies for link building? Please provide only WHITE HAT suggestions! Thank You ;)
Please keep in mind google's announcement on links recently.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | entourage2120