Importance of having a tightly themed sight and domain for ranking and SEO
-
I started the site 10 years ago as www.islesurfboards.com selling mainly surfboards and ranking mainly for surfboards, paddle boards came along and now paddle boards make up for 95% of all the business and we are missing alot of ranking in the paddle board related keywords so what is the best course of action?
my plans:
keep www.islesurfboards.com and keep it surfboards focused, create a new domain www.islepaddleboards.com and move all paddle board related content products etc over to this domain with redirects to transfer the link juice.
Doing this will still keep my surfboard site and all its long term domain credibility and i can offer a link over the the www.islepaddleboards.com site for people looking to buy paddle boards and vice versa on the new paddle board site for people looking to shop surfboards.
Would this be the best course of action or does can anyone offer any better suggestions. I know google supposodly has taken off much ranking emphasis of the domain but as i pick apart the competition who rank welll in the paddle board space they all have "paddleboards" in the domains and a paddle board specific site to keep it tightly themed which pays off across the board in content, ppc campaigns, and overall ease of use as surfboards and paddle boards are two seperate products and paddle boards is very hot right now so i dont want to stay commited to www.islesurfboards.com domain if its going to create confusion or not help me rank well for paddle boards leading into the future.
Any ideas? Thoughts on the best route to take?
-
Billy and Dan are spot on. Not only is it feasible to have a new section on the site, you are doing what Google loves and introducing new informative content, growing your site and raising its overall value/authority. Google will have absolutely no issue with tightly relating any kind of surfing/board activity. Only consider if the new content is way off track - cake decoration classes or something.
I would just ensure the structure of your site is such that you have something like -
www.islesurfboards. com/paddle-boards/
rather than
www.islesurfboards. com/blah/blah/paddle-boards/
Another way of looking at this - if you have a successful site then where better to test the market, rather than investing time and money in a new site.
-
i agree with Billy
the 2 topic/genres are so closely related i think you will do best by developing out the current site rather than start a new site
-
Although I am certainly not saying that your proposed method is 'wrong' in the slightest... I would be more inclined to take advantage of the year's worth of authority on your old domain.
Surfboards and Paddle boards are certainly similar enough - it isn't like you are branching out in to game systems or lawn mowers.
I would create a paddle board section on the current website and optimize that section for the paddle board terms.
That is just me, though. I see no issue with your proposed method except for having a new domain with no links and no time under its belt.
Cheers.
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
-
6 months Later - 0 Domain Authority/Page Authority and losing Rankings
Hi Moz, Sorry if this comes across as a "Do My Job For Me" type of post but we are an E-Commerce store that have been live since January but have not seen any increase in performance on our site and over the past month, have even seen our rankings decrease. We have 1300 products on site and about 1500 pages in total. 1. As for on-site optimization, we have got 2 reviews and follow up reviews with a highly reputable reviewer from People Per Hour and solved any issues she has found. 2. Updated the Meta Data for products and Alt Descriptions for images focusing on the keywords we wish to rank for. We post weekly blogposts linking back to our products. 3. Social Media Campaigns with regular campaigns on FaceBook, Pinterest, Google+ and Twitter. 4. Attempted to build FOLLOW backlinks to articles relating to products on our site. We have also considered purchasing backlinks to improve our situation as we have yet to see any of these pages be crawled by Google over a month later. I have read a guides on Moz and other sites on how to improve our authority and improve rankings but none have offered much by way of practical solution. My question being, is this just a matter of patience or should I be worried/improving anything given we have 0 Domain Authority and Page Authority on all pages? Thanking you in advance, SEO Novice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | csworkwear0 -
Consolidating Multiple Domains into A Single Domain
I have a client who's website is an amalgamation of multiple domains. jacksonhole.net is the main domain but the site passes traffic back and forth from the following domains/sites. My questions is, would it it be better for SEO to consolidate all of these domains under the single high authority domain and 301 redirect the rest or is that a really bad idea? Thanks for your help. jacksonhole.net (Domain Authority 31) jackson-hole-rental-condos.com (Domain Authority 22) jackson-hole-rental-homes.com (Domain Authority 21) j acksonholehotelguide.com (Domain Authority 19)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbaxa-2613381 -
SEO question
Hi there! I'm the SEO manager for 5 Star Loans. I have 2 city pages running. We are running our business in 2 locations: Berkeley, CA & San Jose, CA. For those offices we've created 2 google listings with separate gmail accounts. Berkeley (http://5starloans.com/berkeley/) ranks well in Berkeley in Gmaps and it shows on first page in organic results. However the second city page San Jose (http://5starloans.com/san-jose/) doesn't show in the Gmaps local pack results and also doesn't rank well in organic results. Both of them have authentic backlinks and reviews. It has been a year already and it's high time we knew the problem 🙂 any comment would be helpful. thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moonalev0 -
International SEO
We want to expand to a few new regions internationally. My question is if we register sites in different geographies and upload our exact site to these web addresses (exact duplicates) so our web addresses will then be www.mysite.co.uk (current site) www.mysite.com (new intended site) www.mysite.com.au (new intended site) and add rel=“canonical” linking elements to prevent duplicate content issues.Will our content production on our current site www.mysite.co.uk retain its value within all the other sites. Is this the best way to do it? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aquaspressovending0 -
Domain.com/postname vs. Domain.com/blog/postname
I am wondering what is the best practice regarding blogs? I read that it would be best to structure a website like a pyramide instead of a flat panckage But I have seen many blogs where the post shows right after the domain name. Domain.com/postname instead of Domains/blog/postname My point is that if a website has many post then the structure will get very flat and this will maybe make your most optimized and important pages less important to google domain.com/page a) What do you think about this, which one of the two blog solutions do you prefer and why? b) in context to blog If for instance you had a keyword like Copenhagen property would you then consider renaming your blog to realetateagent.com/Copenhagen-property-news/post-name c) Would write a little intro like 200 words for the page 1 of your blog and add in some keywords.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nm19770 -
Why is this site not ranking?
http://www.petstoreunlimited.com They get good grades from the on-page tool. The links are not amazing, but are not super spammy. Yet it ranks for nothing they target Any reason why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
My homepage doesn't rank anymore. It's been replaced by irrelevant subpages which rank around 100-200 instead of top 5.
Hey guys, I think I got some kind of penalty for my homepage. I was in top5 for my keywords. Then a few days ago, my homepage stopped ranking for anything except searching for my domain name in Google. sitename.com/widget-reviews/ previously ranked #3 for "widget reviews"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wearetribe
but now....
sitename.com/widget-training-for-pet-cats/ is ranking #84 for widget reviews instead. Similarly across all my other keywords, irrelevant, wrong pages are ranking. Did I get some kind of penalty?0 -
If we add noindex to a subdomain, will the traffic to that subdomain still generate domain authority for the primary domain?
We are trying to decide whether a password protected site, that we will noindex, should be set up as a subdomain or if it should be its own domain. The determining factor here is whether or not having that noindexed subdomain will increase domain authority since its noindexed. Any ideas???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grayloon0