New URL or Folder Off Existing Site
-
I am working on a project that is promoting dining in a particular region of the southwest for a destination marketing company. The parent Web site is an authority in the region and ranks well for almost all terms related to the leisure experience in the region. A completely separate Web site was built to promote this culinary program as it involves a committee of different stakeholders, but it’s solely focused on the region.
My question is this. The site is on a different CMS, etc., but the overall experience on the site is similar to the parent DMO site in terms of creative. The client has a brand new domain that they purchased for this initiative, but we are also considering mapping the parent site URL to the new culinary site.
Parent: www.regionalsite.com
New Themed Site: www.regionalsite.com/theme/
Or
My fear is that if I take the approach of the new URL that it will take forever for the site to build any link clout at all, as the client doesn’t really get the fact that working a link strategy is so critical. However, I know that having links from the regional site over to the theme URL will have an impact.
Also, if I do take the approach of mapping the URL to a new folder off of the parent domain, do I risk that 2<sup>nd</sup> tier links on the micro-site will have a challenge indexing as they will essentially be on tier 3?
Any advice would be appreciated.
-
I sometimes find that a subdomain (e.g. theme.regionalsite.com) doesn't index as well well either. I haven't tried that approach for quite some time though.
-
I don't think pages on tier 3 of a URL folder structure have issues with indexing. As long as there is a good link structure to the pages they should definitely be indexed especially because the main domain has strong authority. I've had experience with publishing content on the third level of a URL and have had no problem indexing. It might be slightly harder to rank because you are essentially telling Google that the page is less important than pages on the second or first level of the URL structure.
I tend to favor building a microsite on a subfolder like regionalsite.com/theme if you want to see faster results. However if you have an exact match domain it is usually easier to rank for your top keywords. Also if the topic of the microsite isn't closely related to the main site's topic, it is probably better long term to use a separate site in my opinion. Having two unrelated topics on the same site may confuse Google. Another option is to use the subdomain: theme.regionalsite.com. Google will consider this a different site (example: http://blog.hubspot.com/) but it should pass some link juice from the main domain.
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
-
I want to transfer an old Blogger blog onto my new site
When we first started out our website didn't have a blog and we started one on Blogger. It has loads of great content on it but it was before the days when I understood SEO so it's 4 years old and has maybe 1000 views per blog article. Now I want to repurpose some of that great content and SEO optimise it and put it onto my new site. How do I go about this from an SEO perspective. I am aware of internal competition and will only be using the old blogs that are new topics to start off with so it doesn't negatively impact my rankings. Should I just delete the old blog and re-write it all on the new one or redirect the old blog articles to the new pages and rewrite them? The blogger articles have no links to them and it's just content that I'd like to use. The old blog has almost no SEO value at all but I want to use a best practice approach to not cause any damage to my new blog or have google thinking I'm stealing someone else's content.
Technical SEO | | Smileworks_Liverpool0 -
Canonical sitemap URL different to website URL architecture
Hi, This may or may not be be an issue, but would like some SEO advice from someone who has a deeper understanding. I'm currently working on a clients site that has a bespoke CMS built by another development agency. The website currently has a sitemap with one link - EG: www.example.com/category/page. This is obviously the page that is indexed in search engines. However the website structure uses www.example.com/page, this isn't indexed in search engines as the links are canonical. The client is also using the second URL structure in all it's off and online advertising, internal links and it's also been picked up by referral sites. I suspect this is not good practice... however I'd like to understand whether there are any negative SEO effectives from this structure? Does Google look at both pages with regard to visits, pageviews, bounce rate, etc. and combine the data OR just use the indexed version? www.example.com/category/page - 63.5% of total pageviews
Technical SEO | | MikeSutcliffe
www.example.com/page - 34.31% of total pageviews Thanks
Mike0 -
Usage of keywords in URL
Hi everyone, I'm trying to optimize our website and I'm not sure what's ideal for our URL structure. We have two products: one of them is focused on B2C & the other one on B2B.
Technical SEO | | Klouwers
Our homepage is focused on the B2C product. For our B2B product, I'm not sure what's ideal. The URL for our 'homepage' of the B2B product is ourdomain.com/software. We have different target groups for our B2B software, and therefore different pages on our website. Which URL would be best to use for the keyword personal trainer software?
1. ourdomain.com/software/personal-trainer-software
2. ourdomain.com/software/personal-trainer0 -
Migrating to new subdomain with new site and new content.
Our marketing department has decided that a new site with new content is needed to launch new products and support our existing ones. We cannot use the same subdomain(www = old subdomain and ww1 = new subdomain)as there is a technically clash between the windows server currently used, and the lamp stack required to run the new wordpress based CMS and site. We also have an aging piece of SAAS software on the www domain which is makes moving it to it's own subdomain far too risky. 301's have been floated as a way of managing the transition. I'm not too keen on that idea due to the double effect of new subdomain and content, and the SEO impact it might have. I've suggested uploading the new site to the new subdomain while leaving the old site in place. Then gradually migrating sections over before turning parts of the old site off and using a 301 at that point to finalise the move. The old site would inform user's there is a new version and it would then convert them to the new site(along with a cookie to auto redirect them in future.) while still leaving the old content in place for existing search traffic, bookmarks and visitors via static URLs. Before turning off sections on the old site we would create rel canonicals to redirect to the new pages based on a a mapped set of URLs(this in itself concerns me as the rel canonical is essentially linking to different content). Would be grateful for any advice on whether this strategy is flawed or whether another strategy might be more suitable?
Technical SEO | | Rezza0 -
Url folder structure
I work for a travel site and we have pages for properties in destinations and am trying to decide how best to organize the URLs basically we have our main domain, resort pages and we'll also have articles about each resort so the URL structure will actually get longer:
Technical SEO | | Vacatia_SEO
A. domain.com/main-keyword/state/city-region/resort-name
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent/orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village_ _ domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name-feature _
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent/orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village/kid-friend-pool_ B. Another way to structure would be to remove the location and keyword folders and combine. Note that some of the resort names are long and spaces are being replaced dynamically with dashes.
ex. domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent-in-orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village_ _ domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name-feature_
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent-in-orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village-kid-friend-pool_ Question: is that too many folders or should i combine or break up? What would you do with this? Trying to avoid too many dashes.0 -
Site Blacklisted
Good morning. Just done my WMT ritual morning check and one of my sites has been blacklisted for malware. It's a wordpress site - I've run various scans, e.g. http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/scanner/ and also installed wordfence and scanned with that and wordfence produced some offending files which I have now deleted. I've also installed website defender in the hope that it wont happen again. I'm pretty good with staying on top of updates and rarely let a few days pass without upgrading new version of wordpress or plugins etc. I've also checked my users to make sure no new admins or anything and also changes passwords. I've asked for a review from Google and just wondered how long these reviews take? Also, has anybody got any advice, is there anything else I should be doing? Thanks
Technical SEO | | littlesthobo0 -
Friendly URL
Can be Friendly URL installed on a custom made jobsite using mod rewrite / apache without any big interference to the system itself? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | tomaz770 -
Should I create mini-sites with keyword rich domain names pointing to my main site?
Hi, I'm new to seomoz (and seo in general) and loving it so far. My main domain name is more of a brandname than a search engine friendly list of keywords. I rank well for some keywords I optimized for, and less so for the more competitive keywords. I was wondering if making one page minisites hosted on keyword rich domain names could help in this respect? What I want to do is just have a single page with a few paragraphs of content and links to the main site. I am not looking for links to boost the main site, just for the minisites to do better for several keywords. Will this help? Is this ok, or against some Google policy? Can this hurt the main site rankings? Thank you! **Edit: **I noticed that sites ranking above me on the first page for some keywords have much less on-page elements than my page, have about the same domain trust and also very little inbound links. The only factor I can see is the exact match of keywords in the domain name.
Technical SEO | | Eladla1