Moving a site as a folder of existing one
-
We have the following case:
Site A with domain authority 65 and 2,750 linking root domains (139K total links) and
Site B with domain authority 68 and 1,336 linking root domains (38K total links)
There's a suggestion to move Site A as a folder of Site B so it becomes something like this: domainB.com/domainA using 301 redirects for the existing domain A. We'd like to better understand what such move will result in.
I imagine at first Site A will drop in rankings, but after that will it be better for it to be under Site B domain? Also, moving all the pages a step behind in the URL path may slightly affect their rankings.
What do you think? Would you move Site A or leave it as a separate domain? I understand there can't be an exact estimation what will happen, but I'll appreciate your thoughts.
-
I would redirect the brand site to the company site. I'd place it into a folder.
-
Thanks for your reply, Stephen.
Products on Site B get similar traffic volumes to Site A. The decision to split SiteAProduct and have it on a separate domain was made back in 2004 because of a partner relationship, which is no longer in place.
-
Hi
This sounds like you already have a model to use as Site B has product on it already.
What are the comparisons for similar products on Site B adn the Single Product Site A in terms of traffic.
I'm assuming that you have SiteB/ProductPages already so do you know why Site B/ProductPage is different from SiteA?
What was the strategic reason behind splitting off SiteAProduct?
I would make my decisions based on the answers to the questions above.
Hope that helps
Steve
-
Sorry for missing some details in my initial question.
Site B is the company site, while Site A is one of its product brands. There's no topic duplication and they don't compete for traffic. Site B gets 8-9 times the traffic of site A, as it contains other products as well. There's about 10% duplication in the linking root domains. Site A has over 55K pages, and site B has over 400K pages.
The team developing the site A product hopes that by moving the whole site to siteb/folder it will gain more authority, better ranking positions and more traffic overall.
-
Not enough information has been provided to make a decision.
How big are these sites?
If you place all of the content on the smaller site onto the larger site will there be topic duplication?
How much duplication is there in the linking root domains?
How much traffic do they get?
If these sites were on same topic, did not have duplicating content, had a huge diversity of different linking root domains and both ranked well in the SERPs, I would redirect the one with smaller traffic to the one with larger traffic and where content is topic duplicated I would rewrite/redirect to merge their strengths.
-
Pushing your SITEA content down one directory level to "SITE-B.com/SITE-A" will probably have an effect on ranking that content.
lower directory = less Importance
I tend to agree with kjay on combining the content.
Do the two sites compete for traffic?
-
Are these sites similar? Could you not combine the content and 301 each page as you combine the info into site B.
I would only considering combining the content and then 301'ing from site A to the combined page on site B if the site content is similar.
If the sites are of completely different content then leave them as separate sites.
HTH,
K
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
-
Site name in page title - leave it or remove it?
Hi all, Recently came across some authority blog (quicksprout to be precise) which stated that apart from main page, contact page, about us and some other generic pages, site name should be removed as it might produce duplicate content. example "How to blog | Example Site name" This mostly is the issue with tags and categories pages as it shows on Moz issues. Is that really a problem and site name should be taken off them? Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | Optimal_Strategies1 -
IP Canonicalization for HTTPS site?
I received an unsolicited SEO report for one of my sites. My site was faulted for not having IP canonicalization set up. I reviewed this carefully. My site runs on Apache, is https and is on a dedicated IP. The mod rewrite rules for Apache all deal with the http version of the site. When I type my site's IP into a browser, I get the the https version, but with a unsecure cert warning as the certificate does not include the IP. Should I implement the http IP canonicalization rule. Another rewrite rule would then redirect the request to the https version?
On-Page Optimization | | FatRodent20130 -
Classified ads site and thin content + titles
Hello, i have two questions. Issue 1 is that we are a classified ads site. I started thinking, analyzing why im not ranking even tho i have a lot more content than others and my backlink profile is also better. Googling the advertisements i see that 95% of it is duplicate content. People usually who advertise, add the same add to 10 maybe 30 sites. For google this is duplicate content. Any ideas what to do? I can manually edit ads, to write a bit of unique content, but that is not a long term startegy. Question 2: My titles are all the same - Unique Name - Keyword im trying to rank for. There is around 1000 of such pages. Should i mix the titles up or it is still better to have 1 keyword which will help me to rank?
On-Page Optimization | | advertisingcloud0 -
Optimising for multi sites selling same products
Hi Everyone I work for a company that sell aluminium joinery under 3 brands which are, ostensibly, competitors. With regards to optimising the websites, for keywords, should I be trying to optimise them for the same keywords, or should I use different keyword variations of each?
On-Page Optimization | | APLNZ110 -
Google Search - One page having problems
this issue is concerning my site - cruvoir.com we retail designer clothing online, and currently have 17 'designer' pages - one for each manufacturer brand name. We target these brand names for our campaign and track the progress with Moz and try to focus them in Google search. Of many of the designer names, we rank pretty well in Google search (usually under #15 when searching for the specific brand. All brands are doing well, except one brand : "Lost And Found" - a designer label we carry. This is the page for this brand name : https://cruvoir.com/5-lost-and-found we cannot figure it out. It happens to be our most important label we carry. when we search for this brand name or include it in any other search terms, we never are in the google search results. I expect it is a crawl issue, but we have covered all our ground in optimizing this brand page. It seems this page is also indexed with Google. But we cannot figure out why it does not rank us in search.
On-Page Optimization | | cruvoir0 -
E-commerce site product descriptions and duplicate content
Hi everyone. I'm developing an e-commerce site using Prestashop and concerned about the issue of duplicate content among product descriptions. My main concerns are: If there are 500 or more products and those product descriptions are obtained from a manufacturer or supplier's website hence running into external duplicate content issues. Internal duplicate content is also an issue, if there are multiple similar products and each product has the same description across several pages. What would be the best approach to eliminate the possibility of incurring a duplicate content penalty due to similar product descriptions? I've already considered the suggestion of noindex-ing the complete range of products to help protect from duplicate content penalties and having unique articles written in the site blog discussing products instead linking to certain products on the site. Another consideration I had was noindex-ing all product pages except pages for featured products in the store and rewriting descriptions for a set amount of those featured products regularly (this will still have the problem of internal duplicate content across pages if similar product descriptions are rewritten). The product range is intended to be very large so I'm really seeking an alternative solution from the insane task of rewriting many product descriptions. Any suggestions to make SEO work efficient are very much welcome and appreciated. Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | valuepets0 -
Need help ranking my site
Hi, Can anyone help me out? I am trying to get this site ranked for "Villa General Belgrano". It was on the first page of Google and then it disappeared. Did I over optimize the anchor text? http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.lawebdelvalle.com.ar
On-Page Optimization | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Sudden Site Rankings Drop
Good day guys, We have been following strict SEO strategies for the past 6 months, all sites have been improving incredibly well, all except one. The site in question is http://bit.ly/IH4pkM . The site is regarding automotive spray booth equipment. We were ranking on the first page for the keyword "spray booth" (which is the most important one), at place #4 for weeks on end. However since half-way last week, the site has been dropped to half-way the second page (#17). There are barely any crawler errors listed for our campaign on SEOMoz. There were several pages of which the meta description was missing, but that has been fixed earlier this week. When it comes to link building, I looked at what the top competitors were doing, and was looking for unique link building opportunities myself. We have received 0 webmaster tools warnings as well. I do not believe we are penalized due to the "penguin" update. After all, if you search for for the company's name in Google, it is still listed on there (# 2). Nor have we been part of dodgy link networks at all. So my question is, what do you guys believe made us drop the rankings? Is there some on-page issues I am overlooking? Any recommendations to restore out previous rankings? Kind Regards, Roderic
On-Page Optimization | | Michael-Goode0
