The pros and cons of subdomain or new domain for a new brand?
-
Hi there Moz experts,
We're launching a new brand and product offering for a completely different audience than we've worked with before. We're expected a significant amount of business to come from inbound marketing, so we're wondering whether we should launch the new brand as a subdomain of the parent company or as a completely separate domain.
The parent company's website has thousands of inbound links and is over 10 years old, so I'm thinking in the short term it would be easier to get new content ranked there. However, in the long term I think it would be better for the new brand to have a separate TLD.
Thoughts or other things I should consider?
Thanks!
-
Devon,
If relevance between two subdomains is low, the value of links pointing from one of them to another will be low, as well--even though they share the same root domain. If they're as different as you say, it's probably best to tough it out on a new domain. Nonetheless, it shouldn't be inconceivable that you could come up with some overlapping concept between something on the two sites about which you could write. Such an article/page of content/blurb added to the old domain and linking to the new domain could give the new site a little boost in visibility/traffic/awareness.
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
-
Why is Google appending a different website's brand name to the end of SERP title?
I've recently been shown some SERP results where Google is appending a different website's brand name to the end of the SERP title. It's actually rewriting the brand's name to that of the other website. (This is obviously not ideal.) Why would this be? The other website doesn't even stock the same product, so there shouldn't be any confusion there. But even if it did, many websites stock the same products. Just confusing...
Branding | | Ria_1 -
Re-Branding Website
Hi everyone! I'm currently in the process of re-branding a website, and am really worried about the SEO consequences of doing so... The site I'm working on has recently been seeing a large increase of organic search traffic (almost 25% each month for the past 3 months) and I want to do my best to avoid screwing that up in the process of changing the aesthetic of the site. A couple specific questions I have are: Does changing the stylesheet, but none of the on-page content affect SEO? Would condensing menu items (i.e. putting all services under 1 item named "services") have a positive or negative effect? Neither? Any advice, tips, or previous experiences on this would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Branding | | Derrald0 -
Change Brand Spelling after 8 years
After changing my complete site, citations, etc to a certain brand spelling--capitalize the first letter, I am being asked to add another capital in the spelling. Could this affect customer usability or ranking in any way? i.e. Mozcon to MozCon Thanks.
Branding | | RoxBrock0 -
Short Custom Domains for using instead of bit.ly etc
Hi Can anyone recommend any good sources/sites for quickly trying to find good shortened custom domain options for using instead of bit.ly etc Any hints and tips at trying to find suitable ones too ? since ive tried a few sites and cant find anything suitable and keeps suggesting options with subfolders Thanks Dan
Branding | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
'The Guardian' Is Moving to a New Domain
'The Guardian' Is Moving to a New Domain according to this article on Mashable - http://mashable.com/2013/05/24/the-guardian-dot-com/ Interested to see all the thoughts from SEOs to see how you would suggest they could implement this correctly, without dropping traffic / rankings etc...
Branding | | Webrevolve0 -
Need advice on old brand names
A couple of years ago my company put all effort into one brand name, closing multiple sites with good names. All traffic going to ie OldBrandName.com is now redirected to www.newbrandname.com/OldBrandName. Here our customers are being told about the fusion/merge and we are linking to the key-products of OldBrandName, on our new age. We have 4 of these pages for 4 different brandnames. These pages still get a lot of traffic. Now to my question: how do I get as much juice as possible out of these OldBrandNames? They have high page authority and many inbound links. But I would like to pass the juice and the links to our frontpage or other relevant pages. What is optimal? Should I just redirect all the traffic to www.newbrandname.com? The redirects was made approximately 2 years ago. We are in the travel & leisure business, so customers often visits numerous times a year, closing deals 1-2 times a year. All 4 OldBrandNames have their own specialities (family, low budget, off-the-beaten-track, wellness). Any recommendations on how to approach this?
Branding | | alsvik0 -
Subject: Brand anchor text distribution. Does the HP url classify as brand anchor?
Hi guys, I just wanted to know what your take is on this and whether anyone knows if google has published any info on this. I am wanting to analyse a fairly large backlink profile. The idea is to discover how far it correlates alongside recent SERPS ranking data (based on anchor text distribution) information that has been published across the web. There is so much data to categorise and segment. This is due to overlaps in categorisation, (which is possibly a good thing as it appears more natural) though I often it difficult to decide which goes where. My question today relates to brand anchor text - in determining the % of overall brand distribution for a backlink profile - Which out of the below do you think rings true? 1.) Should I be considering the homepage url anchor text as a branded link anchor? 2.) Should the brand % just be 'pure brand' anchor text? 3.) Should it contain partial brand + KWD data? 4.) Should it comprise of all of the above elements? 5.) Should I divvy up / segment partial brand, pure brand, brand + kwd, citations etc into new sub categories and see how this individual data correlates to current ranking factors in the SERPS? (Not sure if there is any recent published data in this amount of detail) Anyway, I just wondered what you guys thought about this in the eyes of Google., and also to find out how you go about classifying and segmenting backlink profile data. Thanks for now
Branding | | Turkey0 -
Brand Name searches: Low Click Through Rates in Google - What are your CTR in the SERPS for your Brandname?
Hello, Checking the Analytics part - Search Engine Optimization/ Queries - I found suprising results for my website: The website is no. 1 for my brand name but only has a 28% CTR on the brandname in the Google SERPS! Please see exactly what I mean here: http://screencast.com/t/GKjwliZ6GTF7 I'm looking for your experience of CTR of other websites in the same situation. Do you have similar low CTR? Some background info; The website is no1 for the brandname. Sitelinks are shown. Google Maps is shown on right. In the period are no adwords advertisments on my brand name as I know. I checked several times. I cant understand where 72% go after searching for my brandname. Thanks for sharing your experience. Best Regards Daria
Branding | | nmedia0