Moving categories to new domain
-
Hello Mozzers ,
I'm trying to find best possible solution for this situation. So there is a website (e-commerce) and since it's grew up too much we are looking to move several categories on different domain. The reason for this is that we introduce completely different product group (example: we have products that are related to watches and everything related to watch industry but now we introduce leather products: wallets, bags etc).
Do you think it is worth it to move new categories to new domain in order to better target this product group? In case of positive answer which is the best way to do it - 301 redirect or leave the products on this site and build a new site with slightly different product description and names?
Regards,
Nenad
-
Hi Mike,
Thank you very much for your answer!
We already have landing pages for wallets, bags etc. I was thinking if we move this specific group of products to new domain it will be much easier to target and optimize whole site because then we can focus on related group of products. Also I think it's easier for linkbuilding and content creation (we will probably have blog on new domain).
What do you think?
Regards,
Nenad
-
Hi Nenad,
I guess it all depends on your marketing strategy. If your company is THE watch company and people are mainly coming to your website for watches and nothing else, then it would make sense to move them to a subdomain/new domain and 301 redirect from the old pages to the new ones.
But if your company is THE watch company that is now expanding into other daily accessories (ie: leather wallets, bags, belts) you could be transforming your company into THE accessory company. You would simply have a landing page for watches, one for wallets, one for bags, etc.
Does that help?
Mike
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
-
Phasing in new website - new content on www2
Hi Mozzers, I'm working on a large website redesign / redevelopment project. New sections of the website will be phased in over the next 12 months. The plan is to launch all new content on a subdomain (www2.domain.com) while the old site remains on www.domain.com. There will be no duplicate content across the www and www2 sites, as old content will be removed on www as it is replaced with new content on www2. 301 redirects will also be setup from old content on www to new content on www2. Once the new site on www2 is complete, everything will be moved to www, with a robust 301 redirect setup in place. Is this approach logical, and can you see any SEO implication for managing the migration in this way? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWesley0 -
Ecommerce category pages
Hi there, I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I work on a lot of webshops that are made by the same company. I don't like to say this, but not all of their shops perform great SEO-wise. They use a filtering system which occasionally creates hundreds to thousands of category pages. Basically what happens is this: A client that sells fashion has a site (www.client.com). They have 'main categories' like 'Men' 'Women', 'Kids', 'Sale'. So when you click on 'men' in the main navigation, you get www.client.com/men/. Then you can filter on brand, subcategory or color. So you get: www.client.com/men/brand. Basically, the url follows the order in which you filter. So you can also get to 'brand' via 'category': www.client.com/shoes/brand Obviously, this page has the same content as www.client.com/brand/shoes or even /shoes/brand/black and /men/shoes/brand/black if all the brands' shoes happen to be black and mens' shoes. Currently this is fixed by a dynamic canonical system that canonicalizes the brand/category combinations. So there can be 8000 url's on the site, which canonicalize to about 4000 url's. I have a gut feeling that this is still not a good situation for SEO, and I also believe that it would be a lot better to have the filtering system default to a defined order, like /gender/category/brand/color so you don't even need to use these excessive amounts of canonicalization. Because, you can canonicalize the whole bunch, but you'd still offer thousands of useless pages for Google to waste its crawl budget on. Not to mention the time saved when crawling and analysing using Screaming Frog or other audit tools. Any opinions on this matter?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adriaan.Multiply0 -
Linking from & to in domains and sub-domains
What's the best optimised linking between sub-domains and domains? And every time we'll give website link at top with logo...do we need to link sub-domain also with all it's pages? If example.com is domain and example.com/blog is sub-domain or sub-folder... Do we need to link to example.com from /blog? Do we need to give /blog link in all pages of /blog? Is there any difference in connecting domains with sub-domains and sub-folders?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
A Tale of Two (Competing) Domains
Bit of a weird one but I'm hoping someone can help our team of two sort it out. I'm a copywriter/marketer who's been learning SEO on-the-go, along with our web developer, for the past ~9 months. We've inherited what I consider to be a mess of a situation involving two main e-commerce sites. The company has a sporadic history of spinning off brands, in hopes to either build business in a new market or sell the brands off or what-have-you. The original company rose to prominence manufacturing disc packaging and selling it to software companies, which has obviously been on the way out for some time now. So they've dipped into a handful of other business products for marketing/office use. The company used to sell all products, in individual AND box quantity, on one site (since 1996). In 2012 they decided to move individual quantity sales to a different site with the domain name of one of the brands, focus it more on consumers and small business, etc. We have more flexibility to make changes to the consumer site, so in my opinion it's in better shape. The consumer site (DA 39) offers "retail pricing" with flat rate shipping and free shipping over $25. The b2b site (DA 37) offers "industry pricing" with a weight-based shipping model. Traffic on the business site is down 70% since 2010. We've also been asked to take certain products down in hopes that viewers will pick up the phone and buy a customized version from a sales rep instead. Since probably 3/4 of the products are on both sites, nearly all the category and product pages are competing in SERPs. Not only that, but the business site's product pages invariably link to the corresponding page on the consumer site -- hundreds of links pointing to the consumer site. We know for a fact that people are price checking product+shipping between our own two sites. The issues are further exacerbated because we have even more spinoff domains -- an informative site for a particularly successful product line, an e-commerce site just for vinyl products, etc. etc. So I guess I'm trying to figure out how to make the most of the situation we're now in. Our hands are somewhat tied because we're not 'decision makers'. But we've got a meeting tomorrow to talk about the future of one of the sites, so I figure I at least want to be informed. I am concerned about making further decisions without considering the consequences, especially when our bonuses are tied to web sales... I feel like this is just scratching the surface of the problem so let me know if you guys have further questions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | UEUP0 -
Changing Domain
We have an old domain that we have had registered for many years(pinpoint;asersystems.com) and redirected to our regular domain (which is a short version of our name (pinlaser.com). Management wants to switch and use the longer version as the primary domain for branding purposes. I have cautioned against this for many reasons: Need to do 100's of redirects Potential loss of back links Most links will now be 301 redirects and not look natural to search engines. I would appreciate feedback on any and all risks associated with this potential move. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pinlaser0 -
Should I 301 a penalized domain to another domains subfolder?
I have a niche domain seems to have been hit by Penguin. It had very good rankings before the update, and I think at least a good part of the penalty might be due to overoptimized anchor text. So here is the question; If I decide to take this site down, should I 301 the entire domain to a relevant sub-folder of another site? i.e comtemporaryfurniture.com to domain.com/category/modern-furniture.html Will the penalty get passed onto the new domain? If the penalty is partly due to anchor text, then pointing it to another site's subfolder would mean the tartget URL has more varied anchor text and could boost rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Domain Favoured by Google
Hi there, We have just launched our website in Ireland .ie and was wondering would the .ie website be favoured by Google over a competitor with a .co.uk or .com domain? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Moving poor content to its own domain may risk being seen as a doorway page?
We have decided to move some thin content from our primary domain to an independent domain in order to lift the panda penalty. Does anyone have suggestions for how to avoid being seen as a doorway page? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0