Should I move my brand under our corporate domain to boost Domain Authority?

[andrew1212]

Dear Community,

I am seeking your expert advice on this situation:

We have these assets as a starting point:

• a long-existing and well-linked Corporate Website (CW) with good metrics,
• a Brand Website (BW) with low/medium metrics,
• and some Brand Competitor (BC) websites with very similar metrics to BW.

We will launch a new version of BW very soon with a well SEOd structure and copy (the old one was not SEOd at all) which I hope itself will bring SERP advantages.

My dilemma emerged after checking the domain level values of our Corporate Website:

• CW / BW / BCs
• Domain Authority: 48 / 28 / 24-27
• Domain mozRank: 4.79 / 3.15 / 2.6-3.25
• Domain mozTrust:  4.73 / 2.79 / 2.47-3.06

My understanding is that based on seoMoz consensus domain level values give about 1/4th of the total pie. Based on these what do you think I should to win over competitors rankings?

1. Should I keep running the service under BW (in an neighborhood  with nearly identically valued competitors)
2. Should I redirect BW to a sub-folder of the Corporate Website? (e.g.www.corporate.com/brand) with 301 redirects and enjoy the advantages of the much better domain values
3. Alternatively, I could also build valuable and keyword-optimized content under our CW linking back to our BW.

My understanding is that Option 1 has the least advantages among the three. Option 2 and 3 compete with the following advantages:

• Option 2: We could quickly rank higher as domain values elevate us from the mediocre BW and BC values (offsetting a little loss on 301 redirects)
• Option 3 would allow us to occuppy more positions for the important keywords on SERPs thus attract more "deep-browsing" visitors (and possibly BW could also get some advantages by receiving links from CW)

Which direction would you proceed from here?

Cheers,

Andrew

[KaneJamison]

Whoa boy, that's a long one. There are a few ways to handle this, here's one way that I'd approach it, based off of the info you've given us:

First, if your BW Domain Authority is already at 28, and you're competitors are weighing in at 24 to 27, don't reinvent the wheel. Getting up to 30s or 40s is not that hard with some proactive link building. I would keep the BW on its own site and instead of spending time transferring it to your CW, use that time for link building.

That said, in order to take advantage of your CW's authority, I would still go ahead and add some Brand content to that site, using different copy than what's on the BW. This will naturally be a longer term project, since you're currently focusing on getting the main BW relaunched. But, having two versions that target different keywords is an excellent way to leverage the authority of the CW, and frankly you'll have to recognize that Brand on the CW in some way, right? Might as well make it a ranking subsection of the site, that links to the BW if you like.

Will some of the link value be split between the properties using this method? Yes. BUT, you're already at the front of the pack in terms of competitors from what I can tell, so if you spend more time link building to both BW and CW, you'll reap the benefits. Focus on finishing BW and link building there first. Don't spend you're time with all of the hassles that come with transferring BW to a subfolder of CW.