Hosted content vs Dedicated website (for large piece of content)
-
There is one question that keep bugging us and for which we are looking for a logical answer – to put it short, in which context(s) is it preferable to publish original content on a company website vs on a dedicated external platform with its own URL?
To give a little more details: we an education company that provides languages course abroad and that functions like a specialised travel agency. Each trip is very specific – it depends on people's language level, objectives, budget, etc. – so we provide tailor-made advice for each of our students. Our site is not an e-commerce site, and a typical call-to-action is a request for a 1-to-1 interview with one of our agents, or a quote request for a language trip project. The top conversion for us is an enrolment for a language course abroad.
We have a corporate websites structure where we have 1 website per locale where we operate, which means 14 websites in 7 different languages. We produce smaller pieces of content for these websites in a dedicated section – the rest of the website being mostly a presentation of our products, services and destinations – but here we intend to create a very large Quiz which will be based on multiple audio files. The content will be translated into multiple languages (likely 10 different languages) and will require some rather heavy development. We intend to add sections for scoreboards, stats, a log-in section (probably Facebook), etc.
This sounds to us like something we should host on a specific URL, but then how can we make the most of the SEO benefits that we will (hopefully) get with such content? We plan to have an about section where we explain a little bit who we are, where we will probably link back to our corporate websites, but of course we want our project to live for itself and to be as far from commercial as possible – while still making the most of the SEO benefits.
How can we do this in the most subtle / logical way? Would it be better to host our Quiz on our corporate domains?
Thanks in advance for your advice.
Maëlle
-
Hello John,
Thanks again for your help – it is much clearer now. We don't want to trick our users, but we do want them to use the piece of content we have created without being overwhelmed by the brand. What we're probably going to so is host the content on our corporate URL but create a whole new design – much less branded – for that content.
-
On your comment on generic advice as I am not 100% familiar with your brand strategy accordingly I do not like to give "hard advice". There are too many variables.
That said I will do the best with what provided.
In short there are zero SEO tactical advantages to separating content from brand. Perhaps if the content site is a trick to get someone thinking that the branded site is independent and then refer to your branded domain - about the only time I would consider or recommend it. Is that the case? Hence there are almost zero advantages to setting up a separate site. Site maintenance is hard work, and the doubling of SEO efforts foolhardy. Why have two houses if you only live in one? Unless of course you are rich and it is of no consequence.
If I was advising you I would suggest it is not even worth considering. The domain authority for https://www.esl.co.uk is 25 - which is weak for a specialized site. In short you are not rich enough to afford the second house, the main domain is a straw house at present. If the domain authority was 60+ I might be with you. First thing I worry about is susceptibility to competition.
Given such a low domain authority for the prime domain I would be working hard in improving my link profile and domain authority. Every marketing dollar matters. Focus on building https://www.esl.co.uk into a dominant power - at present however a strong competitor coming into your space would have a powerful impact on search - as it would be easy to outrank. That said great looking site, well optimized from my quick look - needs some strong linking work.
Hopefully not to blunt and a little clearer but happy to answer.
-
Hi John,
Thank you for your answer; unfortunately I am not completely satisfied with it if I may say, as I am not looking for generic SEO resources / responses here, but rather a tactical answer on the advantages and disadvantages we could find in detaching our content from our brand.
The website that should be considered for this is www.esl.co.uk – sorry I was not going to write URLs here, so please do remove it if it has to be removed – and the 13 other versions, all hosted on local URLs. The site you mentioned above is our group website.
-
Yes.
Ok on a purely technical aspect in relation to SEO it is better to include the new content in a corporate site. I assume the content is to be marketed heavily and hence on a worst case base you build up some backlinks and and a bit of domain authority for your corporate website. If the content succeeds well then the ripple effect to the other sites will be profound.
On a brand new domain to start from scratch - new domain, no history and no backlinks is a far harder task, but certainly not un-achievable. Personally I believe you should try and limit new domains as practically it increases your required SEO output in this case by 1/15th. So just to keep level you need to work an extra 3 hours each week with a new domain...
I just had a quick look at https://www.esl-education.org which i assume is the parent site. What you could do - which will help your seo generally is review your title tags and H1. This moz article is highly relevant.
https://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag
You will get some quick uplift with the right keywords. Hope that assists.
-
Hi John,
Thank you for your response. In fact, the 14 domains have similar content (our language courses portfolio) but this new domain would be just the quiz – so the content would be completely different. If we were to get a new domain, it would be one without our brand name (unlike the 14 other ones) but rather with our project's name. It would be a multi-language website, from which I would point to our various corporate websites from a section in each language.
Does this makes sense?
-
To be clear you are creating one large piece of content that cuts across all 14 domains (as distinct from previous content) - hence you are questioning whether you should consider adding a 15th domain. If this is incorrect let me know.
If correct then to optimize SEO benefits it should be hosted on a current or your primary domain - not create a new domain. Adopting that course there are a myriad of discussions to be had on how to effect same on a current or primary domain. Ensure content not duplicated etc. optimize benefits.
So the short answer answer would be host on a current domain. Though I add I am unfamiliar with the sites or consequences so if the primary site where the "content" is to be hosted is german this may upset the english visitors...many variables you need to consider - the variables maybe overpowering and require the 15th domain but I would try an steer clear of the 15th if possible, certainly if a once off.
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
-
Domain Transition: Leaving low quality content behind
We're in the initial stages of planning a domain transition / rebrand. We're considering 301'ing our low and high(er) quality content split to two different domains. One for the low quality, one for our high. Best practices normally tell you to not split your content between between multiple domains. However, what if the majority of pages on your site are thin/outdated, and attract low volume/long tail? Does it make sense to bring that low quality/volume content over the new domain, when you know you'll never have the resources (nor would it make sense to) mass improve the quality of these pages? I'm concerned the quality of these pages are affecting our overall domain authority. Some background on our site/business: Current site has 15,000+ pages. 98% of our site is a product directory of professional/enterprise business management software. While a small handful of our product pages have quality original long form content (maybe 50-100), most of the product pages are a combination of: thin, outdated, overly sales-y content provided directly from product developers, and/or catch only very low-volume/long tail organic traffic. 95% of our pages attract fewer than 20 visits/mo, 90% of our pages attract fewer than 10 visits/mo. We have a small business of about 10 employees. Most of which don't maintain our site. It's unrealistic for us to genuinely improve the quality of that many pages. Nor does it make sense to improve most of these pages, as they'll attract only very low volume keywords. Individually these low quality pages don't bring in many customers, but on aggregate they do. 70% of our organic conversions come from pages with less than 20 visits/mo. A few questions: Is this content negatively affecting our domain authority in any way? While I don't believe we've been hit with a penalty, Google knows that on average our pages aren't very helpful to many users, and I'm concerned that affects our ability to rank with pages that matter. None of the content was mass produced in any form of scraping efforts or anything nefarious like that. Would there be any negative/positive affect to offloading these low quality/volume pages to a different domain during the rebrand?
Branding | | dsbud0 -
My question is in regards to possible conflict in creating an additional website under a new domain for our company.
Our companies, Vulcan Information Packaging and ATC both live under the domain “www.binders.com”. This is a great thing as far as us dominating in the binder industry. However, in the next 2-3 years and forward, we want to build our presence as a company who offers packaging products such as boxes, marketing kits, and other forms of packaging. Obviously, the “binders.com” brand/domain does not contribute much to this effort and can be confusing to customers visiting the site. Essentially, we want to build an additional branding for our company in the packaging industry. Keeping this in mind, we own the domain “www.vulcaninformationpackaging.com” and we are considering building a new website using this domain which contains the word “packaging”. This new site would only promote and contain packaging related products. This new website will advertise and direct traffic to our company Vulcan Information Packaging, which is the same company “binders.com” directs traffic to. So my question is to determine whether doing this might be a practice that Google and other search engines might frown upon. I tend to think it will be fine because we will be promoting and driving traffic for non-binder products where as, binders.com is heavily in binder related products. thank you, Dominic Zaidan
Branding | | dzaidan0 -
Two companies merging into a new website. How to merge two existing websites into a brand new website and preserve search rankings.
Brand A and Brand B are merging to form Brand C. Brand A has a great search presence (prominent rankings, answer boxes, and impressive organic traffic). Brand B has a good reputation in real life but their web presence was extremely weak (we've been helping with that over the past few months and it is improving). What are the steps we need to take? The previous domains from Brand A and Brand B are going away and we need to promote the newly minted Brand C website. This Q/A summarizes what we want to do but with one exception: They only discuss merging Brand A into BRand B and there is no Brand C.
Branding | | CommandPartners0 -
If other people copy your content, is really GOOD or BAD for SEO ?
Hi MOZ friends. Last week, when i was following up the backlinks linking to my domain, i detect that a new website from an unknown administrator copies the content of an entire section of my website. The administrator of that webpage did not remove the internal links on the post, so i could find.
Branding | | NachoRetta
My website has a better domain and page authority and we focus every day on create new content, but when we found people that only copy content from another, i feel disappointed. But then I got to thinking that could be good that people copy our content, although they did not quote us. If they do not remove the links either by mistake or on purpose, we receive new backlinks. ¿What do you think about this? ¿Is really good that a website copy our content? If they remove all backlinks, Is risky that Google detects that the content owner is another? ¿What do you do in this cases?1 -
Social Media Content - Duplicate Content?
Hi All, What's your opinion on sharing the same content across your social media outlets. We are targeting only slightly different markets across each social media outlet. I find it hard to develop content for each outlet 3-5 times a week. There really is so much to share. At the same time, I wouldn't want to get canned for any duplicate content or anything like that. Along those lines, can anyone provide some advice on which social media outlets are "followed" vs. "not-followed," both in terms of links and overall indexing? Thanks!
Branding | | CSawatzky0 -
Duplicate Content Question
I have a question about duplicate content. We have our mission statement on our home page, a few paragraphs. When I searched Copyscape the only pages that came back were sites like Google Plus, Manta, Linkedin, AngieLists ect. All of them have the same exact copy. Would this be something that is hurting us for duplicate content??
Branding | | chuck-layton
It is our mission statement so we kind of want to be the same across those sites. Any input would be great. Thanks, Scott0 -
Using mlm and 'scammy' websites to identify brand/reputation management opportunities
I think this almost warrants a youmoz post, but I was wondering if anyone has used MLM or 'shady' industry companies to see where they place their reputation/brand links to dominate the first 2-3 pages of google for things like 'company name + scam' 'company name + reviews'. On a side note what is your opinion of a company that goes to great lengths to create a very strong push to control those keywords? Would you recommend your clients dominate the first 2-3 pages with 'honest review about company x' and 'the truth about company x' fakeditorials? Do you guys think people see right through them. Take any MLM..for instance legal shield scam (not my company, but an MLM that I am very wary of) as professionals what do you think of their reputation management build out......what do you think consumers would see when they read this? is there such a thing as going to far to refute false claims and building sponsored reviews? I'm personally against doing sponsored reviews and spamming with them, but maybe I am naive.
Branding | | ilyaelbert1 -
Copycat websites
Hello, Do you know if there is anything you can do against a copycat website? By copycat I mean a website which uses our brand / domain name to steal our brand traffic. The reason I ask is a new site recently launched with which is optimised to take some of our brand traffic: Site tile - www.my<ourbrandname>.co.uk</ourbrandname> Description - For when I need <ourbrandname></ourbrandname> They gave no physical address or email addresses to funnel customers through an enquiry form which got me suspesious so when I checked the IP address in the MOZ Toolbar and did a WhoIs check on the IP address it brought up one of our main competitors websites. Anyone got an experiences of this and know what can be done?
Branding | | RikkiD220