Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Managing Subsidiaries. Should I house them all in a single domain? What about a single social media presence?
-
Situation: My company has 8 subsidiaries. They each have their own niche (IT, Electrical, Roofing, etc...). We also have offices in multiple countries (If that's even a factor).
Questions:
1. Should I establish a web presence for each one? (www.SubsidiaryOne.com) I would then link to these sites from www.ParentCompany.com. The other options are to do something like www.ParentCompany.com/SubsidiaryOne or SubsidiaryOne.ParentCompany.com. We are trying to build the brand of the parent company so I figured that housing everything inside of the parent company domain would help me meet my goal. Each company will have its own unique content, products, blogs, etc...
2. Should each subsidiary have its own social media presence (Its own Google+, Twitter, FB, etc...) or should I house them all under the umbrella of the parent?
Thanks, Alex
-
Alan,
I agree with you and Ash. Providing we are willing to commit the proper resources to support separate efforts like this, I think that the ccTLD is the way to go.
-Alex
-
I'm with Ash on the Internationalization strategy. I would also suggest that if you go with domain.com/countryspecificsection/ then each country specific section should have it's on country / language specific structured markup and Meta data assignment. This will help ensure Google doesn't have to figure it out on their own (because they are a gambler's nightmare as to how they can get mixed signals wrong).
-
My preference is for the ccTLD if there will be a commitment to optimise that domain - usually the smaller countries are sales offices without a proper marketing complement, so they assume that "head office" will look after the website. Head Office usually doesn't have any budget to cater to the subsidiaries, so the ccTLD will be left to its fate.
Hence your choice of company.com/Country will do.
While Bing is not too important, note that its Webmaster tools has an option to mark off such country folders as being different countries. My suspicion is that Google automatically picks up such cues.
-
Ash,
Your response was very informative. Thank you. It looks like you've got a nice amount of international experience. That's great! If the branded TLD in each country is available, should I stick with that vs. Company.com/Country?
-Alex
-
Drew,
Your logic is sound. I will keep this in mind. I don't want to bite off more than I can chew but the company is willing to give me the proper resources to ensure that each individual brand is given the proper attention. At this point it's really going to come down to me asking them if each brand is THAT important. I agree that it would be more resource/time/cost effective to manage one vs. many.
Thanks Drew!
-Alex
-
Alan,
Thank you very much for your response. I will not be linking from every page. I will ensure that those links are housed in the "About" or "Contact" sections as recommended. I would like each entity to operate as its own brand. Each entity is responsible for their own production & marketing efforts so it would be good for them to be totally separate.
I plan on approaching each website as its own. I will not throw up a few pages and expect results. There needs to be an ongoing effort for each entity.
Thanks again Alan.
-Alex
-
Being in Australia I tend to get a good share of multi-national SEO challenges.
Larger, established brands can break all the rules concerning TLDs because they get local authority through their local links and citations. A current client is a major bank with a presence in 31 countries. They just happen to be my bank, so I have observed them over 20 years. They started as a .com with an Australian emphasis and were multi-national for a while. Then they shut down some of the foreign offices. They then decided to populate their .com.au domain and left a complete, parallel copy on the original .com. Then they resumed their global focus and did NOT use their TLDs in those countries because a handful were not in their possession. These are the obscure countries that haven't signed up to the international copyright conventions. Branding is paramount for them, so no amount of SEO advice could budge them.
So their international locations take the format example.com/countryname. Does that work for them? Of course it does. I was in Singapore where I tested for myself from a local PC, so as to remove any hint of my personal history. They do very well. Despite having the duplicate content in Australia, they do very well among their peers.
A former client who has offices in over 60 countries also started as a .com and when they got more serious in the US they realised that they did not rank at all in that country. They had the usual IT-centric excuse not to make many sites, so I left that for them to resolve internally. Is sales more important than some technician's convenience? I hope they got that point. I did recommend a local micro site for the US that would display US-centric customer stories and local news events.
The takeaways here are that local content and local links can overcome any advantages/disadvantages of a gTLD for a multi-national site.
-
Drew,
Thanks for emphasizing the resource allocation consideration. I mentioned it only in a minor way, yet it really is a critical consideration.
-
The real question is, do you have the time, energy and resources to manage more than one website / social media / seo campaign really well? Having worked with companies who tried that approach, it seemed like they split there attention and none of them really panned out. The ones that got the focus did well. I'm not saying you should not do the subsidiaries, but perhaps that can come later, if one area grows beyond what the site can do from a content standpoint, or needs more SEO attention. As Alan mentioned it's about the brand, and in my experience, managing one brand vs eight is more resource/time/cost effective.
-
The founding principle to SEO is brand identification. The more you do to model your web presence after successful major brands, the more you will naturally earn trust and authority big brands earn. That in turn boosts all other aspects of SEO.
To achieve this specific to subsidiaries, you establish a parent company corporate site, and a stand-alone domain for each subsidiary. Every site however, needs to utilize the most sustainable SEO methods possible. You can't just slap up sites with a few pages and expect them to rank or pull in highly qualified visitors without serious focus.
Only link back to the parent company site and other subsidiary sites from your "About", and "Contact" sections unless you believe it's valuable from a visibility perspective to link from every page. HOWEVER if you link from every page, they should be nofollow links. if you do mass volume links from site to site and they're not nofollowed, that leaves you highly exposed to potential algorithm penalties.
If you want each subsidiary to succeed as its own brand you will need separate social channels for each as well. Again though, they'll only be helpful long-term if you have the resources to maintain them in quality engagement ways.
There are many other rules and guidelines (like "keep duplication of content to as near zero as possible") however that's the core concept that addresses your question here.
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
-
So many links from single site?
this guy is ranking on all high volume keywords and has low quality content, he has 1600 ref domains check the attachment how did he get so many links from single site is he gonna be penalized YD2BvQ0
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SIMON-CULL0 -
Is there a benefit to changing .com domain to .edu?
Hey All! I'm wondering if there is any benefit (or if benefit could possibly outweigh the cost) to changing a domain from .com to a new .edu domain. The current .com domain has decent credibility already, and the .edu will have never been used before.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | frankandmaven1 -
301 Redirecting from domain to subdomain
We're taking on a redesign of our corporate site on our main domain. We also have a number of well established, product based subdomains. There are a number of content pages that currently live on the corporate site that rank well, and bring in a great deal of traffic, though we are considering placing 301 redirects in place to point that traffic to the appropriate pages on the subdomains. If redirected correctly, can we expect the SEO value of the content pages currently living on the corporate site to transfer to the subdomains, or will we be negatively impacting our SEO by transferring this content from one domain to multiple subdomains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris81980 -
Duplicate content due to parked domains
I have a main ecommerce website with unique content and decent back links. I had few domains parked on the main website as well specific product pages. These domains had some type in traffic. Some where exact product names. So main main website www.maindomain.com had domain1.com , domain2.com parked on it. Also had domian3.com parked on www.maindomain.com/product1. This caused lot of duplicate content issues. 12 months back, all the parked domains were changed to 301 redirects. I also added all the domains to google webmaster tools. Then removed main directory from google index. Now realize few of the additional domains are indexed and causing duplicate content. My question is what other steps can I take to avoid the duplicate content for my my website 1. Provide change of address in Google search console. Is there any downside in providing change of address pointing to a website? Also domains pointing to a specific url , cannot provide change of address 2. Provide a remove page from google index request in Google search console. It is temporary and last 6 months. Even if the pages are removed from Google index, would google still see them duplicates? 3. Ask google to fetch each url under other domains and submit to google index. This would hopefully remove the urls under domain1.com and doamin2.com eventually due to 301 redirects. 4. Add canonical urls for all pages in the main site. so google will eventually remove content from doman1 and domain2.com due to canonical links. This wil take time for google to update their index 5. Point these domains elsewhere to remove duplicate contents eventually. But it will take time for google to update their index with new non duplicate content. Which of these options are best best to my issue and which ones are potentially dangerous? I would rather not to point these domains elsewhere. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajiabs0 -
Community inside the domain or in a separate domain
Hi there, I work for an ecommerce company as an online marketing consultant. They make kitchenware, microware and so on. The are reviewing their overall strategy and as such they want to build up a community. Ideally, they would want to have the community in a separate domain. This domain wouldn't have the logo of the brand. This community wouldn't promote the brand itself. The brand would post content occassionally and link the store domain. The reasoning of this approach is to not interfere in the way of the community users and also the fact that the branded traffic acquired doesn't end up buying at the store I like this approach but I am concerned because the brand is not that big to have two domains separated and lose all the authority associated with one strong domain. I would definitely have everything under the same domain, store and community, otherwise we would have to acquire traffic for two domains. 1. What do you think of both scenarios, one domain versus two? Which one is better? 2. Do you know any examples of ecommerce companies with successful communities within the store domain? Thanks and regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | footd0 -
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 -
Should I buy a .co domain if my preferred .com and .co.uk domain are taken by other companies?
I'm looking to boost my website ranking and drive more traffic to it using a keyword rich domain name. I want to have my nearest city followed by the keyword "seo" in the domain name but the .co.uk and .com have already been taken. Should I take the plunge and buy .co at a higher price? What options do I have? Also whilst we're on domains and URL's is it best to separate keywords in url's with a (_) or a (-)? Many thanks for any help with this matter. Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoSheikh0 -
Keyword-Rich Domains - Redirect?
Hi, Mozzers- I have a client that has a bunch of pretty nice keyword-rich domain names. Their traffic and rankings are good. They provide legal services in the Chicago area. I have lots of good content that I could use to start a blog using a domain like keyword,keyword-blog.com. Good idea? Currently I have a resources area on their website but feel like this area could be getting a little bloated and some news-related stuff isn't really appropriate. 2 Questions: Should I use one of the decent domains for a blog and build up the rankings, traffic, and link to the main site? Or is this lots of work for little payout? Both sites would be hosted in the cloud. Some of the domain names are related to their name, others are keyword or geo-targeted. Would it be wise to setup 301 redirects going to their website? Pros/cons? If you need additional info, please PM me for details. Thank you, friends! LHC
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lhc670