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
-
Our thought process is that binders.com limits us to binders and as we all know, looseleaf binders are slowly going away. What comes to your mind when you both think about binders.com? I assume ring/looseleaf binders. So our long term goal behind considering building a new website using vulcaninformationpackaing.com is to strengthen our position as a packaging company, not a binder company.
So anyway, my question wasn't so much about if it's a good idea to build the new website but if Google and other search engines will have a problem with us having 2 websites representing the same company, which is Vulcan Information Packaging. binders.com will continue to promote binders and the new site vulcaninformationpackaging will promote packaging. But they will both represent Vulcan Information Packaging.
thoughts???
-
That's a really good point, Julie.
My suggestion above about a new domain such as VulcanProducts.com was assuming that binders.com would be redirected to pass its ranking value - I just didn't say anything about the redirect. Even with that, some ranking value will pass, but possibly/probably not all.
-
If you've owned Binders.com for a long time and it ranks really well in the SERPS, you might think that creating and ranking a new domain won't be difficult. If your company execs think this, they are potentially in for a big disappointment.
If you start a brand new website from scratch, you could wait a long time before it ranks well enough to bring you any sales. Ranking a subdomain on your current site would certainly be quicker.
-
do you see a problem in regards to Google and other search engines if we do decide to create a website under vulcaninformationpackaging.com that directs traffic to Vulcan Information Packaging, which is the same company represented under binders.com?
I think that Google will rank your websites based upon their quality for each individual querry. I think that customers will find the names and domains confusing. Most of my sites are on exact match keyword domains and those domans can have a limited fit for a growing collection of products and services. A domain that has no product association might be a better fit for a diverse company. VulcanProducts or VulcanServices or something similar might retain a portion of your identity and allow you to build a website for a more diverse company.
You have mentioned "advertising" and "directing traffic" from one domain to another. Would it be more efficient to place all of your efforts into one domain, make everything extremely clear, and focus all of your energy into a single attack. Catching visitors on domain A and transferring them to domain B is like trying to kill rabbits with a ricochet. Just shoot 'em.
-
Thanks much for your response and thoughts. The challenge we face is with our domain which is so focused and limiting. Or so it seems to me. Our domain is binders.com, we do currently market other products such as boxes and packaging but because of the binders.com domain, we feel it might be limiting as far as incoming traffic. This is the main reason we are considering building a new website under www.vulcaninformationpackaging.com, geared more toward packaging only and not binders. I would appreciate any additional input from you. Also, from your experience, do you see a problem in regards to Google and other search engines if we do decide to create a website under vulcaninformationpackaging.com that directs traffic to Vulcan Information Packaging, which is the same company represented under binders.com?
thanks again.
-
Generic advice on this matter isn't good advice. You have to consider a lot of things and then put them together.
One of the most important things that I would consider is how many of your current customers would be customers of these new services. The higher that number the more strongly I would consider keeping everything on one domain and changing the business name to something that fits all types of products offered by the company.
From an SEO perspective, uniting your brands usually creates a more formidable web presence that is more difficult to beat in the SERPs than building a new site for every new product.
So, if I thought that I could create a website that funnels visitors to what they need easily and efficiently then I might do everything on one website. A lot of people don't want to mix business lines or don't want to think hard or are not up to the design challenge. They take the easy route and build a separate site. I would work hard to avoid that if the products and services are complimentary.
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
-
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 -
Switch to naked domain that has higher page authority
Brilliant Moz community! I just started here and find it so helpful and am confident that I can get an answer to this. Our domain is currently https://www.example.com. I have been wanting to move to https://example.com just for a cleaner URL. To my surprise, https://example.com has the same DA but a significantly higher page authority than our current https://www.example.com. Of course my immediate reaction is to 301 to the https://example.com but I wanted to get some advice and anything we should consider before doing this. My other question would be - how is this possible? I don't remember that we ever used that domain but we also had some rather bad developers a couple of years back. Thank you so much in advance!
Branding | | kris-fannin0 -
In the Google search results, the company name (with the drop down arrow) next to the result URL is incorrect. The company being displayed here is a company we acquired many years back. How do I adjust/fix this?
When I search any term for my organization, we are getting good results BUT the company name, next to the results URL is of an orgnization we acquired many years back and not the name of our company. The URL is correct page JUST the company name next to this URL is incorrect on the Google search results page. How do I go about changing so the company name next to the URL ?
Branding | | DigitalNTT0 -
1 Website, 2 Business Names, 2 Locations
I took on a dentist office as an SEO client. They have 1 website, 2 business names and 2 locations. Each location has it's own business name. They are both within the same city as well. I'm not exactly sure where to start with them since they have 2 different business names. If it were 1 name with multiple locations I would just create a Contact Us page for each one, but is that the best thing to do when the location names are different? Should I create a different website for each location or is that smart because then they are competing against each other? Any help from the community on the direction I should take would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Branding | | SilhouetteBS0 -
Footer anchors question
A few months ago, we changed the anchors in all of our websites footers to rel="nofollow". We did this so we could drop the possibility of getting hit by the penguin update. So first, we had anchors in the template of every website that read something along the lines of "web design by bluetone media". This was on every page, so we quickly changed every link in our footers to nofollows so it would show Google that we were using that space for mainly branding purposes, instead of stealing juice from clients. However, after monitoring our link analysis, we have severely dropped in domain authority, domain moztrust, domain mozrank and more. I believe this is due to the lack of followed links, so would it be best to go back and remove all of the links from the templates of our websites and just leave the dofollow links on the homepages of our websites, or just wait it out and see what happens. This crazy decline in domain authority has only recently happened, should I expect a bounce back soon?
Branding | | BTMSEO0 -
Which Domain Name to Choose
A non-profit I run owns two domains - ChristianSimplicity.com and SimpleLivingWithGod.com. I have just started producing content under ChristianSimplicity. These are long-term projects and we have resources to commit to them. They do not need an economic return and that is not going to be sought. Ultimately I want the sites to rank high on the key words like - Simple Living Living a Simple Life Living Well The Good Life Christian Lifestyle Christian Simple Living I have a two part question. . . I'll ask the first part now. The second may be irrelevant depending on the first answer. **Which domain name of the two is best to start out the site? ** We already have some content on the first site, but are early enough in the process that it isn't a big deal for us to switch and I don't think we will lose too much with respect to rankings. Will the second domain name partial match on key word phrase help significantly more in ranking for the harder term Simple Living? I already rank 14 for Christian Simple Living - and I'm willing for that to drop to have the longer term goal of ranking higher on Simple Living. Thanks.
Branding | | WithGodInc0 -
New Social Media Site + META Tags for User Profiles
I'm currently in the process of building a social media site and was deciding whether or not to add META descriptions/keywords for individual user profiles. After reviewing Facebook, I noticed that in the META Description field, user profile pages just inherited the values for Facebook (there were no META keywords); and, when I reviewed LinkedIn, there was no META description/keywords at all. After this investigation, I figured it might be a question best addressed to the SEO community. With that, what do you guys think? If you were building a social media site, would you have META description + META keywords for each user's profile? If so, what would be the best way to optimize the individual profiles so they rank highly within the search engines?
Branding | | NiallSmith0 -
Google Displays Domain / URL Above Description?
I am seeing a new SERP format from Google. (new for me at least) In the past the title tag would display as the first line of a listing, followed by description and domain / URL. Today I see the domain / URL as the second line. This is placing an emphasis on "Who". If you have a big brand or a great URL this might be helpful to your CTR. Are you seeing this? What do you think of it?
Branding | | EGOL0