Subdomain vs. Separate Domain for SEO & Google AdWords

[mkbeesto]

We have a client who carries 4 product lines from different manufacturers under a singular domain name (www.companyname.com), and last fall, one of their manufacturers indicated that they needed to move to separate out one of those product lines from the rest, so we redesigned and relaunched as two separate sites - www.companyname.com and www.companynameseparateproduct.com (a newly-purchased domain). Since that time, their manufacturer has reneged their requirement to separate the product lines, but the client has been running both sites separately since they launched at the beginning of December 2016.

Since that time, they have cannibalized their content strategy (effective February 2017) and hacked apart their PPC budget from both sites (effective April 2017), and are upset that their organic and paid traffic has correspondingly dropped from the original domain, and that the new domain hasn't continued to grow at the rate they would like it to (we did warn them, and they made the decision to move forward with the changes anyway).

This past week, they decided to hire an in-house marketing manager, who is insisting that we move the newer domain (www.companynameseparateproduct.com) to become a subdomain on their original site (separateproduct.companyname.com). Our team has argued that making this change back 6 months into the life of the new site will hurt their SEO (especially if we have to 301 redirect all of the old content back again, without any new content regularly being added), which was corroborated with this article. We'd also have to kill the separate AdWords account and quality score associated with the ads in that account to move them back.

We're currently looking for any extra insight or literature that we might be able to find that helps explain this to the client better - even if it is a little technical. (We're also open to finding out if this method of thinking is incorrect if things have changed!)

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi mk

I am completely with Martin here. It never made sense creating a domain name with company and product in in the first place. You would be doubling the mistake by bringing it back to a sub domain.

In my opinion you either leave it like it is but more preferably, use a subfolder, then 301 all the old site back to the equivalent pages within that. i.e.

domain.com/catergory/separateproduct

It just doesn't make sense from a number of points running a site just for a subset of products. The site would continually fight with www.companyname.com for link juice. It's far better to keep the whole shebang under one umbrella.

Although part of the ranking factor in determining QS is associated with conversion history I would argue that it is heavily skewed towards how the ad text is written targeting appropriately written on page content/headings/meta.

Regards

NIgel

[benesmartin]

Hey there,

it depends mainly on the company's long-term strategy. If the company is going to have more products in the future (in addition to the mentioned 4), it wouldn't make no sense to make for each product special domain. Therefore, users could be a little bit confused and you would unnecessarily split the domain authority. Better to have everything under one roof.

In my opinion, it also depends a little bit on length of the domain name. If the domain of the new product is easy to remember, short and makes sense, then I wouldn't change it now. You risk the effort of the previous 6 months.

So from the view of long-term strategy, I would change - however, not to subdomain but to subfolder (domain.com/productname). Regarding the effort of the previous 6 months - I would review the amount of back links and how hard would it be to eventually manage them.

That's just my opinion, hope it helps a bit. Martin

[Alick300]

Hi,

First of all I would like to tell you that it is just my opinion in case of SEO. Redirecting a sepaarte domain into subdomain of new website wouldn't be a good move and neither I have heard something like that so far. Wait for some other community member opinion/suggestion on this.

In case of Adwords I assure you that there is no need to create separate Adwords account. First of all check for double serving because you can't have two adwords account to sale same products otherwise your account could be banned by Google adwords. If that is not the case you can create separate campaign in existing adwords account instead of creating new adwords account.

Thanks