Should I move my brand under our corporate domain to boost Domain Authority?
-
Dear Community,
I am seeking your expert advice on this situation:
We have these assets as a starting point:
- a long-existing and well-linked Corporate Website (CW) with good metrics,
- a Brand Website (BW) with low/medium metrics,
- and some Brand Competitor (BC) websites with very similar metrics to BW.
We will launch a new version of BW very soon with a well SEOd structure and copy (the old one was not SEOd at all) which I hope itself will bring SERP advantages.
My dilemma emerged after checking the domain level values of our Corporate Website:
- CW / BW / BCs
- Domain Authority: 48 / 28 / 24-27
- Domain mozRank: 4.79 / 3.15 / 2.6-3.25
- Domain mozTrust: 4.73 / 2.79 / 2.47-3.06
My understanding is that based on seoMoz consensus domain level values give about 1/4th of the total pie. Based on these what do you think I should to win over competitors rankings?
- Should I keep running the service under BW (in an neighborhood with nearly identically valued competitors)
- Should I redirect BW to a sub-folder of the Corporate Website? (e.g.www.corporate.com/brand) with 301 redirects and enjoy the advantages of the much better domain values
- Alternatively, I could also build valuable and keyword-optimized content under our CW linking back to our BW.
My understanding is that Option 1 has the least advantages among the three. Option 2 and 3 compete with the following advantages:
- Option 2: We could quickly rank higher as domain values elevate us from the mediocre BW and BC values (offsetting a little loss on 301 redirects)
- Option 3 would allow us to occuppy more positions for the important keywords on SERPs thus attract more "deep-browsing" visitors (and possibly BW could also get some advantages by receiving links from CW)
Which direction would you proceed from here?
Cheers,
Andrew
-
Whoa boy, that's a long one. There are a few ways to handle this, here's one way that I'd approach it, based off of the info you've given us:
First, if your BW Domain Authority is already at 28, and you're competitors are weighing in at 24 to 27, don't reinvent the wheel. Getting up to 30s or 40s is not that hard with some proactive link building. I would keep the BW on its own site and instead of spending time transferring it to your CW, use that time for link building.
That said, in order to take advantage of your CW's authority, I would still go ahead and add some Brand content to that site, using different copy than what's on the BW. This will naturally be a longer term project, since you're currently focusing on getting the main BW relaunched. But, having two versions that target different keywords is an excellent way to leverage the authority of the CW, and frankly you'll have to recognize that Brand on the CW in some way, right? Might as well make it a ranking subsection of the site, that links to the BW if you like.
Will some of the link value be split between the properties using this method? Yes. BUT, you're already at the front of the pack in terms of competitors from what I can tell, so if you spend more time link building to both BW and CW, you'll reap the benefits. Focus on finishing BW and link building there first. Don't spend you're time with all of the hassles that come with transferring BW to a subfolder of CW.
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
-
Reaching out to all SEO experts for exciting new brand and project
Hi everyone! We're a beauty and travel ecomm brand looking to hire an SEO consultant (independent contractors only - no agencies please) on a contract basis to join our team. We're fast-growing and need help to optimize our on-site and off-site SEO efforts (www.shopsphynx.com). Please message me directly if you're interested in working with us. Below is a little more about us. Thanks! About Us: We recently launched with our first line of products - a new and innovative 3-in-1 travel razor for women that includes a water spray bottle, moisturizing shave bar and two razors all in one compact case. We've received tons of press for the product's unique design and innovation within the shaving industry (and are also in over 900 retail stores nationwide), and only recently launched our new site on shopify (two weeks ago) to drive our B2C sales. There's a lot of room for SEO improvement in terms of on-site efforts, as well as some guidance we'd like to receive for off-site SEO strategies, so we can build up our traffic, audience and customer base. We're targeting a big market & demographic of young women (ages 19-35), mainly competing with Gillette and Schick for a product segment that has largely gone untouched for decades. We'd like to change that 🙂 Let me know if you're interested! Thanks.
Competitive Research | | shopsphynx0 -
Subdomain vs Root Domain Metrics
My site has everything in the root - test.com. www.test.com is redirected to test.com and all content is in the root; there are no subdomains. So I'm completely confused as to how the mozrank and moztrust are different. They have the same number of links yet: Subdomain: MozRank - 3.72
Competitive Research | | Optimise
MozTrust - 3.23 Root Domain: MozRank - 3.05
MozTrust - 2.79 This seems consistent with all my competitors too so just wondered if someone could explain why the root domain is usually/often lower? Surely the root domain numbers should always be equal to or higher than the subdomain?0 -
Much better authority and content than some competitors, why do they appear first?
On august we have lost the top positions for some keywords. Our website authority is 62 (google page rank 5), and some quite small competitors appear first now (some of them have authority 22, google page rank 3!). Our only big change was the DNS server, from godaddy to dnsimple.com, which seems to be some milisseconds slower. Every other metric is in our favor: from on-page repports to site speed. Sometimes by a factor of 3 or 4. What can be happening? We have also realized that, in private browsing, rankings will change a little bit in different cities, even if they are quite close to each other.
Competitive Research | | PauloSilveira0 -
"Linking Root Domains" Authority 100 ?
In All of my competiitors appears Wordpress.com, google.com, w3.org, yahoo.com and all of them have Domain Auth. 100. How is it possible? And how can in get links from domains like thath.
Competitive Research | | pageup5550 -
SEO Strategy Questions on an International Domain
I'm going to try not to get too wordy with my question. Any help that could be provided would be much appreciated! We recently purchased a Germany-based company. They were using two domains (possibly more) for their website. Domain1 and Domain2. I'm sure for duplicate content reasons, only Domain1 ranked well. We in the US wanted to use Domain2, as it contains the brand name and would add legitimacy to our website in the US. Problem is that they also wanted to use it in Germany. So we split it using GeoDNS. Any international traffic goes to their server. Any US/Canada traffic goes to ours. From what I've read, we in the US should have the advantage here in terms of getting our pages indexed on Google, because Google will crawl from the US. So to Google, it should be as if we've changed all of our URLs. The problem is that Google has not recognized these changes for our homepage and it has been about a month since I submitted a sitemap and changed our geo-targeting to the US in Webmaster tools. They've picked up other pages of ours, but the Title and Meta descriptions for the homepage are in German still. We also rank about 23rd for our own brand name. Bing and Yahoo have picked up the changes without issue and we rank 2nd for our brand name. My other issue is that the old distributor in the US (whom we have replaced) is ranking first for our brand name. I'm working on increasing our inbound links, but is there anything else I could be doing to jump ahead of them in the rankings? Any tips would be appreciated. Thanks!
Competitive Research | | KathleenLTG0 -
Does SEOMoz (or anyone) offer a measurement of "overlapping" links between 2+ domains?
I'm trying to judge how much incremental value we'd see from 301'ing an old domain vs. revitalizing the old domain's content. My gut feeling is that most of the links to the two sites are from the same set of websites so it wouldn't add much value to 301 the old domain. I've seen the opposite of this done with Competitive Link Analysis (e.g show links that you don't have that your competitor does have). Is there a tool available that can take 2 or more sites and tell me for instance - 72% of the inbound links or linking root domains are the same?
Competitive Research | | Jeff_DomainTools0 -
Old Domains
I recently had a discussion with a fellow SEO on the importance of older domains. The guy said he uses a lot of auctions to dig out old domains and use them to setup sites. I considered this as a potential way of generating incoming links. He did mention he had been punished with the google Panda update. What are peoples opinions on this as a way of generating incoming links. A domain may cost around $10 plus the hosting could be found quite cheap - it seems a good idea ? Plus if you get lucky and perhaps get a domain with existing authority it could really be a good investment. In research I do come across these sites quite a lot a basic wordpress install with pages added linking into other sites. They type that have no contact details and you have to find the whois info to gain any contact with the webmaster.
Competitive Research | | onlinemediadirect0 -
Can i have chance to rank higher than official website in google local domains ?
Q : can i have chance to rank higher than official website in google local domains ? for example : rank higher than microsoft,kaspersky,nokia etc... in google italy or google germany or any other local domain for google
Competitive Research | | activeacts0