Pros and Cons of new subdomain and redirecting old subdomain?
-
Hi guys,
I am thinking about redirecting the ranking subdoman to a new subdomain which has my main keyword within it. I am trying to outrank an exact match competitor and don't seem to be able to do so.
For example: page.example.com would be my existing ranking URL which is very powerful, and I am thinking about redirecting this to a new URL being keywordpage.example.com
What are your thoughts on do this?
Thanks
B
-
Barry - If you are currently sitting at #2 for your keyword and refer to your existing sub-domain as 'very powerful', I would let this idea go. As Highland said, you stand to lose some rank in doing this, at least temporarily. In addition, the search engines are slowly but steadily losing favor of exact match domains.
Your potential upside doesn't outweigh the risks of this move, in my opinion.
-
Thanks Highland.
I am at number 2 in Google for the said keyword. Keyword competitor analysis has shown that I am beating my competitor on every single factor by a considerable amount. I'm just thinking that that change might result in the push it needs.
-
You stand to lose some rank in doing this, at least temporarily. Keywords in the domain help, but if you're not ranking well now I wouldn't count on that one change to carry you to #1. If I were you, I would focus your efforts on ranking the current site for that keyword.
What does your campaign for your site tell you about how well you're doing in SEO?
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 avoid duplicate content for a new landing page which is the same as an old one?
Hello mozers! I have a question about duplicate content for you... One on my clients pages have been dropping in search volume for a while now, and I've discovered it's because the search term isn't as popular as it used to be. So... we need to create a new landing page using a more popular search term. The page which is losing traffic is based on the search query "Can I put a solid roof on my conservatory" this only gets 0-10 searches per month according to the keyword explorer tool. However, if we changed this to "replacing conservatory roof with solid roof" this gets up to 500 searches per month. Muuuuch better! The issue is, I don't want to close down and re-direct the old page because it's got a featured snippet and sits in position 1. So I'd like to create another page instead... however, as the two are effectively the same content, I would then land myself in a duplicate content issue. If I were to put a rel="canonical" tag in the original "can I put a solid roof...." page but say the master page is now the new one, would that get around the issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz0 -
Best wordpress plugin for redirects, Old to new pages
What is the best wordpress plugin for redirects, Old to new pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael.Leonard1 -
Subdomained White-Label Sites
Wanted to pass along a specific use-case that I'm thinking through in the technical setup for a client. Site: http://www.abc.com is an ecommerce company that offers the ability to white-label a site so an affiliate can join and get access to the site, and ultimately get a cut of whatever is sold through that affiliate. So I join the site and get access to scott.xyz.com and can handle my business through that. From a technical standpoint, this is the proposed technical setup of the site. Canonical URLS will be set to www.xyz.com Pages on scott.xyz.com will be set to noindex, while the main www.xyz.com will be set to be indexed Webmaster Tools for scott.xyz.com will be set to have preferred domain of www.xyz.com scott.xyz.com will have separate robots.txt instructing to block crawl Questions Am I missing any steps in properly setting up the technical background of the subdomain sites? The use of subdomains isn't something that I am able to move away from. Will any links in to scott.xyz.com pass juice and authority to www.xyz.com, or does the noindex/nocrawl block that from happening? Is there anything else that I am missing? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemarieReed
Scott0 -
Subdomains for US Regions
The company I work for is expanding their business to new territories. I've got a lot of stabilization to do in the region/state where we're one of the most well known companies of our kind. Currently, we have 3 distinct product lines which are currently distinguished by 3 separate URLS. This is affecting the user flow of our site, so we'd like to clean it up before launching our products into the various regions. The business has decided to grow into 5 new states (one state consisting of one county only) — none of which will feature all 3 products. Our homebase state is the only one that will have all 3 products this year. My initial thought was to use subdomains to separate out the regions, that way we could use a canonical tag to stabilize the root domain (which would feature home state content, and support content for all regions), and remove us from potential duplicate content penalization. Our product content will be nearly identical across the regions for the first year. I second guessed myself by thinking that it was perhaps better to use a "[product].root/region" URL instead. And I'm currently stuck by wondering if it was not better to build out subdomains for products and regions...using one modifier or the other as a funnel/branding page into the other. For instance, user lands on "region.root.com" and sees exactly what products we offer in that region. Basically, a tailored landing page. Meanwhile the bulk of the product content would actually live under "product.root.com/region/page". My head is spinning. And while searching for similar questions I also bumped into reference of another tag meant to be used in some similar cases to mine. I feel like there's a lot of risks involved in this subdomain strategy, but I also can't help but see the benefits in the user flow.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | taylor.craig0 -
Canonicalization interact with 301 redirects?
This is a interesting one I think. I have recently taken down some product list pages from our website www.towelsrus.co.uk. These have canonicalisation in place to deal with pages where a query string is generated depending on the search criteria. When I put a 301 redirect in place the target page redirects fine, however webmaster tools then errors with 404 on all canonicalised pages. Is this correct behaviour and how do we get over this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
New to SEO. How do I set up a 301 Redirect? What Else should I do?
Hello, I am new to web design. I designed my own site using dreamweaver and did all my seo on my own, I read a few books. Long story short I rank on the bottom of page 1 just after 3 months and the keywords are highly competitive. Now, I am up against some heavy hitters from national brands versus my local real estate site. I don't have a 301 redirect, and am not sure what else I should be doing to get my site ranked higher. I have back links from various sites, ( non-paid ) so it's what others call white hat. When I grade my site on website grader I get a great score versus the sites that are higher than me. I'm guessing my sites age is an issue. I guess I'm looking for some guidance. Thank you all, Here is my site to view. http://www.bronxpad.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Subdomain or subdirectory
We're a big social networking site with over 1 million indexed pages and over 4 million visits a month. Our PR is 7. We're about to acquire and rebrand the content of a large reviews website, current PR 3. The new content will be treated as a 'site within a site' with different navigation and interface. With these factors in mind I think we need to create a new subdomain for the reviews site but I need to factor in the SEO implications, bearing in mind that new advertisers are going to be looking closely at our stats. Migrating the content to a new subdomain I understand will be easier than siting it in a new folder. Any advice appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CecilyP0 -
301 Redirects After Company Acquisition
We recently acquired a company, and now we are going to redirect all of the pages on their site to their respective pages on our site. Do we need to keep the original pages on their site active? For how long? Ideally, we would like to redirect everything and remove the old site entirely so we don't have to pay to keep hosting it. Is this possible? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt1