Would moving a large part of our website onto a separate website be SEO suicide?

[esendex]

Hello,

Our website currently has what I would call educational and sales pages - which sells our services and also a techy section for the developer community.

The developer pages on the website have some of the highest authority pages that we have and equates for about 50% of the content.

It has been proposed to move the developer pages onto their own domain - away from the main website.

Now, would this crush a lot of the SEO benefit that we have on our main site?

Does anyone know of a workable solution that would help retain the SEO.

Would linking to our main site from the developer site help?

It would be great to hear what people think,

Thanks,

[RyanKent]

This is an important decision and one that should not be rushed. The most important question is the one which Irving asks, why exactly is this change being considered? More specifically, what is the problem you are trying to solve or the benefit you wish to gain by making this change?

The response to the above question will help us better respond to your need. Generally speaking, the reason to keep the site together is the PR from all your pages work together to raise the Domain Authority. By splitting your content into two sites you will have two weaker sites rather then one stronger site. A few other disadvantages:

• you may have additional expenses for SSL, trust badges and other software which is domain licensed

• you will have the work of maintaining two sites rather then one

• you will have software configuration and work such as maintaining cookies or information / logins between sites

The primary reason for separating the content to another site is they cover unrelated topics. If you had one company with two unrelated product lines such as vitamins and computer hardware, you would likely want to serve the content on two separate websites.

[irvingw]

Why do they want to do this, what is the reason.

"The developer pages on the website have some of the highest authority pages that we have and equates for about 50% of the content."

This alone is reason enough to not mess with it, because it's passing PR to the rest of the site. If you get rid of that section of the site you make the entire site weaker. Less PR and less content.

Where is the money made, on the main site I assume? How are the rankings for the main site? The developer site may be passing the juice needed to have the main site ranked well and you would be taking that away from the main site if you 301 all of that PR to a subdomain.

[AlanMosley]

I would transfere it into a subdomain, i have seen no evidence that subdimains do not work as a subfolder as far as SEO goes. You can then host on 2 servers.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/

I would also 301 subfolder to subdomain.domain.com.