Is it Bad to Break Up A Site into Multiple Sites?
-
I have a big cluttered website with endless pages. It's a non-profit that has content for patients, researchers, therapists, etc..
Would it be a bad idea to turn this cluttered site into 3 or more completely different sites, each focused on their specific demographic? Or should I just figure out how to organize the one site better?
Thanks for your help!!!
-
I agree with Jared that generally splitting up the site can lead to drop of SEO results. It will also increases your work load since you will have to work SEO on 3 sites instead of one. However, it seems that you are concerned with usability of your site and in my humble opinion that should take a presence and should be addressed. I would suggest splitting the site under a single domain. You can have essentially 3 sites with very few crosslinks (so users would not get confused). www.mydomain.com/patients
On each of the 3 home pages, you can have a cross link to other two home pages. E.g. on www.mydomain.com/patients page you can put link like Click here for the medical professional to route user to www.mydomain.com/doctors
-
In my experience it's rarely the best solution to break up a site (or start out with separate sites for that matter). The cases that generally warrant having multiple properties don't usually have anything to do with the site itself, but the business. An example would be a medium fast food chain that begins allowing franchise operations, but wants each location to now have it's own website.
A big reason for this so rarely being a good option is because you're splitting assets, plain and simple. Domain authority, link equity, brand awareness, inevitable loss in rank for certain pages, not to mention the technical work on the back end that would have to be done (site architecture rearrangement on the new sites, 301s, etc). And this isn't just in the beginning either - you're going to always have to do things in 3s once you make the change. 3 link acquisition campaigns, 3 content campaigns, 3 social campaigns (not to mention the individual accounts), and I can't even begin to think about your PPC, whew! That's a ton of work.
In my opinion, you're much better off reorganizing your current site for long term success.
References:
Splitting a Site into Two Sites for SEO Purposes TCS Case Study: Why We Combined Two Sites Into One Web Content Management Strategy
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
-
How can I fix New 4XX Issue on Site Crawl?
Hi all, My recent site crawl shows 27 4xx issues on this website http://www.rrbusinessconsultants.com/ All of them are for 'posts' on this wordpress website. Here is an example of the issue: http://www.rrbusinessconsultants.com/rr-business-consultants-on-the-rise-of-glassdoor-and-how-companies-are-coping/void(null) The blog page seems to be creating links ending in void(null) which are defaulting to 404 pages. I cannot see the links on the site so cannot see how to remove them. Can anyone provide any insight into how to correct his issue? Many thanks in advance.
Web Design | | skehoe0 -
Force SSL. Good or Bad?
My website can be accessed with a number of different URL's and I am trying to consolidate the traffic to one point. Is there any problem, SEO or technical, with forcing all users who come to my site to going to our https domain? I have already set a preferred domain in WebMaster Tools and set rel=canonical for each page. For instance, anyone entering the below sites would be forced to land at https://www.1099pro.com. 1099pro.com www.1099pro.com http://1099pro.com http://www.1099pro.com
Web Design | | Stew2220 -
Pulling old site-map and URL structure of a site
Hey guys how do I pull an old sitemap or URL structure of a site ! This company I am helping out . Build a new site without any 301 redirect ! It's been about 2 months and hosting company sent me. SQL database file said we basically need to build another site ! Wondering if there are any other ways to see what exact urls were existent before their change over
Web Design | | BizDetox0 -
Site Doing Horrible After Redesign
Hello Fellow Forum Members: Thank you all for taking the time to read this. This is in follow up to one of my previous questions, but I now have more information. I will try to be as concise as possible and want to sincerely thank anybody who invests time in answering this. Around February 9, 2013, we launched our new site on the Bigcommerce platform. We moved from Volusion after 6 years. We had paid the Bigcommerce partner for an upgraded 301 redirect package as I was thoroughly concerned about losing rankings. By the end of February our rankings were diminishing. We expected a slight dip due to the new site. As of May, our organic traffic had dropped by 82%. Google WMT is showing 1500+ 404 errors. Many have to do with review page type URLs and some were just plain never redirected apparently. In May, we hired a wonderful SEO company that is a heavy contributor to the Moz community. They have been generous and wonderful to work with. By the end of this last week it was determined that most of the coding suggestions our SEO was making could NOT be implemented in Bigcommerce because Bigcommerce will not allow access to the PHP files by our developer, thus hindering the execution of these suggestions. Some of these were move the blog to the root, use canonical on the home page, use canonical for pagination, stop the indexing of https URLs and a few more. Today, June 25 we are at a complete loss and trying to just keep our business alive. The opinion of both the SEO and the developer is that my choice of Bigcommerce as a platform was not the best. So my main question is what are the odds our rankings have decreased due to the lack of 301 redirects during our migration to Bigcommerce versus the rankings decreasing do to Bigcommerce being a bad choice as a platform? We are being advised to redevelop our entire site on an Open Source platorm such as Wordpress or Magento, but if that's not needed I certainly don't want to have to do that. I hope I have provided a decent amount of history and information. Thank you for any help/advice you are willing to offer.
Web Design | | josh3300 -
Site structure- category pages
Hi, I'm relatively new to SEO but have tried to apply all best practices to my site. However, I've hit a stumbling block when it comes to whether or not to index my category pages. http://istudyenglishonline.com/category/expressions-idioms/ General info: the site has been created with Wordpress and has a directory of English idioms. Each idiom is associated with one or more categories that it falls under (emotions, sports, food etc). Each category has its own page where the list of idioms will be. As each idiom often has more than one associated category, the same idiom will appear in different category pages, thus creating duplicate content. However, I have given each category page its own unique description. The issue is, when there are numerous idioms, the category page will have more than 1 page. I don't have the ability to create a unique description for each subsequent page of the main category. I know that the very model for some vertical search engines (such as indeed.com) is to create such landing pages and that the more "categories" that they have assigned to their job ads, in this case, the more pages created and the more pages indexed in Google. This seems to work very well for them. My question is, am I doing things right? Should I be doing anything to the subsequent category pages to avoid duplicate content? My plan was to have so many idioms associated with so many categories that I have a fair number of landing pages indexed in google, thus attacking the long tail keywords. However, I'm not sure if I am going the right way. Any advice would be much appreciated!
Web Design | | villarroel0 -
Hey on some of my report cards its saying im not using rel canonical correctly how do i change this on my site?
on some of my report cards its saying certain things featured on my services page are actually linking to my blog or something. and its saying im not using rel canonical correctly. can you help me out?
Web Design | | ClearVisionDesign0 -
Branding site
We are starting a new used car site in latam, and we are in the process of developing the brand, part of the team would like to have the "auto" (spanish for car" in the name and some no. The question is, form a SEO point of view, how strong signal is to have the string auto as part as the URL, and can you have a complete unrelated url and have several URLs with the auto string on it pointing in a 301 way to the non unrelated brand name as a way around? (sorry about my english, I hope you can understand the question) PS, yes, there are a lot of queries involving auto in our target market.
Web Design | | Bligoo0 -
Google Analtyics Conversion Tracking for Wordpress Life Coaching Site
Hello, How do I do conversion tracking for Google Analytics for this site: debidonner(dot)com She has a 'Thank You' page after you return from Paypal Thanks!
Web Design | | BobGW0