Umbrella company is taking Domain and link strength!
-
Hi everyone! First thanks for reading this, I really appreciate it. The company I work for has two sites one is an event website and the other is a blog. The blog gets a great amount of the traffic and propels sales. The event website doesn't get much traffic but has been around for awhile and has garnered a 6 Google Page rank with a lot of backlinks and referring domains. The event website, though, has the same name of the company and this sometimes gets confusing when talking to businesses so the executives in charge want to make the event website an umbrella site for the company (very similar to Virgin's website). They will keep the event website but rebrand it with a new domain and basically start over. The good news about this is the event website, even though it has high link strength, has a lot of 404s because they had a previous database that they dumped leading to a lot of 404s (I made them change those to 410s).
Here's my issue. I want to keep the SEO strength of the event website for the event website. Could I do a 301 redirect for a couple months and then take it off and make the umbrella site? Would the strength pass? Or would it be possible to do a 301 redirect in the subfolders where most of the content and links are? Or would you recommend another method of transferring the strength of the site?
-
Hi Matt,
In general, my advice would be to achieve permanent 301 redirects at as granular a page/folder level as possible (prioritized by the current number of linking root domains - Open Site Explorer's Top Pages report is a great tool for this).
Where the rebranding & migration is concerned, I would strongly recommend reading through two resources here at Moz:
- Ruth Burr's overview of Moz's own fairly recent move (from SEOmoz.org to Moz.com) and
- Aleyda Solis's handy "Achieving an SEO-Friendly Domain Migration" infographic
Between both, I think you'll have your bases covered.
Best,
Mike -
Thanks Mike. The URL in question is Flavorpill dot com. There's been some talk of moving it to a new domain. Currently the site redirects you to new york or sf or la and all the events live on /events. I was thinking of, if we were to go to a new domain, to do 301 redirects on subfolders (new york, events, etc) and that might save some of the Google equity. There is a huge amount of links to the site and the site has been around for awhile so I'd like to keep that strength. There's also a lot of rebranding going on and I have said that I would like the rebranding to happen first before moving so some advice on that would be good as well.
Thanks,
Matt
-
Hi Matt,
Not sure I have a clear understanding of what you mean by "Could I do a 301 redirect for a couple months and then take it off and make the umbrella site?"
Any 301s you set up to pass link equity must be maintained permanently.
You can absolutely use 301s at the subfolder/page level, and if you can leave those redirects in place permanently this may be a solution for you.
The other option is to reach out to webmasters for your most valuable links and get those changed over to the new events site - can take a lot of time and isn't always successful, but it's often the best option to ensure link equity is maintained.
If you'd like to share more detail, I can circle back and provide more specific info. Hopefully the above helps to some degree.
Best,
Mike -
I see what you mean about the relevancy for the blog now. What would you recommend that I do. Do you know of any way I could keep the SEO strength? Would doing a 301 on subfolders work?
-
If I understand correctly the executives at your company want to use the domain that the current event site is on to create an umbrella site, but you want to keep SEO strength of that site but on a different domain?
I don't think that that would work how you want it to, because as far as I know once you take that 301 off, all of the links leading to the original domain are going to start counting towards that umbrella site and the even site will likely drastically drop in rankings.
The temporary might help to boost the new domain for the event site, but it's definitely a complicated situation and I'm not sure that there's a good way to go about it.
Also, you mentioned a blog at the beginning of your post but after reading it, it kind of seems somewhat irrelevant to your question.
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
-
Is it worth keeping a decades-old domain that's merely 301 redirecting to the main domain?
Hi fellow Moz SEOs, We have a bigger client who we just did an SEO Site Audit for, and it was discovered that they have several domain names that are simply 301 redirecting to their main domain name. One of their domains in particular is decades old, and the client is asking if there is any value in keeping it (and the others), or simply leaving them as-is. Considering the domain age, does anyone have any recommendations? Much appreciated, Zack Barton
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zack
Barton Interactive
(833) 442.6853 // office
(408) 910.7750 // mobile
https://bartoninteractive.com0 -
Link from Google.com
Hi guys I've just seen a website get a link from Google's Webmaster Snippet testing tool. Basically, they've linked to a results page for their own website test. Here's an example of what this would look like for a result on my website. http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.impression.co.uk There's a meta nofollow, but I just wondered what everyone's take is on Trust, etc, passing down? (Don't worry, I'm not encouraging people to go out spamming links to results pages!) Looking forward to some interesting responses!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomcraig860 -
When should you redirect a domain completely?
We moved a website over to a new domain name. We used 301 redirects to redirect all the pages individually (around 150 redirects). So my question is, when should we just kill the old site completely and just redirect (forward/point) the old domain over to the new one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | co.mc0 -
Dummy links in posts
Hi, Dummy links in posts. We use 100's of sample/example lnks as below http://<domain name></domain name> http://localhost http://192.168.1.1 http:/some site name as example which is not available/sample.html many more is there any tag we can use to show its a sample and not a link and while we scan pages to find broken links they are skipped and not reported as 404 etc? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Subdomain Metrics Links??
I have been analysing my companies website against our competitors and we beat them hands down on everything apart from the total links in the subdomain metrics. Our competitor jumped above us a couple of months ago to grab the number one spot for our industries most valuable keyword. They have had a new website designed and after looking at the source code and running it through SEO MOZ in comparison to our site I can't see how they have manged to do it. We beat them hands down on all factors apart from subdomain metrics > Total links where they have twice as many. When it comes to Page Specific Metrics and Root Domain Metrics we easily beat them on all factors. Does anyone have any ideas what I need to do to improve the subdomain metrics? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Detectamet0 -
Merging Domains... Sub-domains, Directories or Seperate Sites?
Hello! I am hoping you can help me decide the best path to take here... A little background: I'm moving to a new company that has three old domains (the oldest is 10 years old), which get a lot of traffic from their e-letters. Until recently they have not cared about SEO. So the websites have some structural, coding, URL and other issues. The sites are indexed, but have a problem getting crawled and/or indexed for new content - haven't delved into this yet but am certain I will be able to fix any of these issues. These three domains are PR4, PR4, PR5 and contain hundreds of unique articles. Here's the question... They want to move these three sites **to their main company site (PR4) and create sub domains for each one. ** I am wondering if this is a good idea or not. I have merged sites before (creating categories and/or directories) and the end result is that the ONE big site, is much for effective than TWO smaller, less authoritative sites. But the sub domain idea is something I am unsure about from an SEO perspective. Should we do this with sub domains? Or do you think we should keep the sites separate? How do Panda and Penguin play into this? Thanks in advance for the help! SD P.S. I'm not a huge advocate in using PR as a measurement tool, but since I can't reveal the actual domains, I figured I would list it as a reference point.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | essdee0 -
Measurement of Link Value
Over the past few months I have encountered webmasters who claim to be using instruments far better than open site explorer but they will not disclose what they are. Are there better ways of determining the value of a link than OSE? Is "link juice" more important than page/domain authority where the link resides? Or vice-vesa. Any help understanding this would be appreciated. I do not want to offend other webmasters but I also do not want to be fooled by them either while negotiating a link exchange with them
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
Image Links Vs. Text Links, Questions About PR & Anchor Text Value
I am searching for testing results to find out the value of text links versus image links with alt text. Do any of you have testing results that can answer or discuss these questions? If 2 separate pages on the same domain were to have the same Page Authority, same amount of internal and external links and virtually carry the same strength and the location of the image or text link is in the same spot on both pages, in the middle of the body within paragraphs. Would an image link with alt text pass the same amount of Page Authority and PR as a text link? Would an image link with alt text pass the same amount of textual value as a text link? For example, if the alt text on the image on one page said "nike shoes" and the text link on the other page said "nike shoes" would both pass the same value to drive up the rankings of the page for "nike shoes"? Would a link wrapped around an image and text phrase be better than creating 2 links, one around the image and one around the text pointing to the same page? The following questions have to do with when you have an image and text link on a page right next to each other, like when you link a compelling graphic image to a category page and then list a text link underneath it to pass text link value to the linked-to page. If the image link displays before the text link pointing to a page, would first link priority use the alt text and not even apply the anchor text phrase to the linked page? Would it be best to link the image and text phrase together pointing to the product page to decrease the link count on the page, thus allowing for more page rank and page authority to pass to other pages that are being linked to on the page? And would this also pass anchor text value to the link-to page since the link would include an image and text? I know that the questions sound a bit repetitive, so please let me know if you need any further clarification. I'd like to solve these to further look into ways to improve some user experience aspects while optimizing the link strength on each page at the same time. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abernhardt
Andrew0