Sub domain versus separate domains, which is better for Search engine purposes?
-
We are pitching to a hotel client to build two new websites, a summer website and a winter website, two completely different looking websites.
The client wants to automatically switch their domain name to point to one or the other, depending on the time of year. The customer does not want to use a landing page where you would choose which site to visit; they want the domain name to go directly to the relevant website.
Our options:
Set up two new domain names and optimise each website based on the holiday season and facilities offered at that time of year. Then change the exisiting domain name to point at the website that is in season.
Or
Use the existing domain name and setup two sub domains, switching the home page as necessary.
We have been chewing this one over for a couple of days, the concern that we have with both options is loss of search visibility. The current website performs well in search engines, it has a home page rank of 4 and sub-pages ranking 2 and 3’s, when we point the domain at the summer site (the client only has a winter website at present) then we will lose all of the search engine benefits already gained. The new summer content will be significantly different to the winter content. We then work hard for six months optimising the summer site and switch back to the Winter site, the content will be wrong.
Maybe because it's Friday afternoon we cannot see the light for the smoke of the cars leaving the car park for the weekend, or maybe there is no right or wrong approach.
Is there another option? Are we not seeing the wood for the trees?
Your comments highly welcome.
Martin
-
Thank you for your response. Links is a big concern of ours, the option to display both sites on an entry page is a definite non starter, the client doesn't like that idea. I like the option of using sub folders. We would link between the two sites to allow a user to book rooms in either season.
I suppose these types of projects are the ones that challenge us all to think outside the box.
Thank you again, food for thought.
Martin
-
What happens if its summer and I want to book my winter break or winter and I want to book my summer break. I would make sure that they are definitely sure they want two versions of the site before I started but if they are then there is a possible 3rd option to consider - subfolders - www.example.com/summer and www.example.com/winter
For 6 months you redirect anyone coming to the www.example.com site to the required seasonal version. Any links in will to an extent benefit the whole site rather than the one subdomain of the site.
One problem you are going to face is that if you build up links to the summer domain or folder then switch to the winter site some people may remove their link to you as it no longer points to the page that it did when they set up the link.
My preferred option would be a home page giving the option to get to navigate to both sets of content which is held in subfolders with the focus of the home page (in terms of content and design) switching when the seasons change.There would be no need for redirects, less SEO issues, better for a user who is planning ahead and means that any links achieved by either section of the site benefit the domain as a whole.
If wanted to minimise the footprint of the link to the other seasons site then like some sites that have small country selectors at the top of the screen there could be a small season selector that a user only uses when they want to view the off season site.
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
-
Google Search Analytics How to Get Search Keywords for a Page?
How do I get the keywords coming into a page on the new Google Webmaster Tools Search Analytics? Used to be there in the old version. You would just view your most popular urls and when you expanded the urls you would see the terms driving the traffic. How do I see the most popular keyword queries for a given page in the new tool? Alternatively can I still use the old tool somehow?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | K-WINTER0 -
Domain Factors
Now that Page Rank seems to have been 'put out to graze' by Google with no further PR update planned, what would you say is the 'main factor' when looking at a domain? Is it Moz DA? or Moz Links? or Majestic TrustFlow? Or none of the above or is it a combination of the above?! Many thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomKing0 -
List of Search Engines subscribing to the ajax crawling scheme?
Hi, Does anyone have a list of (major) Search Engines that subscribe to the Ajax Crawling Scheme? (https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/) Specifically interested in major international Search Engines such as Bing/Yahoo, Baidu & Yandex - if anyone knows, please let me know! Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux0 -
Buying a domain banned by google
Hi , I came across a super domain for my business but found out that it was a great domain with 100s of link backs but is now banned by Google search engine meaning Google does not index content from that domain. Since the domains linkbacks are from my domin does it make sense to but that domain and redirect those link backs to another (301) and hope that the new domain gets some juice ... I know it is sounding crazy and may not be the best thing to do ethically but still wanted to check if its possible to get some juice.. Rgds Avinash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Avinashmb0 -
Zip Code Blocks the Search Engines!
I have a site where when you visit the product pages, it asks for your zip code. This is obviously blocking the bots from crawling the site. I know you can basically tell the bots how to ignore the zip code feature but I am not exactly sure how to do this. Any help would be appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lhawk0 -
Multi domain redirect to single domain
Hello, all SEOers. Today, I would like to get some ideas about handling multiple domains. I have a client who bought numerous domains under purpose of prevent abuse of their brand name and at the same time for future uses. This client bought more than 100 domains. Some domains are paused, parked, lived and redirected to other site. I don't worry too much of parked domains and paused domains. However, what I am worrying is that there are about 40 different domains are now redirected to single domain and meta refresh was used for redirections. As far as I know, this can raise red flag for Google. I asked clients to clean up unnecessary domains, yet they want to keep them all. So now I have to figure out how to handle all domains which are redirect to single domain. So far, I came up with following ideas. 1. Build gateway page which shows lists of my client sites and redirect all domains to gateway page. 2. Implement robots.txt file to all different domains 3. Delete the redirects and leave it as parked domains. Could anyone can share other ideas in order to handling current status? Please people, share your ideas for me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Artience0 -
Is User Agent Detection still a valid method for blocking certain URL parameters from the Search Engines?
I'm concerned with the cloaking issue. Has anyone successfully implemented user agent detection to provide the Search engines with "clean" URLs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyaRiemer0 -
Blog - on the domain or place on separate site, now that Panda ranks for bounce, TOP, depth of visit
Over 10 years ago, we decided to run our blog external to our main website. contrary to conventional wisdom then, we thought we’d have more control/opps for generating external anchor text links, plus working in a bona fide blog software environment (WP). As we had hoped, the blog generated alot of strong inbound links, captured inbound links of it own from other sites and I think, helped improve our SERPs and traffic. Once the blog was established and with the redesign of the website, we capitulated, and finally moved the blog onto the main domain. After reading a number of pieces on Panda and the new reality of SEO, sounds like bounce rates (in particular), time on page, and other GA measures may have a more profound influence on google rankings now. Given that blogs are notoriously for high bounce rates (ours is), low time on site, depth of visit, seems logical that it adversely affects our site averages for the main domain). Is it time to re-consider pulling our blog off the main domain to reassert the ‘true’ GA measures of the main domain? I guess it still gets down to the question... is the advantage of all the inbound links to the blog on the main domain of greater value than moving the blog off-site and reasserting better 'site stats' for google's pando algo? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ahw0