Separate Site or should we incorporate it into our main site
-
Hello,
We have a website to sell personal development trainings.
The owners want to start 2 blogs - one for each owner - that promotes their personal coaching practices.
What's the SEO advantages of embedding both blogs in the current site vs starting 2 brand new blogs with their names as the domain names?
-
There was a fad a few years about doing microsites, where everyone was trying to create as many 'feeder' style sites as possible. Lately, the trend has reversed, (Penguin / Panda) where the focus is more on creating a single great user experience and a brand associated with it.
In your case, 'personal development' and 'personal development training' could be considered as competitive, just based on the sheer number of ranking pages, and the number of advertisers for the 'training' keyword.
By putting the two blogs as subfolders (or even merging them into a single blog with 2 authors), you can expect to gain backlinks and build up social activity around your site at a much faster rate, compared to running them on separate blogs.
It potentially would be more fun for the blog authors as well, as there should be more readers and potential comments and discussion, and readers who follow one author stick around to join the discussion on the other blog authors posts.
So, I strongly vote for a single site / blog platform. Of course, you may have to contend with some personal egos, to convince two people to share the same blog, but for SEO and ranking, it will produce much faster results.
-
"The big opportunity would be to get all 3 sites to rank for primary keywords like personal development. Of course, this strategy will require 3 times the work :-)"
also requires you to not get caught by Google or all three sites may get penalized for site spamming.
-
The big opportunity would be to get all 3 sites to rank for primary keywords like personal development. Of course, this strategy will require 3 times the work
My guess is that the trainers are not prepared to do the work to get each individual site to rank, so it probably makes sense to join them all together. If, in a few months, you find out that you are producing tons of content, you can always peel off the sites with 301 redirects.
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
-
Site Migration Question - Do I Need to Preserve Links in Main Menu to Preserve Traffic or Can I Simply Link to on Each Page?
Hi There We are currently redesigning the following site https://tinyurl.com/y37ndjpn The local pages links in the main menu do provide organic search traffic. In order to preserve this traffic, would be wise to preserve these links in the main menu? Or could we have a secondary menu list (perhaps in the header or footer), featured on every page, which links to these pages? Many Thanks In Advance for Responses
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ruislip180 -
Should m-dot sites be indexed at all
I have a client with a site with a m-dot mobile version. They will move it to a responsive site sometime next year but in meanwhile I have a massive doubt. This m-dot site has some 30k indexed pages in Google. Each of this page is bidirectionally linked to the www. version (rel="alternate on the www, rel canonical on the m-dot) There is no noindex on the m-dot site, so I understand that Google might decide to index the m-dot pages regardless of the canonical to the www site. But my doubts stays: is it a bad thing that both the version are indexed? Is this having a negative impact on the crawling budget? Or risking some other bad consequence? and how is the mobile-first going to impact on this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | newbiebird0 -
Redirecting Pages During Site Migration
Hi everyone, We are changing a website's domain name. The site architecture will stay the same, but we are renaming some pages. How do we treat redirects? I read this on Search Engine Land: The ideal way to set up your redirects is with a regex expression in the .htaccess file of your old site. The regex expression should simply swap out your domain name, or swap out HTTP for HTTPS if you are doing an SSL migration. For any pages where this isn’t possible, you will need to set up an individual redirect. Make sure this doesn’t create any conflicts with your regex and that it doesn’t produce any redirect chains. Does the above mean we are able to set up a domain redirect on the regex for pages that we are not renaming and then have individual 1:1 redirects for renamed pages in the same .htaccess file? So have both? This will not conflict with the regex rule?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nhhernandez0 -
Does subdomain hurt SEO on main site
This client sells event management software and puts all their clients on different subdomains of their main domain. Looking in SEO tools like OSE, when I run a backlink analysis, it pulls up all the backlinks to the subdomains as well as those for the main domain. In webmaster tools when I look at queries, impressions and clicks, they get at least 30 times more traffic and impressions on keywords found in their subdomains and very few on their own. In other words, all these tools are providing a collective analysis of main domain and all subdomains. All the backlinks and keywords recorded for those subdomains are not at all relevent to the keywords they want to rank for. For example, their software supports Boy Scouts, so keywords they rank for according to WT include merit badge, scout camp, etc., but of course, that's on the subdomain. As a result, if you were to take a snapshot of their online presence as these tools do, you would think they were a boy scout website and not a software developer if you include the subdomain, along with its PR, backlinks, keywords, etc. So the question I have is, does Google connect all these subdomains with the main domain and then water down the main site with irrelevant keywords, content and backlinks? Or does Google see all those subdomains as completely separate and we don't need to worry or move their clients off their subdomain? I'm worried about Google assigning a "boy scout" relevancy to them. Am I wrong? What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | katandmouse0 -
Site redesign..have I done everything?
Hello, We have a site that was recently put through the redesign process-a couple of weeks ago. It was a tired site that was optimized well, but still struggled because it was so outdated. I went ahead and re-optimized, submitted a new sitemap, and did the fetch. Have I missed a step? Could someone offer insight into what they do when a site is redesigned and the steps taken to make sure that Google crawls and "appreciates" 🙂 the new site as soon as possible? Thanks in advance for any and all help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lfrazer0 -
Bad site migration - what to do!
Hi Mozzers - I'm just looking at a site which has been damaged by a very poor site migration. Basically, the old URLs were 301'd to a page on the new website (not a 404) telling everyone the page no longer existed. They did not 301 old pages to equivalent new pages. So I just checked Google WMT and saw 1,000 crawl errors - basically the old URLs. This migration was done back in February, since when traffic to the website has never recovered. Should I fix this now? Is it worth implementing the correct 301s now, after such a timelapse?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
It appears that Googlebot Mobile will look for mobile redirects from the desktop site, but still use the SEO from the desktop site.
Is the above statement correct? I've read that its better to have different SEO titles & descriptions for mobile sites as users search differently on mobile devices. I've also read it's good to link build, keep text content on mobile sites etc to get the mobile site to rank. If I choose to not have titles & descriptions on my mobile site will Google just rank our desktop version & then redirect a user on a mobile device to our mobile site or should I be adding in titles & descriptions into the mobile site? Thanks so much for any help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Need help or explanation on my site!
My site has suffered greatly since the recent Google update. I have done everything as suggested. I have had all bad links removed over 2 months ago. I have lowered keyword density (not easy since the keyword is in our company name!). I have rewritten various content and bolstered our existing content. What gives? What can I do? As an example the keyword, "maysville plumber" - I rank about 40th for this keyword. The first three pages are filled with websites with literally NO content or no added value. Maysville is a town of about 1k residents - there is no competition. Before the update I was #1 for years on this particular keyword. And this is the case with 35 other cities (mostly small cities, but a few larger ones). Please help me understand or suggest what I can possibly do at this point. We have hundreds of pages of unique content on each and every page. We have zero duplicate content (I have ran tests and crawlers). We have no fishy links. I have not gotten any messages from google on Webmasters. PLEASE HELP!! I asked a similar question a little while back and fixed all of the suggestions. My site is www.akinsplumbing.net.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chuckakins0