What are the pros and cons of moving one site onto a subdomain of another site?
-
Two sites. One has weaker sales. What would the benefits and problems for SEO of moving the weak site from its own domain to a subdomain of the stronger site?
-
Cons:
May lose some of the link juice from the 301 redirect from the old URL's (between 1 and 10% is the usual quoted figure)
Initial (usually short term) drop in rankings and potentially traffic of weaker site pages
www.weakersite.com is a "nicer" looking URL for offline marketing than www.strongersite.com/weakersite
Pro's:-
If on Subfolder rather than sub directory pages will benefit from domain authority and links to domain of stronger site.
Can focus future link building and on-page SEO efforts on one site rather than 2, potentially doubling the amount you can get done
If building from scratch and choice of 2 sites or 1 I would say go for one. As two already exist there is more of a call to be made.
-
Hey! That sure was a great seminar.
That advice makes sense. Thanks.
-
Aye.
Oh, and hey! I just noticed I know you from NOLA.
-
So it could get the full benefit of the stronger site's domain authority?
-
I would be more inclined to move it to a subdirectory on the stronger site.
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
-
Subdomain question
Hi guys, I have a subdomain on my site that i want to completely remove from the index. I tried already everything to remove it but it is special situation so the only choice i have left is to remove it from Search Console in "Remove URLs" feature. So my question is: if i remove my root subdomain (example: http://subdomain.mydomain.com/) via "Remove URLs" feature in Webmaster Console, will it remove all the URLs coming from that particular domain as well? I also want to make sure that my root domain will stay untouched and be functioning normally. Thank you for advice!
Technical SEO | | odmsoft0 -
Blog on subdomain of e-commerce site
Hi guys. I've got an e-commerce site which we have very little control over. As such, we've created a subdomain and are hosting a WordPress install there, instead. This means that all the great content we're putting out (via bespoke pages on the subdomain) are less effective than if they were on the main domain. I've looked at proxy forwarding, but unfortunately it isn't possible through our servers, leaving the only option I can see being permenant redirects... What would be the best solution given the limitations of the root site? I'm thinking of wildcard rewrite rules (eg. link site.com/blog/articleTitle to blog.site.com/articleTitle) but I'm wondering if there's much of an SEO benefit in doing this? Thanks in advance for everyone's help 🙂
Technical SEO | | JAR8970 -
Tracing Redirects to a Site
I wonder if anyone has used any tools where you can trace the redirects pointing to a site? I know there are a number of tools out there that can be used to check where a URL redirects to, but I was wondering if anyone has used a tool where I could trace all redirects with the final URL? I am using this for competitor research so I don't have access to Analytics or Webmaster Tools.
Technical SEO | | BeattieGroup0 -
Another client copies everything to blogspot. Is that what keeps her site from ranking? Or what? Appears to be a penalty somewhere but can't find it.
This client has a brand new site: http://www.susannoyesandersonpoems.com Her previous site was really bad for SEO, yet at one time she actually ranked on the first page for "LDS poems." She came to me because she lost rank. I checked things out and found some shoddy SEO work by a very popular Wordpress webhoste that I will leave unnamed. If you do a backlink analysis you can see the articles and backlinks they created. But there are so few, so I'm not sure if that was it, or it just was because of the fact that her site was so poorly optimized and Google made a change, and down she fell. Here's the only page she had on the LDS poems topic in her old site: https://web.archive.org/web/20130820161529/http://susannoyesandersonpoems.com/category/lds-poetry/ Even the links in the nav were bad as they were all images. And that ranked in position 2 I think she said. Even with her new site, she continues to decline. In fact she is nowhere to be found for main keywords making me think there is a penalty. To try and build rank for categories, I'm allowing google to index the category landing pages and had her write category descriptions that included keywords. We are also listing the categories on the left and linking to those category pages. Maybe those pages are watered down by the poem excerpts?? Here's an example of a page we want to rank: http://susannoyesandersonpoems.com/category/lds-poetry/ Any help from the peanut gallery?
Technical SEO | | katandmouse0 -
Seo For Forum Sites
I have forum site.I've opened it 2 months ago.But there is a problem.Therefore my content is unique , my site's keyword ranking constantly changing..Sometimes my site's ranking drops from first 500.After came to 70s. I didn't make any off page seo to my site.What is the problem ?
Technical SEO | | tutarmi0 -
What are the pros and cons of changing my domain from .com to .us in Google webmaster tools?
Hi, I'm migrating my site from a .com domain to local country domains. I'm wondering what to consider if i chose to move the .com to .us domain. What should I consider before deciding? BR
Technical SEO | | Quru0 -
What can i do to move my site up the search engines
Hi. my site www.in2town.co.uk is currently number five in google for the search word lifestyle magazine, sometimes it moves to four but for over a year it has not got past four. before we had to do the site from scratch due to a major problem upgrading, we were number one in the search engines and our traffic was around 30% higher than it is now. For the keyword lifestyle news, we are on the fifth page of google and would really like to improve this. I would like to know what i need to do on our home page to try and improve our rankings for these two words. the most important word for us is lifestyle news. any help in my goal to improve our rankings would be great. We have improved our design which we are still working on, and we have upgraded to a bigger dedicated server to improve the speed.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
One large site or a few microsites?
Hi, I have a client who runs a professional expo company and wants to redo his website. Right now he has one website that has the following sections: expo company info, wedding show info, electrical wire show info, fishing show info. My question is, when I rebuild the site would it be better to do one site or four microsites?
Technical SEO | | JohnWeb120