New URL or Folder Off Existing Site

[VERBInteractive]

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

www.themeurl.com

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^nd tier links on the micro-site will have a challenge indexing as they will essentially be on tier 3?

Any advice would be appreciated.

[VERBInteractive]

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.

[Charlessipe]

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.