Managing Subsidiaries. Should I house them all in a single domain? What about a single social media presence?
-
Situation: My company has 8 subsidiaries. They each have their own niche (IT, Electrical, Roofing, etc...). We also have offices in multiple countries (If that's even a factor).
Questions:
1. Should I establish a web presence for each one? (www.SubsidiaryOne.com) I would then link to these sites from www.ParentCompany.com. The other options are to do something like www.ParentCompany.com/SubsidiaryOne or SubsidiaryOne.ParentCompany.com. We are trying to build the brand of the parent company so I figured that housing everything inside of the parent company domain would help me meet my goal. Each company will have its own unique content, products, blogs, etc...
2. Should each subsidiary have its own social media presence (Its own Google+, Twitter, FB, etc...) or should I house them all under the umbrella of the parent?
Thanks, Alex
-
Alan,
I agree with you and Ash. Providing we are willing to commit the proper resources to support separate efforts like this, I think that the ccTLD is the way to go.
-Alex
-
I'm with Ash on the Internationalization strategy. I would also suggest that if you go with domain.com/countryspecificsection/ then each country specific section should have it's on country / language specific structured markup and Meta data assignment. This will help ensure Google doesn't have to figure it out on their own (because they are a gambler's nightmare as to how they can get mixed signals wrong).
-
My preference is for the ccTLD if there will be a commitment to optimise that domain - usually the smaller countries are sales offices without a proper marketing complement, so they assume that "head office" will look after the website. Head Office usually doesn't have any budget to cater to the subsidiaries, so the ccTLD will be left to its fate.
Hence your choice of company.com/Country will do.
While Bing is not too important, note that its Webmaster tools has an option to mark off such country folders as being different countries. My suspicion is that Google automatically picks up such cues.
-
Ash,
Your response was very informative. Thank you. It looks like you've got a nice amount of international experience. That's great! If the branded TLD in each country is available, should I stick with that vs. Company.com/Country?
-Alex
-
Drew,
Your logic is sound. I will keep this in mind. I don't want to bite off more than I can chew but the company is willing to give me the proper resources to ensure that each individual brand is given the proper attention. At this point it's really going to come down to me asking them if each brand is THAT important. I agree that it would be more resource/time/cost effective to manage one vs. many.
Thanks Drew!
-Alex
-
Alan,
Thank you very much for your response. I will not be linking from every page. I will ensure that those links are housed in the "About" or "Contact" sections as recommended. I would like each entity to operate as its own brand. Each entity is responsible for their own production & marketing efforts so it would be good for them to be totally separate.
I plan on approaching each website as its own. I will not throw up a few pages and expect results. There needs to be an ongoing effort for each entity.
Thanks again Alan.
-Alex
-
Being in Australia I tend to get a good share of multi-national SEO challenges.
Larger, established brands can break all the rules concerning TLDs because they get local authority through their local links and citations. A current client is a major bank with a presence in 31 countries. They just happen to be my bank, so I have observed them over 20 years. They started as a .com with an Australian emphasis and were multi-national for a while. Then they shut down some of the foreign offices. They then decided to populate their .com.au domain and left a complete, parallel copy on the original .com. Then they resumed their global focus and did NOT use their TLDs in those countries because a handful were not in their possession. These are the obscure countries that haven't signed up to the international copyright conventions. Branding is paramount for them, so no amount of SEO advice could budge them.
So their international locations take the format example.com/countryname. Does that work for them? Of course it does. I was in Singapore where I tested for myself from a local PC, so as to remove any hint of my personal history. They do very well. Despite having the duplicate content in Australia, they do very well among their peers.
A former client who has offices in over 60 countries also started as a .com and when they got more serious in the US they realised that they did not rank at all in that country. They had the usual IT-centric excuse not to make many sites, so I left that for them to resolve internally. Is sales more important than some technician's convenience? I hope they got that point. I did recommend a local micro site for the US that would display US-centric customer stories and local news events.
The takeaways here are that local content and local links can overcome any advantages/disadvantages of a gTLD for a multi-national site.
-
Drew,
Thanks for emphasizing the resource allocation consideration. I mentioned it only in a minor way, yet it really is a critical consideration.
-
The real question is, do you have the time, energy and resources to manage more than one website / social media / seo campaign really well? Having worked with companies who tried that approach, it seemed like they split there attention and none of them really panned out. The ones that got the focus did well. I'm not saying you should not do the subsidiaries, but perhaps that can come later, if one area grows beyond what the site can do from a content standpoint, or needs more SEO attention. As Alan mentioned it's about the brand, and in my experience, managing one brand vs eight is more resource/time/cost effective.
-
The founding principle to SEO is brand identification. The more you do to model your web presence after successful major brands, the more you will naturally earn trust and authority big brands earn. That in turn boosts all other aspects of SEO.
To achieve this specific to subsidiaries, you establish a parent company corporate site, and a stand-alone domain for each subsidiary. Every site however, needs to utilize the most sustainable SEO methods possible. You can't just slap up sites with a few pages and expect them to rank or pull in highly qualified visitors without serious focus.
Only link back to the parent company site and other subsidiary sites from your "About", and "Contact" sections unless you believe it's valuable from a visibility perspective to link from every page. HOWEVER if you link from every page, they should be nofollow links. if you do mass volume links from site to site and they're not nofollowed, that leaves you highly exposed to potential algorithm penalties.
If you want each subsidiary to succeed as its own brand you will need separate social channels for each as well. Again though, they'll only be helpful long-term if you have the resources to maintain them in quality engagement ways.
There are many other rules and guidelines (like "keep duplication of content to as near zero as possible") however that's the core concept that addresses your question here.
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
-
Domain Name redirection to new Domain Name - VS - Transfering Domaine Name from account 1 to account 2
Hi there! Thanks for your time 😉 I have a new cutsomer that bought his domain name via WIX and your know... WIX sucks huge time for SEO. Basically, we want to do SEO outside of WIX. But I am not sure HOW I should proceed. I think I have 2 options: OPTION 1- We transfer the domain name from WIX to a new hoster. But we will lose 7 days during that, lose prospects while the website is in maintenance and we might lose the little bit of ranking we have on the way. BUT! ONCE Everything is done with the transfer, we will be able to operate our SEO campaing with a Domain Name that as 15 domain authority, links, little bit a ranking, etc. OPTION 2- I just buy a new domain name. I build the new Website on it and then use the SEO juice from the old domain name with redirect to push the new domain name. Like this, I won't lose any opportunities. BUT I will have to restart the SEO as new... Any tips or ideas for me? Maybe there is an OPTION 3 that I don't know about.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gab-SEO1 -
Cross Domain duplicate content...
Does anyone have any experience with this situation? We have 2 ecommerce websites that carry 90% of the same products, with mostly duplicate product descriptions across domains. We will be running some tests shortly. Question 1: If we deindex a group of product pages on Site A, should we see an increase in ranking for the same products on Site B? I know nothing is certain, just curious to hear your input. The same 2 domains have different niche authorities. One is healthcare products, the other is general merchandise. We've seen this because different products rank higher on 1 domain or the other. Both sites have the same Moz Domain Authority (42, go figure). We are strongly considering cross domain canonicals. Question 2 Does niche authority transfer with a cross domain canonical? In other words, for a particular product, will it rank the same on both domains regardless of which direction we canonical? Ex: Site A: Healthcare Products, Site B: General Merchandise. I have a health product that ranks #15 on site A, and #30 on site B. If I use rel=canonical for this product on site B pointing at the same product on Site A, will the ranking be the same if I use Rel=canonical from Site A to Site B? Again, best guess is fine. Question 3: These domains have similar category page structures, URLs, etc, but feature different products for a particular category. Since the pages are different, will cross domain canonicals be honored by Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC1 -
Using pictures from another domain
We are building several sites for several clients which will be using images from the manufacturer. Our dev team wants to insert the manufacturer's url for the images, instead of actually downloading the image and hosting on our server. There are thousands of images, so downloading images to our server will be time consuming, so we are looking for a shortcut.... however I'm concerned this will cause other issues. Is using manufactueresdomain.com/12345.jpg going to cause SEO issues? will this generate Google penalties? Since we are not able to control the image file name, we cannot optimize it. We will add Alt text and Title tag for each image, but the file name is random characters. How important is the file name for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Branden_S0 -
New Domain Vs. Existing Domain
Hello, A potential client of mine has been blacklisted because of bad SEO process basically they have over 1,500 toxic links on their site. They have penalised to such an extent that they are now on page 12 for most of their keywords and not ranking well on brand terms either. They are keen to on to a new domain entirely and ditch their current domain when we design their new site. I wanted to get people's opinion on whether this is the best course of action or should we try to salvage the current domain? Many thanks, Mat
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Barques-Design0 -
301 redirect to multiple domain
Hi guys, I have a domain A, B and C. The domain A was an association of two business and they are about to split. Parts of domain A are going to be redirect to domain B, but some content belong to the domain C. So my question : Is it possible to 301 redirect some pages from A to B and some other pages from A to C and if yes, what would be the impact on SEO ? Thanks a lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StevePatenaude0 -
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 -
Redirecting a Page from Domain A to Domain B
We have a page on Domain A, an established and well-ranking website, that would be more appropriate on Domain B, a site that we launched about two years ago. This page ranks well, pulls nice search traffic and has traffic from external links. We would like to move the page and its traffic from Domain A to Domain B using a 301 redirect. Have you ever done this or have you heard of how it has worked for someone else? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EGOL0 -
Keyword-Rich Domains - Redirect?
Hi, Mozzers- I have a client that has a bunch of pretty nice keyword-rich domain names. Their traffic and rankings are good. They provide legal services in the Chicago area. I have lots of good content that I could use to start a blog using a domain like keyword,keyword-blog.com. Good idea? Currently I have a resources area on their website but feel like this area could be getting a little bloated and some news-related stuff isn't really appropriate. 2 Questions: Should I use one of the decent domains for a blog and build up the rankings, traffic, and link to the main site? Or is this lots of work for little payout? Both sites would be hosted in the cloud. Some of the domain names are related to their name, others are keyword or geo-targeted. Would it be wise to setup 301 redirects going to their website? Pros/cons? If you need additional info, please PM me for details. Thank you, friends! LHC
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lhc670