Moving External TLD To Subfolder of Corporate Domain?
-
Our Challenge:
Our corporate site receives about 20,000 visits per week. Unfortunately, nearly half of those visitors are "looking" for a link we provide in our navigation link found on our homepage that takes them to our “Employee" focused site which resides on a separate TLD.
Because so much of the traffic to our corporate site lands on our homepage only as a stepping stone en route to the "Employee" site, the bounce rate, time on site and Average page views for our corporate site are all negatively impacted. Meanwhile, the "Employee" site gets more than 100,000 visits per month and enjoys enviable metrics- low bounce rate, high average page views and average time on site.
Our Goal:
- minimize or eliminate the negative impact of so many visitors using our corporate site as a stepping stone to reach the employee site.
- leverage the traffic volume and positive metrics enjoyed by the employee site to improve the search engine authority of our corporate site.
Our Solution:
- Move the "Employee" site to a subfolder of our corporate site – for example www.oursite.com/employees
- Install Google Analytics on all pages within the subfolder
- Provide a 301 redirect from old "Employee" domain to new employee subfolder
The expected result is an increase in overall corporate site traffic, more page views, higher time on site, and lower overall bounce rate from merging these two website properties.
Our Need:
After comparing the subfolder option to subdomain approach, we feel that the proposed solution is our best course of action and are looking for validation or an alternate recommendation.
-
The page views and time on site information will be of limited benefit since most of the pages involved wont be viewable to Google since they are behind a login filter.
While many people believe that Google considers the factors you mention in their algorithms, I am not aware of any solid evidence or statements from Google confirming this information. In fact, Matt Cutts has specifically stated that no Google Analytics data is used in rankings at all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBw9tbAQhU
It makes perfect sense to me the factors you mention can be considered as part of the ranking process. I am sure many other SEOs believe they are as well. I would love to see any evidence to this effect. I think most people make this assumption.
With the above understood, if you felt the move was a low level of effort, I would probably go ahead with the change. It sounds like it can be a bit nicer for employees to stay on the same site. If this was considered a big project, I would not make the move without solid evidence you will achieve the benefits you desire.
-
Hi Ryan,
Great questions!
- Yes, some of the pages are currently indexed (see more info on #2)
- Some of the employee pages are indexed, however the large majority of them require users to be logged in to access certain pages. While we understand that many pages are not visible to Google due to this, that is ok with us. Our main concern is to be able to increase the corporate site time on site, number of page views, and reduce the domain bounce rate. By installing Google Analytics across all pages (logged in & logged out) we think over overall site metrics would increase?
As for the "employee" pages offering value or interesting content, I would say no in that these pages are contain some personal information that is not to be shared with others. There are some generic information pages such as how to use the site, etc. which are in front of registration. We are not particularly interested in ranking these "employee" pages/subfolder within search engines, but rather want to increase our overall site metrics for user activity in the eyes of Google Analytics by combining the two domains in question (employee & corporate domains).
By increasing these important metrics of our corporate domain as a whole, we hope to ultimately increase our corporate domain authority and in turn rank our "important" pages a little bit easier.
Please let me know if you have any additional questions. Thanks!
-
Hi Chris.
I have a few questions which will help myself and others to better answer your question.
Are your employee pages currently indexed?
Do employees need to login to access the employee site?
Do your employee pages offer anything of value for the internet? Do you have content that others may be interested in finding?
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
-
Dramatic drop in Domain Authority
I have a client who has reported a drop in Domain Authority from 16 to 1 in a matter of a few weeks. Also, MOZ was reporting links, but now none! I know there were some issues with the recent MOZ index update. However, this sounds like something else. Anyone got ideas on where we should start looking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Legacy domains
Hi all, A couple of years ago we amalgamated five separate domains into one, and set up 301 redirects from all the pages on the old domains to their equivalent pages on the new site. We were a bit tardy in using the "change of address" tool in Search Console, but that was done nearly 8 months ago now as well. Two years after implementing all the redirects, the old domains still have significant authority (DAs of between 20-35) and some strong inbound links. I expected to see the DA of the legacy domains taper off during this period and (hopefully!) the DA of the new domain increase. The latter has happened, although not as much as I'd hoped, but the DA of the legacy domains is more or less as good as it ever was? Google is still indexing a handful of links from the legacy sites, strangely even when it is picking up the redirects correctly. So, for example, if you do a site:legacydomain1.com query, it will give a list of results which includes pages where it shows the title and snippet of the page on newdomain.com, but the link is to the page on legacydomain1.com. What has prompted me to finally try and resolve this is that the server which hosted the original 5 domains is now due to be decommissioned which obviously means the 301 redirects for the original pages will no longer be served. I can set up web forwarding for each of the legacy domains at the hosting level, but to maintain the page-by-page redirects I'd have to actually host the websites somewhere. I'd like to know the best way forward both in terms of the redirect issue, and also in terms of the indexing of the legacy domains? Many thanks, Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | clarkovitch0 -
Domain Name
Hello everyone Please advice what to do in a situation when searching for a domain: www.domain.com google is recommending domain.org ? when these are completely 2 different sites? Does it has to do with trust rank? Please advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FusionMediaLimited0 -
Why domain authority increase
Hi all Our domian authority has increased from 39 to 42 last week. We have been improving our metadata and removing bad backlinks recently. Is there any other reason or updates last week that would have resulted in this increase? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gavinr
Gavin0 -
What is best practice SEO approach to re structuring a website with multiple domains and associated search engine rankings for each domain?
Hello Mozzers, I'm trying to improve and establish rankings for my website which has never really been optimised. I've inherited what seems to be a mess and have a challenge for you! The website currently has 3 different www domains all pointing to the one website, two are .com domains and one is a .com.au - the business is located in Australia and the website is primarily targeting Australian traffic. In addition to this there are a number of other non www domains for the same addresses pointing to the website in the CMS which is Adobe Business Catalyst. When I check Google each of the www domains for the website has the following number of pages indexed: www.Domain1,com 5,190 pages
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JimmyFlorida
www.Domain2.com 1,520 pages
www,Domain3.com.au 149 pages What is best practice approach from an SEO perspective to re organising this current domain structure? 1. Do I need to use the .com.au as the primary domain given that we are in this market and targeting traffic here? Thats what I have been advised and it seems to be backed up by what I have read here. 2. Do we re direct all domains to the primary .com.au domain? This is easily done in the Adobe Business Catalyst CMS however is this the same as a 301 redirect which is the best approach from an SEO perspective? 3. How do we consolidate all of the current separate domain rankings for the 3 different domains into the one domain rankings within Google to ensure improved rankings and a best practice approach? The website is currently receiving very little organic search traffic so if its simpler and faster to start again fresh rather than go through a complicated migration or re structure and you have a suggestion here please feel free to let me know your ideas! Thank you!0 -
Are there any concerns moving a site to https?
I am currently having analytics issues where the non-secured (http) front end of my site is not properly communicating to the backend (https) of my site. When a user jumps between the the secured and non-secured, it will display as a bounce in GA and I get duplicate visits. GA has a work around for this but it is messy and not working. So my question is, has anyone had good/bad experiences moving a non-secured site over to the secured side? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 2comarketing0 -
7 years old domain sandboxed for 8 months, wait or make a domain change?
Hello folks The questions is, if a domain, 7 years old being sandboxed due to "notice of unnatural links to website" does it make sense to make a domain change (301 permanent redirect and make a "domain change" under google webmaster tools) to another, aged(!) domain name?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ferray
Website being sandboxed for over 8 months already and there is no chance to do anything with those "unnatural" links to website... Any suggestions?0 -
Would switching domain names be a good move?
Hi All, I'm trying to decide whether to switch to a more relevant domain name for an SEO project. For a while now I've already been doing the standard SEO work on an existing website, content optimization, link building etc but I can't help feeling I won't ever get the full benefits of SEO until I also change the domain name. The current website is for a law firm in new jersey called sandz.net which obviously has no immediate impression it is for a law firm so I'm looking at setting up a new domain and doing 301s to a new site. My concerns are that as its a highly competitive market, I've initiated the campaign to target local searches so I'm wondering just how beneficial buying a domain name with the term lawyer or attorney which actually be. And of course the ideal domain names such as njlawyer, NJattorney .COMs are all taken so I would be looking at perhaps a .ORG with the intention that all printed material the firm has still contains their original name, sandz.net and by word of mouth they should tell people their site is sandz.net as its easy to remember but for the sake of SEO and links then these should all be focused on a new domain.. Any thoughts appreciated.. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davebrown19750