Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
What are the pros and cons of moving one site onto a subdomain of another site?
-
Two sites. One has weaker sales. What would the benefits and problems for SEO of moving the weak site from its own domain to a subdomain of the stronger site?
-
Cons:
May lose some of the link juice from the 301 redirect from the old URL's (between 1 and 10% is the usual quoted figure)
Initial (usually short term) drop in rankings and potentially traffic of weaker site pages
www.weakersite.com is a "nicer" looking URL for offline marketing than www.strongersite.com/weakersite
Pro's:-
If on Subfolder rather than sub directory pages will benefit from domain authority and links to domain of stronger site.
Can focus future link building and on-page SEO efforts on one site rather than 2, potentially doubling the amount you can get done
If building from scratch and choice of 2 sites or 1 I would say go for one. As two already exist there is more of a call to be made.
-
Hey! That sure was a great seminar.
That advice makes sense. Thanks.
-
Aye.
Oh, and hey! I just noticed I know you from NOLA.
-
So it could get the full benefit of the stronger site's domain authority?
-
I would be more inclined to move it to a subdirectory on the stronger site.
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
-
Moving from a subdomain to subfolder
Hello, I am currently working on a site that is leveraging multiple subdomains. I wanted to see if it suggested to migrate them into subfolders. One of the subdomains is a .shop and the other is location specific. Thanks, T
Technical SEO | | Tucker_100 -
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 -
Removed Subdomain Sites Still in Google Index
Hey guys, I've got kind of a strange situation going on and I can't seem to find it addressed anywhere. I have a site that at one point had several development sites set up at subdomains. Those sites have since launched on their own domains, but the subdomain sites are still showing up in the Google index. However, if you look at the cached version of pages on these non-existent subdomains, it lists the NEW url, not the dev one in the little blurb that says "This is Google's cached version of www.correcturl.com." Clearly Google recognizes that the content resides at the new location, so how come the old pages are still in the index? Attempting to visit one of them gives a "Server Not Found" error, so they are definitely gone. This is happening to a couple of sites, one that was launched over a year ago so it doesn't appear to be a "wait and see" solution. Any suggestions would be a huge help. Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | SarahLK0 -
How to create site map for large site (ecommerce type) that has 1000's if not 100,000 of pages.
I know this is kind of a newbie question but I am having an amazing amount of trouble creating a sitemap for our site Bestride.com. We just did a complete redesign (look and feel, functionality, the works) and now I am trying to create a site map. Most of the generators I have used "break" after reaching some number of pages. I am at a loss as to how to create the sitemap. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
Technical SEO | | BestRide0 -
"Fourth-level" subdomains. Any negative impact compared with regular "third-level" subdomains?
Hey moz New client has a site that uses: subdomains ("third-level" stuff like location.business.com) and; "fourth-level" subdomains (location.parent.business.com) Are these fourth-level addresses at risk of being treated differently than the other subdomains? Screaming Frog, for example, doesn't return these fourth-level addresses when doing a crawl for business.com except in the External tab. But maybe I'm just configuring the crawls incorrectly. These addresses rank, but I'm worried that we're losing some link juice along the way. Any thoughts would be appreciated!
Technical SEO | | jamesm5i0 -
301 redirects & merging two sites into one
We have a client that has two sites that rank well for different searches in their market. The main pages ranking are things like advice articles and news pieces. For various reasons, they just want one site. I believe they need to duplicate the content from the outgoing site and place it on the main site, with a 301 redirect from each old page to each new one. What happens when they eventually want to redirect the entire domain? Would these smaller, internal redirects become obsolete, therefore removing any link value they once had? I am not sure how this works or if there is a best practice way to do this. Thanks Gareth
Technical SEO | | Gmorgan0 -
Subdomain and Domain Rankings
I have read here that domain names with keywords might add a boost to your search rank For instance using a completely inane example monkey-fights.com might get a boost compared to mfl.com (monkey fighting league) Â when searching for "monkey fights" There seems to be a hot debate as to how much bonus the first domain might get over the second, but leaving that aside for the moment. Question 1. Would monkey-fights.mfl.com get the same kind of bonus as a root domain bonus? Question 2. If the answer to 1 above was yes would a 301 redirect from the suddomain URL to root domain URL retain that bonus I was just thinking on how hard it is to get root domains these days that are not either being squatted on etc. and if this might be a way to get the same bonus, or maybe subdomains are less bonus prone and so it would be a waste of time Thanks
Technical SEO | | bThere0 -
Index forum sites
Hi Moz Team, somehow the last question i raised a few days ago not only wasnt answered up until now, it was also completely deleted and the credit was not "refunded" - obviously there was some data loss involved with your restructuring. Can you check whether you still find the last question and answer it quickly? I need the answer 🙂 Here is one more question: I bought a website that has a huge forum, loads of pages with user generated content. Overall around 500.000 Threads with 9 Million comments. The complete forum is noindex/nofollow when i bought the site, now i am thinking about what is the best way to unleash the potential. The current system is vBulletin 3.6.10. a) Shall i first do an update of vbulletin to version 4 and use the vSEO tool to make the URLs clean, more user and search engine friendly before i switch to index/follow? b) would you recommend to have the forum in the folder structure or on a subdomain? As far as i know subdomain does take lesser strenght from the TLD, however, it is safer because the subdomain is seen as a separate entity from the regular TLD. Having it in he folder makes it easiert to pass strenght from the TLD to the forum, however, it puts my TLD at risk c) Would you release all forum sites at once or section by section? I think section by section looks rather unnatural not only to search engines but also to users, however, i am afraid of blasting more than a millionpages into the index at once. d) Would you index the first page of a threat or all pages of a threat? I fear duplicate content as the different pages of the threat contain different body content but the same Title and possibly the same h1. Looking forward to hear from you soon! Best Fabian
Technical SEO | | fabiank0