Sub-Domain Choice Dilemma
-
We have successfully rolled out 5 sub-domains using very industry specific KWs as the sub, e.g. familylawyers. We're rolling our an employment focused sub.and ideally would use employmentlawyers.XXX.com.
However I'm tempted to use a long established (5+ years) sub-domain with a topic related KW that now hosts a non-active blog with PR3 - employment-law.XXXX.com. It has 49 indexed pages, some with PR2. So there's potential for getting a kickstart on traffic and trust with some redirects. Should I go for instant gratification or build for the long haul with the slightly more beneficial URL KWing?
I should add that this sub-domain will have thousands of pages that are geo and sub-category focused - a typical URL would be. sub-domain.XXX.com/TX/Austin/wrongful-termination-lawyers.html
THX for any opinions.
-
Exact match type efforts are great. For a single phrase. Or longer tail phrases off of that. As soon as you want to get ranked for variations that in their sum total require going beyond the exact match, they're not as valuable. Especially if you need to start from scratch.
On the other side of the coin, is all of the content on the existing site high enough quality AND truly relevant to your goals? If it' snot and you need to scrap it, you're going to take a hit on those statistics anyhow.
And on a final note - don't trust the PR numbers alone. They're inaccurate at best, and at least months old. Could very well be that the real PR (not the TBPR you're going by) is lower, especially after Panda/Farmer.
Better to look at the traffic statistics on the site both current and historically compared. If you don't have analytics to review, it's a crap-shoot.
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
-
Same URL for languages sub-directories
Hi All, I have a main domain and 9 different subdirectories for languages, example: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page-uk.html www.example.com/es/page-es.html we are implementing hreflang tags for the languages, but we are thinking to get rid of the dashes on the languages URL: -uk or -es, so it will be: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page.html www.example.com/es/page.hrml would this be a problem? to have same page names even if they are in different subdirectories? would we need to add canonical tags, at lease for the main domain URLs? www.kornferry.com/page.html Thank you, Rachel
Technical SEO | | RaquelSaiz0 -
Moving my domain to weebly
I am thinking of moving my html website to weebly. They offer a 301 redirect for my domain name. Is that ok for SEO?
Technical SEO | | bhsiao0 -
One server, two domains - robots.txt allow for one domain but not other?
Hello, I would like to create a single server with two domains pointing to it. Ex: domain1.com -> myserver.com/ domain2.com -> myserver.com/subfolder. The goal is to create two separate sites on one server. I would like the second domain ( /subfolder) to be fully indexed / SEO friendly and have the robots txt file allow search bots to crawl. However, the first domain (server root) I would like to keep non-indexed, and the robots.txt file disallowing any bots / indexing. Does anyone have any suggestions for the best way to tackle this one? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Dave1000 -
Redirect root domain to www
I've been having issues with my keyword rankings with MOZ and this is what David at M0Z asked me to do below. Does anyone have a solution to this? I'm not 100% sure what to do. Does it hurt ranking to have a domain at the root or not? Can I 301 redirect a whole site or do I have to do individual pages. "Your campaign is looking for rankings for the www version of the campaign but the URL resolves as a root domain. This would explain the discrepancy. Since there is no re-direct between the two, you can have brickmarkers.com 301 re-direct to www.site.com which will prevent you from re-creating your campaign to track the root domain. Once the re-direct is in place it will take a while for Google to show the www version in the results in which your campaign rankings will be accurate." Thanks
Technical SEO | | SeaDrive0 -
Anybody having success with Cross-Domain canonical?
Has anyone been using rel="canonical" to attribute content that has been republished on Domain B... back to Domain A, which is the original source? The videos below say that this should be working... I am asking to hear from anyone who has done it. Has it worked as you expected? Did Domain A get the benefit that you expected? Thanks! ========== Source Videos ============= Matt Cutts (April, 2012) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI6L2N4A0hA Matt Cutts (April, 2010) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8XdFb6LGtM Rand Fishkin (August, 2012) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8drPXudZZc
Technical SEO | | EGOL1 -
Different domains for multilingual website
Hey guys, A site that I'm currently working on as different domains for each website language. So for example: word1word2.com for the english version word3word4.com for the french version word5word6.com for spanish version .... Is it better to move all of the different languages to the same domain and use subfolders for each language /fr/... Please note that the domains being used bring in organic traffic as well as they are EMDs. Thank You.
Technical SEO | | BruLee0 -
Redirect non www. domain to WWW. domain for established website?
Hey guys, The website in question has been online for more than 5 years but there are still 2 versions of the website. Both versions are indexed by Google and of course, this will result in duplicate content. Is it necessary to redirect the non-www domain to the www. domain. What are the cons and advantages? Will the www. links replace the non-www links when it comes to keyword rankings? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | BruLee0 -
Sitemap with References to Second Domain
I have just discovered a client site that is serving content from a single database into two separate domains and has created xml sitemaps which contain references to both domains in an attempt to avoid being tagged for duplicate content. I always thought that a sitemap was intended to show the files inside a single domain and the idea of multiple domains in the sitemap had never occurred to me... The sites are both very large storefronts and one of them (the larger of the two) has recently seen a 50% drop in search traffic and loss of some 600 search terms from top 50 positions in Google. My first instinct is that the sitemaps should be altered to only show files within each domain, but am worried about causing further loss of traffic. Is it possible that the inclusion URLs for the second domain in the sitemap may in fact be signalling duplicate content to Search Engines? Does anyone have a definitive view of whether these sitemaps are good, bad or irrelevant?
Technical SEO | | ShaMenz0