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
-
Does it hurt SEO to build landing pages in HubSpot instead of directly in Word Press?
Our team's website is built in Word Press, but we use Hub Spot as our CRM. We are trying to determine if building landing pages in Hub Spot is going to hurt our SEO efforts and if it's better to build directly on Word Press.
On-Page Optimization | | MerlinLaw0 -
How can a page rank for keywords that it does not have on it?
I have a client that is ranking in the top 10 for several keywords on their homepage. Their site has no purposeful SEO in it, there is barely any text on the homepage at all and none of the text are the keywords it is ranking for.
On-Page Optimization | | woodchuckarts2 -
301 Redirect or landing page
Hi everyone. I'm currently doing some SEO for a client, at the moment he has some landing pages which are categorised, but the category is set as a 302 redirect. I have a dilemma whether to 301 redirect to the landing page or make a page for each category. The link structure is as follows - http://examplesite.co.uk/products/fire/company-1/product/ so currently this is set as a 302 redirect - http://examplesite.co.uk/products/fire/company-1/ Do I make this page a category page and link the page to the children with some on-page optimisation or 301 redirect it?
On-Page Optimization | | Unbranded_Lee0 -
Inventory Pages that are Sold, 404 vs 301?
I am working with a company that sells high-priced automobiles. Each Unit has its own URL We currently leave most sold inventory live on the site as it draws in many leads (the units are visually shown as sold, so it shouldn't be a UX issue in most cases). We are wanting to start pruning some old units (this is in WordPress - custom post type) and I'm not quite sure what the best solution for this site is with removed units. Some ideas: Remove the units pages that are no longer needed, resulting in any links 404'ing to a useful 404 page. Remove the units pages, and 301 them to the Homepage (I don't really want to do this, as it seems like really poor UX) Remove the units page, and 301 the user to a specific "This item has sold" page that is shared by all sold units, but may not be the sites full 404. another option I haven't thought of? I dont' want to do anything that would confuse or get search engines upset, and I'm not sure how bad 404's are, I see some info on how bad they are, some that say they aren't bad. I'm guessing it is as usual, some gray area in the middle.
On-Page Optimization | | Andy_Staple0 -
Temporary Redirect pages
Hi, Temporary Redirect pages example when a non member goes to http://www.Somesite.com/detail/Username-Mike As he clicks the user names the user is directed to the login page http://www.Somesite.com/user/login We have 50K user accounts and 50K pages of content and each page has an option to comment and to comment user should be a member Moz campaing i get these 1,000's of links in Temporary Redirect page What is the action i can take thanks
On-Page Optimization | | mtthompsons0 -
"Issue: Duplicate Page Content " in Crawl Diagnostics - but these pages are noindex
Saw an issue back in 2011 about this and I'm experiencing the same issue. http://moz.com/community/q/issue-duplicate-page-content-in-crawl-diagnostics-but-these-pages-are-noindex We have pages that are meta-tagged as no-everything for bots but are being reported as duplicate. Any suggestions on how to exclude them from the Moz bot?
On-Page Optimization | | Deb_VHB0 -
Locating Duplicate Pages
Hi, Our website consists of approximately 15,000 pages however according to our Google Webmaster Tools account Google has around 26,000 pages for us in their index. I have run through half a dozen sitemap generators and they all only discover the 15,000 pages that we know about. I have also thoroughly gone through the site to attempt to find any sections where we might be inadvertently generating duplicate pages without success. It has been over six months since we did any structural changes (at which point we did 301's to the new locations) and so I'd like to think that the majority of these old pages have been removed from the Google Index.  Additionally, the number of pages in the index doesn't appear to be going down by any discernable factor week on week. I'm certain it's nothing to worry about however for my own peace of mind I'd like to just confirm that the additional 11,000 pages are just old results that will eventually disappear from the index and that we're not generating any duplicate content. Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be a way to download a list of the 26,000 pages that Google has indexed so that I can compare it against our sitemap. Obviously I know about site:domain.com however this only returned the first 1,000 results which all checkout fine. I was wondering if anybody knew of any methods or tools that we could use to attempt to identify these 11,000 extra pages in the Google index so we can confirm that they're just old pages which haven’t fallen out of the index yet and that they’re not going to be causing us a problem? Thanks guys!
On-Page Optimization | | ChrisHolgate0 -
.us VS .com
In general from what I have experienced a location specific extension such as .co.uk geo-targeted to the same location gives the best results when ranking BUT when I look at results from the US, page after page shows results of .com, surely if my above statement is true then a .us domain extension should rank better then a .com.
On-Page Optimization | | activitysuper0