Piggybacking on a domains authority - Unsure on whether to move a sub brand or not

[Griffith]

Hey guys,

We are a higher ed website and we have a conference centre that would like to have separate brand identity to the college. They have the local keyword friendly domain confrencecentre.ie redirecting to their conference centre landing page on the higher ed site. We are considering going back to the conferencecentre.ie and redirecting the higher ed landing page to this domain.

My main concerns are if we do this are we taking a risk with loosing are rankings? Currently we are ranked very highly for many keywords related to conference centre and most of our traffic is from organic. I'm afraid of recommending this move for this reason as I feel the conference centre is piggybacking of the authority of the our higher ed website.

I'd love to here your thoughts?

Thanks

Rob

[EGOL]

Good luck.  Hope you can explore the many options with them.

[Griffith]

Hi Egol,

They would still very much be associated with Griffith. They just wanted a little bit more creative control over how they look which you have indicated can be achieved with a different template between the header and footer.

Thanks for the feedback. It is very much appreciated. You echo my sentiments but I guess I just needed reassurance.

Rob

[EGOL]

I spent one of my careers in academia and understand some of the thinking that occurs there.

So you have a university that most likely has a strong reputation and an enthusiastic clan.   That strong reputation supports your rankings in the search engines and the enthusiastic clan supports your visibility in social media.

The conference center wants to leave that to form their own identity?

Maybe they don't realize that starting a new, tiny, unknown website is going to separate them from the strong reputation of the university that will support their rankings in search and separate them from the enthusiastic clan that can promote them in social media.

That reputation and enthusiasm will contribute to the success of the conference center if they remain on the university website.  That's just how search engines respond to established powerful sites compared to how they respond to new, tiny, unknown websites.

Honestly, I gave you a technical answer on why they should want to remain on the university website.  Artistically and socially, they can have the same content on the university website that they could post on a separate website.  Their portion of the university website could look "as they like it" between the university header and university footer.

If they are proud of their association with the university and the university is proud of them then, in my personal opinion, that is the way it should be.  And if that does not exist then I think that the question is more administrative than technical.

I know of situations where a university group needed an actively managed website and the university IT department was unable or unwilling to give staff time to that - and unwilling or unable to allow them to manage their own portion of the university website.  That can be frustrating to the group.  There are also situations where a university group has to pull teeth to get the formatting that they need.  Here the staff support is present, but it is just uncooperative.    So, I would explore with this group to see if this is not a question of "support" or "policy".  And, you always have the possibility that the group is simply composed of especially free spirits.