Moving a site as a folder of existing one

[lgrozeva]

We have the following case:

Site A with domain authority 65 and 2,750 linking root domains (139K total links) and

Site B with domain authority 68 and 1,336 linking root domains (38K total links)

There's a suggestion to move Site A as a folder of Site B so it becomes something like this: domainB.com/domainA using 301 redirects for the existing domain A. We'd like to better understand what such move will result in.

I imagine at first Site A will drop in rankings, but after that will it be better for it to be under Site B domain? Also, moving all the pages a step behind in the URL path may slightly affect their rankings.

What do you think? Would you move Site A or leave it as a separate domain? I understand there can't be an exact estimation what will happen, but I'll appreciate your thoughts.

[EGOL]

I would redirect the brand site to the company site.  I'd place it into a folder.

[lgrozeva]

Thanks for your reply, Stephen.

Products on Site B get similar traffic volumes to Site A. The decision to split SiteAProduct and have it on a separate domain was made back in 2004 because of a partner relationship, which is no longer in place.

[stevecounsell]

Hi

This sounds like you already have a model to use as Site B has product on it already.

What are the comparisons for similar products on Site B adn the Single Product Site A in terms of traffic.

I'm assuming that you have SiteB/ProductPages already so do you know why Site B/ProductPage is different from SiteA?

What was the strategic reason behind splitting off SiteAProduct?

I would make my decisions based on the answers to the questions above.

Hope that helps

Steve

[lgrozeva]

Sorry for missing some details in my initial question.

Site B is the company site, while Site A is one of its product brands. There's no topic duplication and they don't compete for traffic. Site B gets 8-9 times the traffic of site A, as it contains other products as well. There's about 10% duplication in the linking root domains. Site A has over 55K pages, and site B has over 400K pages.

The team developing the site A product hopes that by moving the whole site to siteb/folder it will gain more authority, better ranking positions and more traffic overall.

[EGOL]

Not enough information has been provided to make a decision.

How big are these sites?

If you place all of the content on the smaller site onto the larger site will there be topic duplication?

How much duplication is there in the linking root domains?

How much traffic do they get?

If these sites were on same topic, did not have duplicating content, had a huge diversity of different linking root domains and both ranked well in the SERPs, I would redirect the one with smaller traffic to the one with larger traffic and where content is topic duplicated I would rewrite/redirect to merge their strengths.

[stevecounsell]

Pushing your SITEA content down one directory level to "SITE-B.com/SITE-A" will probably have an effect on ranking that content.

lower directory = less Importance

I tend to agree with kjay on combining the content.

Do the two sites compete for traffic?

[SEOKeith]

Are these sites similar? Could you not combine the content and 301 each page as you combine the info into site B.

I would only considering combining the content and then 301'ing from site A to the combined page on site B if the site content is similar.

If the sites are of completely different content then leave them as separate sites.

HTH,

K