Would moving a large part of our website onto a separate website be SEO suicide?
-
Hello,
Our website currently has what I would call educational and sales pages - which sells our services and also a techy section for the developer community.
The developer pages on the website have some of the highest authority pages that we have and equates for about 50% of the content.
It has been proposed to move the developer pages onto their own domain - away from the main website.
Now, would this crush a lot of the SEO benefit that we have on our main site?
Does anyone know of a workable solution that would help retain the SEO.
Would linking to our main site from the developer site help?
It would be great to hear what people think,
Thanks,
-
This is an important decision and one that should not be rushed. The most important question is the one which Irving asks, why exactly is this change being considered? More specifically, what is the problem you are trying to solve or the benefit you wish to gain by making this change?
The response to the above question will help us better respond to your need. Generally speaking, the reason to keep the site together is the PR from all your pages work together to raise the Domain Authority. By splitting your content into two sites you will have two weaker sites rather then one stronger site. A few other disadvantages:
-
you may have additional expenses for SSL, trust badges and other software which is domain licensed
-
you will have the work of maintaining two sites rather then one
-
you will have software configuration and work such as maintaining cookies or information / logins between sites
The primary reason for separating the content to another site is they cover unrelated topics. If you had one company with two unrelated product lines such as vitamins and computer hardware, you would likely want to serve the content on two separate websites.
-
-
Why do they want to do this, what is the reason.
"The developer pages on the website have some of the highest authority pages that we have and equates for about 50% of the content."
This alone is reason enough to not mess with it, because it's passing PR to the rest of the site. If you get rid of that section of the site you make the entire site weaker. Less PR and less content.
Where is the money made, on the main site I assume? How are the rankings for the main site? The developer site may be passing the juice needed to have the main site ranked well and you would be taking that away from the main site if you 301 all of that PR to a subdomain.
-
I would transfere it into a subdomain, i have seen no evidence that subdimains do not work as a subfolder as far as SEO goes. You can then host on 2 servers.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/I would also 301 subfolder to subdomain.domain.com.
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
-
My Website Page Speed is not increasing
HEY EXPERTS, My website page speed is not increasing. I used the wp rocket plugin but still, I am facing errors of Reduce unused CSS, Properly size images, and Avoid serving legacy JavaScript to modern browsers. you can see in the image Screenshot (7).png I used many plugins for speed optimization but still facing errors. I optimized the images manually by using photoshop but still, I am facing the issue of images size. After Google Core Web Vital Update my website keyword position is down due to slow speed. Please guide me on how I increase the page speed of my website https://karmanwalayfabrics.pk Thanks
Technical SEO | | frazashfaq110 -
Barba Plugin and SEO
Hello, community! My client wants to use the barba.js plugin for their new site. What are the implications for SEO?
Technical SEO | | SimpleSearch0 -
Big SEO Changes
Firstly, this is quite extensive so thank you to anyone who answers some or all of the below! So this is quite a lengthy ordeal, and I'm going to start by saying that I'm no SEO expert (yet). I've paid for SEO for years and only on the odd occasion has it made any real difference. It has come to the point now where I've spent so much money on SEO over the years with practically no benefit that I can't afford to do it anymore, so I am teaching myself. So, back in July my website was hacked for a total sum of three weeks. My SEO/Hosting company at the time didn't do anything about it, let the hack sit there and didn't even take the site offline. It just so happened that at the time I was changing over to a new site at the time anyway, so I launched the new site (completely different in structure to the old one), did all of the relevant 301 redirects, and my traffic hasn't recovered since. I have gone from around 100-150 daily visits to 0-10. The descriptions, keywords, alt image tags, h1 & 2, meta data, etc. is all much better (a lot of it was empty on the previous site) on the new site than it was on the previous site so I was assuming it would be better, but it isn't. Anyone got any suggestions as to why this might be? Here are some specific questions: Canonical Problem? My site is ecommerce and lists some products in several categories, that has resulted in a high duplicate content rate. Is it expected/accepted by google that this would be the case for an ecommerce website or do I need to sort out some serious canonical urls to fix the issue? The site structure of my website could also be a problem, but I'm not qualified enough to know for sure. If you view a product/sub-category, then remove the category section of that link, the product will still appear. I don't know if this structure is good or not? i.e. if you click both links below, the link will appear all the same. http://thespacecollective.com/space-clothing/nasa-and-space-t-shirts http://thespacecollective.com/nasa-and-space-t-shirts Is this a problem for SEO? Duplicate Product Tag Problem? I have many duplicate product tags appearing on many products, should these be blocked in the robots.txt? i.e. http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/space-flown/apollo-11-flown-cm-meteorite-acrylic http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/space-flown/apollo-11-flown Site Code Structure When choosing the template I would use for my website I did not stop to consider if the code was SEO friendly, this on my part was due to my ignorance on the subject. Is the site structure SEO-friendly or is it hindering my efforts? Website: http://thespacecollective.com Again, thank you to anyone who takes the time to read/care about the issues facing a newbie. My only option now is to learn SEO myself (which is well overdue), so any advice/answers are appreciated!
Technical SEO | | moon-boots0 -
SEO Issues
Hi, We have created a moving cost calculator tools and other moving company can added this tools their website. This is the code: [ <iframe src="http: www.enakliyat.com.tr="" fiyat-hesapla.aspx"="" height="554" width="400" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="border:none;"> ] when the other moving company added this code their websites, tool also works on the site and the tool make the referrals traffic our site.** Is it right using this method?**</iframe src="http:> http://www.enakliyat.com.tr/evden-eve-nakliyat-fiyatlari-hesaplama/ here is the tool
Technical SEO | | iskq0 -
SEO for User Authenticated Content
Hi Everyone - I have a potential client who is seeking SEO for a site that contains about 95% of content only accessible through user authentication . Does anyone have tips for getting this indexed without having to open it up to the public? I was considering adding "snippets" into the robots.txt or creating an additional page with snippets linking to the login page. I'd appreciate any thoughts! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | manutx0 -
How can i do SEO For Ecommerce site
I am doing SEO for my WP blog but now I am starting my recently launch an eCommerce site where I am selling electronics products. I want to know how can I do the SEO so at least I can top 10 position for my google India. Second how can i avoid duplicate content about copying manufacture contents. Please help
Technical SEO | | chandubaba0 -
Website is extreemly slow
A couple of days a go one of our websites became extreemly slow. I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this question but frankly i don't where else to ask it Our hosting provider mentioned it was a socket exploid but even after removing all the infected files we are still running into a strange wait time of 45 seconds (See attachements) This has mayor efects on the SEO as well the link is www[dot]schouw[dot]org Hopefully there is someone how can help me out 12.png
Technical SEO | | TiasNimbas0 -
Switching Hosting & SEO
Hello friends, We are facing the prospect of switching to a new hosting account or company. We are currently using a third-party reseller account but are outgrowing that account. We are considering VPS and dedicated servers. However, this will mean updates for IPs and nameservers. Does anyone have experience with SEO consequences of making switch? Best practices? Tips? Obstacles? Any and all comments/advice welcome. We're trying to balance the potential SEO ramifications of making the switch with the consequences of reduced site speed.
Technical SEO | | Gyi0