Is it possible to redirect the main www. domain - but keep a subdomain active?

[edlondon]

Hi Mozzers,

Quick question, which I hope one of you can answer...

Let's say I have a website (i) www.example.com and on that a subdomain exists, (ii) subdomain.example.com.

Let's say I want to change my main domain from www.example.com to www.newwebsite.com.  I'd 301 all content, use GWT to notify Google of a change of address etc etc.

Having done that, is it still possible to keep the original subdomain active? So, even though www.example.com has been redirected / transferred to www.newwebsite.com, subdomain.example.com would still exist.

If that is possible, what is the implication for Domain Authority?  On the one hand, I have transferred the main site (so DA from that will transfer to the new site); but part of that root domain is still active.

Make sense?  Any answers?

Thanks everyone...

[edlondon]

Hi - thank you for your responses and sorry for my very late reply.

Appreciate your input on this.  Ruth, the reason for this being in a consideration was because the company wanted to re-brand their customer-facing site (changing to newwebsite.com) but keep oldwebsite.com as a corporate site.

The issue of course is that, unless we did a complete domain transfer, we would lose some of the fantastic rankings that have been built up over two years of hard work.  This got me thinking about whether I could give them both, i.e. create subdomain.oldwebsite.com even though the main site has been redirected and transferred.

Having thought about that, I wanted to know if anyone had tested this as it seemed like a potential loop-hole, whereby you might be able to have subdomain.oldwebsite.com and newwebsite.com both piggy-backing off the same DA.  But, as you mentioned that DA doesn't transfer that well to subdomains, I guess this may be one reason why.

Thankfully, this strange scenario was avoided, as I finally managed to convince them to start a new corporate site on a .net or .org. The corporate site doesn't need to rank particularly, so I got my #1 solution anyway.  The subdomain idea I posted above was a potential backup plan at best, as the CEO didn't look like budging for a while!

Thanks again - much appreciated!  Incidentally, I have another question posted here: http://moz.com/community/q/google-not-indexing-xml-sitemap-images.  It's really killing me, so I hope somebody can offer some assistance!

Cheers,

Mark

[RuthBurrReedy]

DA doesn't usually transfer very well across subdomains - so it's likely the DA from www.example.com is already not affecting subdomain.example.com.

It's certainly possible to keep the subdomain alive, but I'd be a little concerned about what it would do for your brand. If you're sending the message that example.com is now newexample.com, but then keeping things running at example.com, it could create a lot of consumer confusion. From a DA stance you should be OK, though, especially if you take some extra time to promote the subdomain and the new site after launch.

You may still not see pages from the new domain and the old subdomain ranking in the same SERPs, though - Google is often pretty good at figuring out when multiple sites are owned by the same people.

[Davenport-Tractor]

I think you may have already done that, and just not relized you have.

An example would be Binding #1 set up as yourdomaine.com and the second binding set up as www.yourdomaine.com . Check the SEOMOZ "Site explorer". First do a report on yourdomaine.com noteing the results, now try it on www.yourdomaine.com notice the differance in the results. and your right about the answer. The sub domaine does retain some of its DA.

I'm not sure if it is the correct thing to do, but in GWT, I have manually chosen to have Google use the higher ranking DA name as its default.

Just my thoughts.

[edlondon]

Thanks for your response, Allen - much appreciated.

I probably wasn't clear in my original message that I am specifically interested in what happens to Domain Authority in that scenario - and wondered if anyone had tested this.  Hence felt a web dev / IT forum would be the wrong place.

So I thought it might be possible to do this technically, for the reasons you mentioned.   But what happens to the DA?

Let's say you redirect www.example.com to www.newsite.com.  www.newsite.com then takes over from www.example.com in the rankings (done this several times and it's been near seamless).

But, I then want to set up a subdomain on example.com AFTER I have redirected www.example.com.  Surely, that subdomain would retain some of that DA and thus have an unfair advantage.  All of a sudden, I could engineer it so that subdomain.example.com AND www.newsite.com rank alongside each other.

Not tried this before so fascinated to see if the subdomain would rank - or whether because it's on a redirected site, it would not.

Cheers!

[Davenport-Tractor]

Hey guys,

Yes make perfect sense. Not sure that this is the best place to ask the question though. A web server IT site would probably be the best place.

What your asking is easily possible if you are the Administrator for your web server. All you will need to do is create another binding in the IIS Administrator panel. Just like you created the domain name example.com and the binding www.example.com you can create a third binding example2.com