Sub domain or separate domain?
-
Hi Mozzers,
I'm redesigning a property database, and wondered whether it would be better to put this on a sub domain of my site or to set up a completely separate domain?
Back story: My core website is about lifestyle, holidays and property in France. It's very popular, and benefits massively from long tail search. It's a fairly strong, recognisable brand, so I assume any association the database has with the site would greatly benefit it... Maybe.
My current property database on the other hand is very poor in terms of SEO/visibility, etc, so we're having the whole thing redesigned from scratch.
For the database, is it better to set up a subdomain of my strong branded site, or set up a completely new domain targeting keywords in the URL?
Cheers!
Matt
-
Hi,
We have two sites mysite.com and aa.mysite.com. We want to track these sites separately. We created two different properties with IDs UA-XXX-1 for main domain UA-XXX-2 for subdomain.
gaq code for main domain is as following,
gaq code for subdomain is as following,
It works well for subdomain. But we want to see traffic from subdomain to main domain as referral.
What is wrong with the gaq code of main domain?
Do i need to change code or is it enough to inactivate subdomain tracking option in profile settings of main domain?Thanks in advance,
-
Thanks for the comprehensive response Harald! The blog was especially helpful.
I don't think I'm any closer to making a decision (because I don't think it will make much difference whichever way I go!) but the blog certainly helps.
Thanks again.
Matt
-
Hi Matt, First of all I want you to take a look at the below where I am describing the pros & cons of the sub domain & separate domain;
1. Subdomain
-
Maybe technically easier for some setups
-
Has some of the benefits of subfolder in inheriting parent domain authority and separate domain in providing backlinks to main site, but…
-
Needs to establish its own reputation through backlinks from other sites so…
-
Will not rank as highly or as quickly as a subfolder
2. Separate domain
-
Helps you control and generate external backlinks for which you control the anchor text, i.e. editorial links within blog copy back to category and product pages
-
Can create a more differentiated brand identity which can be seen as independent from the main site so generates more engagement with it’s audience potentially
-
Can target a different country, i.e. I have seen UK companies launching a US hosted blog
-
You may not rank competitively at all for weeks or months depending on the quality of the content you create. This may be hard to sell to your colleagues investing in it – it’s an act of faith…
-
Will require a long-term commitment to content creation and backlink development
So, to summarize If you create exceptional content which creates a lot of backlinks then separate domain can be valuable in providing links back to the main site from a separate authority site you control.
For more details please refer to this link:
Understanding root domains-Sub domians
I hope that you will found the solution.
-
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
-
We added hundreds of pages to our website & restructured the layout to include 3 additional locations within the sub-pages, same brand/domain name. How long could Google take to crawl/index the new pages and rank the keywords used within those pages?
We added hundreds of pages to our website & restructured the layout to include 3 additional locations within the sub-pages, same brand/domain name. The 3 locations old domains were redirected to their sites within our main brand domain. How long could Google take to crawl/index the new pages and rank the keywords used within those pages? And possibly increase our domain authority hopefully? We didn't want our brand spread out over multiple websites/domains on the internet. This also allowed for more content to be written on pages, per each of our locations service's, as well.
Web Design | | BurgSimpson0 -
Is there anything wrong to have large number of internal links pointing to homepage? Including links from sub domains or sub directories?
Hi all, Generally more number of internal links will be pointed to homepage. But I see some modern suggestions that too many internal links to homepage are not good. I'm just wondering if most number of internal links pointing to homepage may hurt? Also we have sub domains, can we point a link from every page of sub domain or sub directory to homepage? Usually the answer here is about users. Of course, the content is about same product across all pages. Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Domain Authority
I have a website which has been up and running for around 7 years. It contains relevant content, receives somewhat timely content updates and has not been involved in any poor marketing activities. http://www.aleutianadventures.com/ That said, it has a very low domain authority and bounces around quite a lot in search results. Any thoughts on how to improve the sites current state. Thanks a bunch!
Web Design | | APICDA0 -
How to redirect special pages to new domain?
Hello. I have 2 websites in diffrent category and i want to move some of my visitor that arrived in specific page of doamin1 (url like this: http://example.com/pages/.........)to root of domain 2.
Web Design | | vahidafshari450 -
What seo benefit does setting up a photo gallery where each photo is a separate web page?
what seo benefit does setting up a photo gallery where each photo is a separate web page? My old SEO guy set up my photo gallery like that claiming that because each photo was a separate page, it added a big seo benefit and i never understood what he was talking about. Maybe alt text on the photo with key phrases in it pointing to my other pages to give my site a theme for google? I'm not really sure. He has since moved away and i am considering redoing the photo gallery to multiple images on one page to be more user friendly to my users. This photo gallery is 3 years old and the photos might have some page rank to them helping my site so i don't want to remove this gallery if there really is a benefit to it and it will hurt my site. I once removed four static page rank 3 pages from my site that weren't used for my site anymore and my rankings dropped 5 positions. Thoughts anyone? Thanks! Ron
Web Design | | Ron100 -
What is the best way to point newly built website on new domain name to the original more well known domain?
Live website on abc.com domain is being totally redone and moved to a new platform. to facilitate full testing and compliance, the new look and content was built on a different url - xyz.com for example. Now that all content is approved and testing, we want people visiting the abc.com domain to see the xyz.com website without necessarily redirecting abc.com to xyz.com What is the best to do this? Thanks all
Web Design | | wkismb0 -
Appropriate domain name
Hello Awesome MOzzers, Hope you are all well this fab wednesday. I have a questions - how good or bad is this domain - www.web-design-company-inc.com for a web design company. I have heard some people say google no longer cares about keywords in the URL? Would love to know your thoughts. As always - much obliged for your insight. Best regards, Vijay
Web Design | | vijayvasu0 -
Stuck with domain: www.kumficars.co.uk
Hi community, I was hoping you could help me. I have a website which I'm running for a client, www.kumficars.co.uk, and it's not featuring at all on google for the primary keyword: Taxi Knutsford I have absolutely no idea why. I've produced a campaign report and am acting on it now, but even that didn't pull much up other than a missing meta description tag, which I'm updating now. Other than that, I can't see any reason why the website shouldn't rank - the competition isn't even difficult! Can anyone shed some light please?
Web Design | | ArtifexDesign0