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
-
Using one domain for email and another domain for your website, but redirects...
Hello - We are rebranding and our new name is fairly lengthy. We own all main domain versions of our brand name - .com, .new and .org - There is a very high search volume for the new brand name as it is a merger of 2 popular existing brands so want to take advantage of that and use our full name within our website domain name. However, since the name is a little long as mentioned - 25 characters - we also own the 3 character acronym of the new brand so we are debating on using the acronym for our new email addresses. ie name@abc.com so it is user friendly. We would obviously redirect the acronym email domain to point to the longer website domain. Are there any negative SEO effects if we do that? Use the longer domain for the website and shorter acronym for our email? Thank you
Technical SEO | | KRBishopBh1 -
One robots.txt file for multiple sites?
I have 2 sites hosted with Blue Host and was told to put the robots.txt in the root folder and just use the one robots.txt for both sites. Is this right? It seems wrong. I want to block certain things on one site. Thanks for the help, Rena
Technical SEO | | renalynd270 -
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 -
Moving to https
Hi all and thanks for taking the time to read my question. We are going to migrate a very small website from http to https, its a roughly 9 page site with 5 of those being product pages. I figured I would have to set a canonical and permanent 301 redirects for each page. But our tech guys suggested just doing a binding to https so any traffic hitting our site with a http url would automatically get redirected to the https version. So if someone land on http://mydomain, it would automatically return https://mydomain Does this sound correct or would we need to do additional tasks even if we go down the binding route?thanks again for looking.
Technical SEO | | Renford_Nelson1 -
Blocking subdomains without blocking sites...
So let's say I am working for bloggingplatform.com, and people can create free sites through my tools and those sites show up as myblog.bloggingplatform.com. However that site can also be accessed from myblog.com. Is there a way, separate from editing the myblog.com site code or files, for me to tell google to stop indexing myblog.bloggingplatform.com while still letting them index myblog.com without inserting any code into the page load? This is a simplification of a problem I am running across. Basically, Google is associating subdomains to my domain that it shouldn't even index, and it is adversely affecting my main domain. Other than contacting the offending sub-domain holders (which we do), I am looking for a way to stop Google from indexing those domains at all (they are used for technical purposes, and not for users to find the sites). Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | SL_SEM1 -
Subdomains Issue
Hi , We have created sub domains of our site to target various Geo´s. For example, geo, uk.site.com, de.site,com and all these sub domains have the same content as main domain. Will it affect our SEO Rankings? How can we solve this if it affects our rankings?
Technical SEO | | mikerbrt240 -
Pros & Cons of deindexing a site prior to launch of a new site on the same domain.
If you were launching a new website to completely replace an older existing site on the same domain, would there be any value in temporarily deindexing the old site prior to launching the new site? Both have roughly 3000 pages, will launch on the same domain but have a completely new url structure and much better optimized for the web. Many high ranking pages will be redirected with 301 to the corresponding new page. I believe the hypothesis is this would eliminate a mix of old & new pages from sharing space in the serps and the crawlers are more likely to index more of the new site initially. I don't believe this is a great strategy, on the other hand I see some merit to the arguments for it.
Technical SEO | | medtouch0 -
Young site trying hard, but banging head against the wall -- Site Review
Hi All New to PRO but we're seriously committed to getting this working. And firstly thank you to anyone who offers any useful thoughts and insights. We've launched a new site, unfortunately late to the market for the season and are really struggling to get search engine recognition. Site: http://www.ignitehats.co.uk/ We're continuously adding new content, slowly gathering more links and working hard to promote socially. But even on our clearest search terms like "Ignite hats" we're down on page 4. Both GWT and the Seomoz tools highlight no big problems (a few titles that are too long) but otherwise nothing. Maybe wrongly we requested that the Google spam team review our site incase it was being penalised, but got a template response saying the site was not in their spam system (phew, there wasn't a reason it should be we believe). We're wondering if this is just that our site is just too young? It's been live for 6 weeks. But worry maybe this is not the case. We've had success with another site we run much sooner than this. Any help or pointers would be really appreciated. Similar stories and what others have done, at least to give us some confidence to carry on would be great. Thanks for reading.
Technical SEO | | JHill0
