Create new subdomain or new site for new Niche Product?
-
We have an existing large site with strong, relevant traffic, including excellent SEO traffic. The company wants to launch a new business offering, specifically targeted at the "small business" segment. Because the "small business" customer is substantially different from the traditional "large corporation" customer, the company has decided to create a completely independent microsite for the "small business" market. Purely from a Marketing and Communications standpoint, this makes sense.
From an SEO perspective, we have 2 options:
- Create the new "small business" microsite on a subdomain of the existing site, and benefit from the strong domain authority and trust of the existing site.
- Build the microsite on a separate domain with exact primary keyword match in the domain name.
My sense is that option #1 is by far the better option in the short and long run. Am I correct?
Thanks in advance!
-
Thanks to everybody who's weighed in on this discussion. Do y'all think subfolders are the way to go for new web content for a big company with a well-established website even if the main site won't do much linking to the subfolder and the covered topics are separate? Is much link mojo passed purely as a property of the domain's strength (if domain.com is reputable, domain.com/folder/ must be, too)? Or is the majority of authority established because of the internal links?
-
Thanks, Nakul.
I very much appreciate your comments and insight.
Cheers - Axel
-
As I said I completely agree with you. There's is certainly "some" level of trust passed on and WebSEO's comment sounds right, because if that would not be the case that blogs on xxxx.blogspot.com and xxxx.wordpress.com would rank like crazy. So yes, number of sub-domains on a domain as well as the interlinking between the domain and the sub-domain would certainly influence the strength of the sub-domain, a little bit more.
The most important factor here that should help you make the decision easily is the usability and brand awareness of the sub-domain when it's attached onto your main authority/brand site.
As I said above in my 1st post and EGOL agreed, it would have been much stronger if you were able to do it as a sub-folder but I understand the technology issues. You might also want to look into Reverse Proxy if sub-folder is an option.
-
Agree. Apparently domain authority and trust does not pass 100% to a subdomain. I've searched thru SEOmoz high and low and cannot find this issue being adequately addressed. (???)
But check out this Sept 2010 post by webseo: www.webseoanalytics.com/blog/multiple-domains-vs-subdomains-vs-folders-in-seo/
"WebSEOAnalytics.com team has done extensive analysis in the past on the Data that we collect from the reports of our SEO tools. Based on those data there are strong indications that a part of Authority and Trust passes to the subdomains only when the domain has a small number of subdomains and when the link structure of the main website passes enough link juice to them. "
And this post on Google Webmaster blog, suggesting that links between a subdomain and a domain are essentially seen as "internal" links.
So maybe there is some advantage passed from domain to subdomain?
I would surely love to see Rand or one of the other experts at SEOmoz give their take on this issue.
-
You are not, you are absolutely right on the way you are thinking. Except that I have not seen any of that "root domain" advantage get passed onto the sub-domain level.
If your main-domain is a brand domain, maybe you could do the sub-domain and I understand your reasoning behind it, however I would not expect the sub-domain to trickle through the SERPS and get the domain authority and trust like your root level domain does.
-
Thanks EGOL and Nakul. Agree, a subfolder would be the best solution. Unfortunately we cannot do the subfolder approach. The sites use completely different platforms/ CMS, and so the options are either subdirectory or completely new domain.
The problem with a new domain is that there is no transfer of domain trust or authority from the existing site to the new microsite. It is a painful, slow, long-term building process. It seems that with the recent Matt Cutts announcement on Google treatment of subdomains, many SEOs are now suggesting that some of the root domain equity does indeed transfer from root to subdomain.
And it actually makes more sense from a holistic user and SEO perspective to use a subdomain. The two offerings are linked from a product category perspective, with one targeted at the needs of the small business user (hence different products, messages, and look & feel), and one targeted at the traditional corporate user. No duplicate content, yet intrinsically linked. I also think that small business users will look at it positively as they see that a "strong, established brand" is behind this targeted product. I have to think that Google (and other SE) algorithms, which are trying to more and more mirror human preferences, would see the subdomain/ domain linkage as positive.
Am I "off-base" with my thinking?
-
I agree with the subfolder.
-
The sub-domain won't essentially help you. Think of your sub-domain as a separate domain, almost. If it's possible from branding and other reasons, do a sub-folder and if that does not make sense or is not doable, your best best is go got Option 2. That according to me sounds better from Search perspective both short term as well as long run.
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 cannibalization
Hi, I am doing the SEO for a webshop, which has a lot of linking and related websites on the same root domain. So the structure is for example: Root domain: example.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C
Shop: shop.example.com
Linking websites to shop: courses.example.com, software.example.com,... Do I have to check which keywords these linking websites are already ranking for and choose other keywords for my category and product pages on the webshop? The problem with this could be that the main keywords for the category pages on the webshop are mainly the same as for the other subdomains. The intention is that some people immediately come to the webshop instead of going first to the linking websites and then to the webshop. Thanks.0 -
Moving site to new domain without access to redirect from old to new. How can I do this with as little loss to SERP results as possible?
I've been hired to build a new site for a customer. They were duped by some shady characters at goglupe.com (If you can reach them, tell them they are rats--phone is disconnected, address is a comedy club on Mission in SF). Glupe owns the domain name and would not transfer or give FTP access prior to dropping off the face of the earth. The customer doesn't want to chase after them with lawyers, so we are moving on. New domain, new site with much of the same content as previous site. All that I have access to is the old wordpress site. I plan to build the new site, then remove all pages/posts from the old site. Is there anything I can do to salvage the current page 1 ranking? Obviously, the new domain will take some time to get back there. Just hoping to avoid any pitfalls or penalties if I can. If I had complete access, I would follow all the standard guidelines. But I don't. Any thoughts? Thanks! Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | c_estep_tcbguy0 -
My site is always in the top 4 on google, and sometimes goes to #2\. But the site at #1 is always at #1 .. how can i beat them?
So i'm sure this is a very generic question.. of course everyone wants to be #1. We are an ecommerce web site. We have all sorts of products, user ratings, and are loved by our customers. We sell over 3 million a year. So let me give you some data.. First of all one of the sites that keeps taking the #2 or #3 spot is amazons category for what we sell.. (i'm not sure if I should say who we are here.. as I don't want the #1 spot to realize we are trying to take them over!) Amazon of course has a domain authority of 100. But they never take the #1 spot. The other site that takes the #2 and #3 spot is not even selling anything. Happens to be a technical term's with the same name wikipedia page! (i wish google would figure out people aren't looking for that!) Anyways.. every day we bouce back and forth between #4 and #2.. but #1 never changes.. Here are the stats of us verse #1 from moz: #1: Page Authority: 56.8, Root Domains Linking to page: 158, Domain Authority: 54.6: root domains linking to the root domain 1.42k my site: Page Authority: 60.6, Root domains linking to the page: 562, Domain Authority: 52.8: root domains linking to the root domain: 1.03k So they beat us in domain authority SLIGHTLY and in root domains linking to the root domain. So SEO masters.. what do I do to fix this? Get better backlinks? But how.... I can't just email GQ and ask them to write about us can I? I'm open to all things.. Maybe i'm not using moz data correctly.. We should at least be #2. We get #2 every other day.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 88mph0 -
An affiliate website uses datafeeds and around 65.000 products are deleted in the new feeds. What are the best practises to do with the product pages? 404 ALL pages, 301 Redirect to the upper catagory?
Note: All product pages are on INDEX FOLLOW. Right now this is happening with the deleted productpages: 1. When a product is removed from the new datafeed the pages stay online and are showing simliar products for 3 months. The productpages are removed from the categorie pages but not from the sitemap! 2. Pages receiving more than 3 hits after the first 3 months keep on existing and also in the sitemaps. These pages are not shown in the categories. 3. Pages from deleted datafeeds that receive 2 hits or less, are getting a 301 redirect to the upper categorie for again 3 months 4. Afther the last 3 months all 301 redirects are getting a customized 404 page with similar products. Any suggestions of Comments about this structure? 🙂 Issues to think about:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox
- The amount of 404 pages Google is warning about in GWT
- Right now all productpages are indexed
- Use as much value as possible in the right way from all pages
- Usability for the visitor Extra info about the near future: Beceause of the duplicate content issue with datafeeds we are going to put all product pages on NOINDEX, FOLLOW and focus only on category and subcategory pages.0 -
Backlinking 3 sites from same domain and backlinking main site too
Hello, we have 4 sites, in which 1 is a main site and rest 3 are niche sites All these 3 sites have dofollow links to main site from home page We got a high quality backlink - through which all 3 niche sites have got it from that domain Is it worth to add backlink from that domain to main site too, despite the fact the 3 sites already have recvd it and they all link to main site many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Folder or subdomain for new e-commerce addition
Our main content site has 5K pieces of unique content all targeting our market. We are planning to add e-commerce as a source monetizing our audience. Should we place the new commerce platform within a subdirectory or subdomain? The layout we are considering is... shop name: Brand Name Market http://www.brandname.com/market/ http://market.brandname.com I am also considering something like: http://www.brandname.com/market/ aggregating product details and content from http://market.brandname.com/ with rel= back to the subdomain if possible.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ejovi0 -
Acquisition of a new site in the same field.
Hello, I work with SEO for a company that just bought another in the same field. What is better to do? Just a 301 domain? Make 301 per page for a related page (more than 10,000 URLs, i'am afraid that this may be interpreted as blackhat ) or make crossdomain canonical tag urls related to (I believe this is not good, because the pages are not fully equal). thank's
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | j0a0vargas0 -
Move blog from subdomain to main domain on ecom site?
I am wondering what my fellow mozers think. Pretty set about my direction but want to get any other input to aid in my decision. Have an ecom site with a www.blog.maindomain.com. The blog is fairly new and no major rankings. There are only about 30 posts. This isn't a super competitive market and the blogging won't be a huge part of our content strategy but I would like to use it for passing juice etc. Would you go through the trouble to move the blog to www.site.com/blog and redirecting all the old content to new?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PEnterprises0