Microsites vs landing pages
-
Hi all!
I'm trying to decide the best way forward with regards to a large site I'm currently in the process of redesigning/rebuilding.
Basically, the site already has a lot of well ranking seo landing pages targetted to different niches. With this in mind which is the best way forward in your experience?
1. Expand upon the existing niche landing pages adding more content etc and more niches?
or
2. Keep the landing pages but set up microsites for each of the niches. (On different domain names or sub domains?)
I do not want to polute the existing site as it performs very well and ranks very well for the keywords we target. Are there any benifits to micro sites seo wise?
Personally I think it best to expand on the landing pages and keep everything onsite but any adivce you can give me would be greatfully received!
Thanks in advance!
-
Hi, in the end I didn't go with microsites. As part of the site build we optimised the urls (using a CMS) and everything else on page we could and 301'd the old URL's to the new versions. Everything ranks as well as it did or better since lanch (4 weeks ago).
-
Hi James,
I'm following up on some older posts that are marked unanswered. Did you use microsites or landing pages? Can you share with us how things turned out? Do you have any more questions?
Thanks!
-
Sounds like overkill for what we are trying to achieve. I guess Microsites are geared more to separate product campaigns etc when you want a clear separation from your main site.
-
By the sounds of it the existing site is doing well and may have built up some domain authority which wouldn't be present with new micro sites. This may help the new landing pages rank higher than the microsites/
If the campaigns for the microsites go well and you achieve a number of inbound links although you can 301 redirect them to the existing site after the microsites have served their purpose their is no guarantee that 100% of 'link juice' will be passed on.
I think that your instinct to keep everything onsite is the correct one in this instance but that rather than adding more content to the existing landing pages you use the experience you have gianed and the lessons you have learned to develop new landing pages for these niches.
Hope this helps!
-
I think microsites work well for one-off competitions etc that aren't going to be around forever. I'd rather spend the time adding to a current site that's going to grow in size.
DD
-
The microsites are a nice idea and could work well in the long run, but you'd be fragmenting your efforts, so your main domain would probably suffer due to diminished updates and attention.
I'd stick with the single domain and as long as the niches are related continue to build on that.
I work on a set of sites that were split from a whole and they are a lot more work than if they were just one site together.
Tom
-
I am always cautions about adding microsites for SEO benefits as these can come back and bite you hard when you least expect it.
Personally, I tend to steer clear of doing this and would opt to keep adding content to your existing site. It doesn't all have to be on the same page, but link out to a few niche articles you could write.
Keep it straight forward and you will have no problems
Regards,
Andy
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
-
On Page reports is empty
Hello, Yesterday I created my PRO account, I have several urls in top 50 instead of a have no report in On Page Reports, how low take the system for generating this? Thank you, Carlos
On-Page Optimization | | cahams0 -
On-Page Report Card: Whats up with the TITLE of the page?
Started to fix the SEO issues on a customers website. When I run a "On-Page Report Card" It says that the title of the webpage:
On-Page Optimization | | maklarlabbet
www.visbymaklarna.se/visbymaklarna.html Is "visbymäklarna - Ditt förstahandsval på gotland." But if I check in the source code of the webbrowser the title should be:
name="title" content="Vi är mäklarna på Gotland som sätter människan i första rummet" /> (Actually this is with special encoding for the swedish characters. The title in coded text is: "Vi är mäklarna på Gotland som sätter människan i första rummet") Anyway the title of the webpage source code and the title of what SEOmoz reports is different. Why is that?0 -
Landing Pages
Howdy Guys, We currently have around 19 landing pages that are near enough identical for each make of car. The content on each page isn't identical but you can tell its a template. Do you think we should change this and just target models instead of makes. Thanks, Scott
On-Page Optimization | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
Which redirect to use when redirecting to https page from http page
I have one form under https which is redirected from the regular http page. this site was not made by me and I am trying to understand if the way it was redirected using 302 redirect is a problem Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | ciznerguy0 -
No index parts of a page?
Little bit of an odd question this, but how would one go about getting Google to not index certain content on a page? I'm developing an online store for a client and for a few of the products they will be stocking they will be using the manufacturers specs and descriptions. These descriptions and specs, therefore, will not be unique as they will be also used by a number of other websites. The title tag, onpage h1 etc will be fine for the seo of the actual pages (with backlinks, of course) so the impact of google not counting the description should be slight. I'm sure this can be done but for the life of me I cannot remember how. Thanks Carl
On-Page Optimization | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Product Page Optimization
I work for an ecommerce site and we are currently in the process of redesigning our product page. Any useful, must-do tips for this? If it helps, our site has both hard goods and apparel that can be imprinted and customized to the buyers liking. Thanks for any help!
On-Page Optimization | | ClaytonKendall1 -
Some of my pages are ranking for terms which I want other pages to rank for. What can I do to effectively switch the ranking?
Some of the pages are ranking for terms I have optimised other pages for. The pages which are ranking are quite rightly falling, because they aren't optimised for the terms they're showing for. However, I have pages which are optomised for those terms. How do I switch the SERPS to the page I want?
On-Page Optimization | | GlobalLingo1 -
Avoiding "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" - Best Practices?
We have a website with a searchable database of recipes. You can search the database using an online form with dropdown options for: Course (starter, main, salad, etc)
On-Page Optimization | | smaavie
Cooking Method (fry, bake, boil, steam, etc)
Preparation Time (Under 30 min, 30min to 1 hour, Over 1 hour) Here are some examples of how URLs may look when searching for a recipe: find-a-recipe.php?course=starter
find-a-recipe.php?course=main&preperation-time=30min+to+1+hour
find-a-recipe.php?cooking-method=fry&preperation-time=over+1+hour There is also pagination of search results, so the URL could also have the variable "start", e.g. find-a-recipe.php?course=salad&start=30 There can be any combination of these variables, meaning there are hundreds of possible search results URL variations. This all works well on the site, however it gives multiple "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" errors when crawled by SEOmoz. I've seached online and found several possible solutions for this, such as: Setting canonical tag Adding these URL variables to Google Webmasters to tell Google to ignore them Change the Title tag in the head dynamically based on what URL variables are present However I am not sure which of these would be best. As far as I can tell the canonical tag should be used when you have the same page available at two seperate URLs, but this isn't the case here as the search results are always different. Adding these URL variables to Google webmasters won't fix the problem in other search engines, and will presumably continue to get these errors in our SEOmoz crawl reports. Changing the title tag each time can lead to very long title tags, and it doesn't address the problem of duplicate page content. I had hoped there would be a standard solution for problems like this, as I imagine others will have come across this before, but I cannot find the ideal solution. Any help would be much appreciated. Kind Regards5
