Consolidating Microsites?
-
Hello,
I work with a conglomerate of 10 or so different websites. In the past year or so (but especially in the past few weeks) we've seen a drop in traffic to our smaller microsites and have found that it's time consuming to rank well for these sites. With the recent changes that Google has made, would you recommend consolidating our sites and focusing our attention on one or two main sites?
Also, if we were to redirect the microsites back to our main site, could that effect the rankings of our main site? Would the demoted rankings get passed along?
Thank you!
-
I think it is a little early to do a universal 301 redirect of all of those sites to your main site. Some of my sites affected last month have already started to come back. I would try to continue to get them to come back a bit.
You could get some more topical content on them and maybe clean them up a bit.
Then wait.
If that still does not work and you don't want to maintain or track them you could do 301 redirects. I dont think you will pass any penalties. I have done this myself and did not see any ill effect.
It seems that when penalties happen they tend to be to a directory or a domain. The penalty does not seem to get passed along.
Anyone else seen any bad things happen when a 301 redirect was done?
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
-
Next scheduled update?
Hello my new website is showing everything at minimum like domain and page rating and backlinks, when will the next update will be?
Algorithm Updates | | raffaelegurrieri0 -
International Homepage Advice
Hello, colleagues! We have a conundrum. A client website has a good subdirectory strategy for localized/translated content for its various international markets, but nothing currently "lives" at the root. In my mind, this presents a challenge to search engines (note that we have had some trouble getting proper visibility overall, which is why I'm asking this question). I'm looking for any links or just plain old good advice on why it's important to have a global homepage. Should that global homepage be in English? Most enterprise sites I've worked with do have a homepage that's in English, with the ability to select a country from a drop down in a nav across the site. Any advice, best practices, etc. about why a global homepage is important and what language it could/should be in would be really helpful. Hreflang tags would make sense, I guess, but each country has slightly different offerings so I'm not sure that it makes complete sense. In other words, one country's homepage may have completely different content than another's. Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | SimpleSearch0 -
Our Sites Organic Traffic Went Down Significantly After The June Core Algorithm Update, What Can I Do?
After the June Core Algorithim Update, the site suffered a loss of about 30-35% of traffic. My suggestions to try to get traffic back up have been to add metadata (since the majority of our content is lacking it), as well ask linking if possible, adding keywords to alt images, expanding and adding content as it's thin content wise. I know that from a technical standpoint there are a lot of fixes we can implement, but I do not want to suggest anything as we are onboarding an SEO agency soon. Last week, I saw that traffic for the site went back to "normal" for one day and then saw a dip of 30% the next day. Despite my efforts, traffic has been up and down, but the majority of organic traffic has dipped overall this month. I have been told by my company that I am not doing a good job of getting numbers back up, and have been given a warning stating that I need to increase traffic by 25% by the end of the month and keep it steady, or else. Does anyone have any suggestions? Is it realistic and/or possible to reach that goal?
Algorithm Updates | | NBJ_SM2 -
Is using REACT SEO friendly?
Hi Guys Is REACT SEO friendly? Has anyone used REACT and what was the results? Or do you recommend something else that is better suited for SEO? Many thanks for your help in advance. Cheers Martin
Algorithm Updates | | martin19700 -
On page vs Off page vs Technical SEO: Priority, easy to handle, easy to measure.
Hi community, I am just trying to figure out which can be priority in on page, off page and technical SEO. Which one you prefer to go first? Which one is easy to handle? Which one is easy to measure? Your opinions and suggestions please. Expecting more realistic answers rather than usual check list. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Is anyone else's ranking jumping?
Rankings have been jumping across 3 of our websites since about 24 October. Is anyone seeing similar? For example ... jumps from position 5 to 20 on one day, then back to 5 for 3 days and then back to 20 for a day I'm trying to figure out if it's algorithm based or if my rank checker has gone mad. I can't replicate the same results if I search incognito or in a new browser, everything always looks stable in the SERPs if I do the search myself
Algorithm Updates | | Marketing_Today0 -
I'm Pulling Hairs! - Duplicate Content Issue on 3 Sites
Hi, I'm an SEO intern trying to solve a duplicate content issue on three wine retailer sites. I have read up on the Moz Blog Posts and other helpful articles that were flooded with information on how to fix duplicate content. However, I have tried using canonical tags for duplicates and redirects for expiring pages on these sites and it hasn't fixed the duplicate content problem. My Moz report indicated that we have 1000s of duplicates content pages. I understand that it's a common problem among other e-commerce sites and the way we create landing pages and apply dynamic search results pages kind of conflicts with our SEO progress. Sometimes we'll create landing pages with the same URLs as an older landing page that expired. Unfortunately, I can't go around this problem since this is how customer marketing and recruitment manage their offers and landing pages. Would it be best to nofollow these expired pages or redirect them? Also I tried to use self-referencing canonical tags and canonical tags that point to the higher authority on search results pages and even though it worked for some pages on the site, it didn't work for a lot of the other search result pages. Is there something that we can do to these search result pages that will let google understand that these search results pages on our site are original pages? There are a lot of factors that I can't change and I'm kind of concerned that the three sites won't rank as well and also drive traffic that won't convert on the site. I understand that Google won't penalize your sites with duplicate content unless it's spammy. So If I can't fix these errors -- since the company I work conducts business where we won't ever run out of duplicate content -- Is it worth going on to other priorities in SEO like Keyword research, On/Off page optimization? Or should we really concentrate on fixing these technical issues before doing anything else? I'm curious to know what you think. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | drewstorys0 -
Microsites for Local Search / Location Based sites?
Referring to the webinar on SEOMoz about Local Search that was presented by Nifty Marketing (http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/be-where-local-is-going). I have a question my client asked us regarding why we broke out their locations into microsites, and not just used subfolders. So here are the details: The client has one main website in real estate. They have 5 branches. Each branch covers about a 50 mile radius. Each branch also covers a specialized niche in their areas. When we created the main site we incorporated the full list of listings on the main site; We then created a microsite for each branch, who has a page of listings (same as the main site) but included the canonical link back to the main site. The reason we created a microsite for each branch is that the searches for each branch are very specific to their location and we felt that having only a subfolder would take away from the relevancy of the site and it's location. Now, the location sites rank on the first page for their very competitive, location based searches. The client, as we encourage, has had recommendations from others saying this is hurting them, not helping them. My question is this... How can this hurt them when the microsites include a home page specific to the location, a contact page that is optimized with location specific information (maps, text, directions, NAP, call to action, etc.), a page listing area information about communities/events/etc., a page of the location's agents, and of course real estate listings (with canonical back to the main site)? Am I misunderstanding? I understood that if the main site could support the separation of a section into a microsite, this would help local search. Local search is the bread and butter of this client's conversions. AND if you tell me we should go back to having subfolders for each location, won't that seriously hurt our already excellent rankings? The client sees significant visitors from their placement of the location URLs. THANKS!
Algorithm Updates | | gXeSEO
Darlene1