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.
Umbrella company and multiple domains
-
I'm really sorry for asking this question yet again. I have searched through previous answers but couldn't see something exactly like this I think.
There is a website called example .com. It is a sort of umbrella company for 4 other separate domains within it - 4 separate companies.
The Home page of the "umbrella" company website is example.com. It is just an image with no content except navigation on it to direct to the 4 company websites.
The other pages of website example.com are the 4 separate companies domains. So on the navigation bar there is :
Home page = example.com
company1page = company1domain.com
company2page= company2domain.com etc. etc.
Clicking "home" will take you back to example.com (which is just an image).
How bad or good is this structure for SEO? Would you recommend any changes to help them rank better? The "home" page has no authority or links, and neither do 3 out of the 4 other domains. The 4 companies websites are independent in content (although theme is the same). What's bringing them altogether is under this umbrella website - example.com.
Thank you
-
Thank you for your comments.
-
I agree with Peter, I have worked with a company who had several different products that are huge so they used the similar structure. I think in order to give better user experience they should have some text on home page (instead of image only) but i think from the technical SEO perspective there is no big problem with this!
-
Hi Caroline
I don't think there are any fundamental issues with the structure for SEO. Many large corporates will have an "umbrella" corporate "group" website with links to their subsidiary sites.
The critical factor for SEO as with any website and its pages is the relevancy of its content based on the many ranking factors discussed in this article: http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors
Peter
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
-
Multiple CMS on one website / domain & SEO
For a client we would like to work with a content hub, but their website is build on a custom CMS so we are limited in our options and if we aks their web developers they ask crazy prices to help us. So now we have the idea to build the content hub with wordpress and implement it next to their current CMS. for example on www.website.com/contenthub/ . As far as i know this is technically possible and there are no negative effects regarding SEO as long as we link the two sitemaps together. Am i right or am i missing something here?
Technical SEO | | Siphoplait0 -
Domain Masking SEO Impact
I hope I am explaining this correctly. If I need to provide any clarity please feel free to ask. We currently use a domain mask on an external platform that points back to our site. We are a non-profit and the external site allows users to create peer-to peer fundraisers that benefit our ministry. Currently we get many meta issues related to this site as well as broken links when fundraisers expire etc. We do not have a need to rank for the information from this site. Is there a way to index these pages so that they are not a part of the search engine site crawls as it relates to our site?
Technical SEO | | SamaritansPurse0 -
Robots.txt and Multiple Sitemaps
Hello, I have a hopefully simple question but I wanted to ask to get a "second opinion" on what to do in this situation. I am working on a clients robots.txt and we have multiple sitemaps. Using yoast I have my sitemap_index.xml and I also have a sitemap-image.xml I do put them in google and bing by hand but wanted to have it added into the robots.txt for insurance. So my question is, when having multiple sitemaps called out on a robots.txt file does it matter if one is before the other? From my reading it looks like you can have multiple sitemaps called out, but I wasn't sure the best practice when writing it up in the file. Example: User-agent: * Disallow: Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/ Sitemap: http://sitename.com/sitemap_index.xml Sitemap: http://sitename.com/sitemap-image.xml Thanks a ton for the feedback, I really appreciate it! :) J
Technical SEO | | allstatetransmission0 -
Rel canonical between mirrored domains
Hi all & happy new near! I'm new to SEO and could do with a spot of advice: I have a site that has several domains that mirror it (not good, I know...) So www.site.com, www.site.edu.sg, www.othersite.com all serve up the same content. I was planning to use rel="canonical" to avoid the duplication but I have a concern: Currently several of these mirrors rank - one, the .com ranks #1 on local google search for some useful keywords. the .edu.sg also shows up as #9 for a dirrerent page. In some cases I have multiple mirrors showing up on a specific serp. I would LIKE to rel canonical everything to the local edu.sg domain since this is most representative of the fact that the site is for a school in Singapore but...
Technical SEO | | AlexSG
-The .com is listed in DMOZ (this used to be important) and none of the volunteers there ever respoded to requests to update it to the .edu.sg
-The .com ranks higher than the com.sg page for non-local search so I am guessing google has some kind of algorithm to mark down obviosly local domains in other geographic locations Any opinions on this? Should I rel canonical the .com to the .edu.sg or vice versa? I appreciate any advice or opinion before I pull the trigger and end up shooting myself in the foot! Best regards from Singapore!0 -
Multiple urls for posting multiple classified ads
Want to optimize referral traffic while at same time keep search engines happy and the ads posted. Have a client who advertises on several classified ad sites around the globe. Which is better (post Panda), having multiple identical urls using canonicals to redirect juice to original url? For example: www.bluewidgets.com is the original www.bluewidgetsusa.com www.blue-widgets-galore.com Or, should the duplicate pages be directed to original using a 301? Currently using duplicate urls. Am currently not using "nofollow" tags on those pages.
Technical SEO | | AllIsWell0 -
Transfer a Main Domain to a Sub-Domain
My IT department tells me they want to transfer my main site domain, which has been in existence since 1999 as an e-commerce site (maindomain.com) to a sub-domain (www2.maindomain.com) or a completely new domain (newdomain.net). This is because we are launching a new website and B2C e-commerce engine, but we still have to maintain the legacy B2B e-commerce engine which contains hard-coded URLs, and both systems can't use the same domain. I've been researching the issue across SEOmoz, but I haven't come across this exact type of scenario (mostly I've seen a sub-domain to new domain). I see major problems with their proposal, including negative SEO impact, loss of domain authority/ranking and issues with branding. Does anyone know the exact type of impact I can expect to see in this scenario and specific steps I should go about to minimize the impact? Btw, I will be using Danny Dover's guide on properly moving domains where appropriate. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | AscendLearning0 -
Domain authority and keyword difficulty
I know there are too many variables for a certain answer, however do people take their domain authority into account when using keyword difficulty tool? I have a new domain which only has a score of seven at the moment. When using the keyword searching tool what is the maximum difficulty level keywords people would target initially? Obviously I would seek to increase the difficulty of the words over time but to start off its a hard choice between keywords which can be ranked for in a reasonable period of time and the keywords which are getting enough traffic to make the effort worthwhile.
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Issue with .uk.com domain
hi i have rockshore.uk.com which is not indexing properly. the internal pages do not show up for the text they have on them, or the title tags. the site is on aekmps shops platform. I understand that a .uk.com is not a proper TLD but i think i have a subdomain of .uk.com Can anyone help? thanks
Technical SEO | | Turkey0