External Microsite VS Internal Folder
-
We would like to create either a new website or a new section of our existing website that will feature (in time) a lot of content including a forum, video training, tutorials and downloadable resources. Logistically, it would be much easier to create this in a new site (we'll call it newproduct.com) and refer people to the new site. We would, however, like to keep all of that content on our existing site for the sake of content building and SEO.
Should we:
- Duplicate the content and use no index no follow and/or rel canonical?
- Host all of the content on our site and set up a vanity domain (www.newproduct.com) to point people to the deep linked area (www.mainsite.com/product/newproductinfo)?
- Host the content only on an external site with the occasional link back to our main site?
I realize there are other options but they're mostly variants of the above. Our main objectives are to make it easy for people to get to while leveraging the new content for SEO purposes. What are the pros and cons of these different approaches? What seems to make the most sense?
Thank you!
-
Thanks, EGOL and Ryan. This is what I've been leaning toward - I just wanted to make sure there wasn't an easy and acceptable way to do this on an external site that I was missing. One downside to the onsite method is that we'll have to use vanity domain(s) to send new visitors to this site since our main domain is our (relatively unknown and way too long) brand name. It sounds like it'll be worth it to avoid the hassles of dual domains, dual content and the associated mess. Thanks again for chiming in, guys :).
-
I would recommend keeping your content together in one site. There are exceptions, but based on the limited information you have shared, it doesn't seem your site would be an exception.
Why intentionally create duplicate content, create the need to update two sites and then apply meta tags to control your data?
-
On my sites this type of content is in a folder on the primary domain. Look at the location of the blog and forum on SEOMoz - they are in folders on the primary domain.
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
-
I want to move some pages of my website to a folder and nav menu in those pages should only show inner page links, will it hurt SEO?
Hi, My website has a few SaaS products, to make my website simple i want to move my website some pages to its specific folder structure , so eg website.com/product1/features
Technical SEO | | webbeemoz
website.com/product1/pricing
website.com/product1/information and same for product2 and so on, the website.com/product1/.. menu will only show the links of product1 and only one link to homepage (possibly in footer). Please share your opinion will it be a good idea, from UI perspective it will be simple , but i am not sure about SEO perspective, please help thanks1 -
Clean URL vs. Parameter URL and Using Canonical URL...That's a Mouthfull!
Hi Everyone, I a currently migrating a Magento site over to Shopify Plus and have a question about best practices for using the canonical URL. There is a competitor that I believe is not doing it the correct way, so I want to make sure my way is the better choice. With 'Vendor Pages' in Shopify, they show up looking like: https://www.campusprotein.com/collections/vendors?q=Cellucor. Not as clean. Problem is that Shopify also creates https://www.campusprotein.com/collections/cellucor. Same products, same page, just a different more clean URL. I am seeing both indexed in Google. What I want to do is basically create a canonical URL from the URL with the parameter that points to the clean URL. The two pages are very similar. The only difference is that the clean URL page has some additional content at the top of the page. I would say the two pages are 90% the same. Do you see any issue with that?
Technical SEO | | vetofunk0 -
Ok to internally link to pages with NOINDEX?
I manage a directory site with hundreds of thousands of indexed pages. I want to remove a significant number of these pages from the index using NOINDEX and have 2 questions about this: 1. Is NOINDEX the most effective way to remove large numbers of pages from Google's index? 2. The IA of our site means that we will have thousands of internal links pointing to these noindexed pages if we make this change. Is it a problem to link to pages with a noindex directive on them? Thanks in advance for all responses.
Technical SEO | | OMGPyrmont0 -
Different domains vs subdomains for 6 e-shops
We have to choose to stay working with different domain or move all 6 domains to new domain. Right now we have 6 different brand e-shops with 6 domains that have Domain Authority 30-40. So for example:
Technical SEO | | TauriUrb
e-shop1.com
e-shop2.com
.. And we are thinkig about making brand new domain and move all these domains content and link juice into one domain with 301 redirect. So we would have one e-shop solution with 6 subdomains like: e-shop1.newdomain.com
e-shop2.newdomain.com
... Like gap.com does with their brands or http://www.andotherbrands.com. That each brand has subdomains but they use same e-shop solution. With same domains or new subdomains strategy, we will improve internal linking structure between all these e-shops. We have also considerd that with new domain we don't have good organic search results within few first months. So we try to see the bigger picture and consider SEO future. SO QUESTION IS:
Lets leave brand marketing out, then what would you suggest to do? To stay with 6 different DA 30-40 domains or build one stong domain with 6 different brand subpages? We cant use subcategories. All subpages products will be clothes. Latetly there as beed many news and articles that subdomains are part of main domain and vice versa we are looking suggestions from this board. As we right now think that as we have weak domains righ now it would be better idea to start building one strong domain.0 -
Web server locations for international seo
We have a site that is currently hosted in the far east for the far eastern market. We are having issues with the hosting co. so we are considering bringing the site back onto our servers in the UK. However, we don't obviously want to damage too much the bit of uplift we get from local hosting. What is our best approach? Is it ok just to have the site in the UK even though its aimed at the Far East? Or is the use of a proxy server good? Or should we look for other local hosts? Any help very gratefully received. Iain
Technical SEO | | iain0 -
Risk of hosting website on internal application server
This isn't really related to SEO, but it came up with a client.... We have a client that is hosting their website internally. That's not a problem except that the server it is hosted on is the same server where they host many secure applications with sensitive customer information. We recommended to the marketing vp to move the website to a different server that doesn't host secure apps so we don't have be concerned about any conflicts. Their IT folks pushed back. So, I'm looking for some ammunition to support our recommendation. Any ideas? Thanks. Bernie Borges Find and Convert bernie@findandconvert.com
Technical SEO | | BernieBorges0 -
Similar Content vs Duplicate Content
We have articles written for how to setup pop3 and imap. The topics are technically different but the settings within those are very similar and thus the inital content was similar. SEOMoz reports these pages as duplicate content. It's not optimal for our users to have them merged into one page. What is the best way to handle similar content, while not getting tagged for duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | Izoox0 -
Www vs non www and understanding opensite
Hi Guys, New guy here with some questions regarding the difference between www and non www. I am helping with a site at the moment and gradually working my way through bits and learning all the time. I was watching one of the seomoz videos and it brought my attention back to www vs non www. I understand that google will treat these as two seperate sites but wanted to check what the stats are telling me. I was under the impression that www.mydummysite.com was getting most links etc as this is what I have always used. However when I used Opensite explorer it told me something different as follows: www.mydummysite.com 32/100 29/100 5 16 mydummysite.com 32/100 29/100 2 1,500 Am i correct in saying that i should be adding a redirect from www.mydummysite.com to mydummysite.com ???? I am thinking that this is telling me that I am potentially missing out on 1,500 links to my site but it could mean I am missing out on just 16. Eitherway I guess its something I should fix right? Do I just redirect that page or would all pages beneith it such as mydummysite.com/news also need redirect??? Can i use Canonical Rel links for this now? Thanks for taking the time to read and reply! 🙂
Technical SEO | | wedmonds0