Merging Domains... Sub-domains, Directories or Seperate Sites?

[essdee]

Hello!

I am hoping you can help me decide the best path to take here...

A little background:

I'm moving to a new company that has three old domains (the oldest is 10 years old), which get a lot of traffic from their e-letters. Until recently they have not cared about SEO. So the websites have some structural, coding, URL and other issues. The sites are indexed, but have a problem getting crawled and/or indexed for new content - haven't delved into this yet but am certain I will be able to fix any of these issues.

These three domains are PR4, PR4, PR5 and contain hundreds of unique articles.

Here's the question...

They want to move these three sites **to their main company site (PR4) and create sub domains for each one. **

I am wondering if this is a good idea or not. I have merged sites before (creating categories and/or directories) and the end result is that the ONE big site, is much for effective than TWO smaller, less authoritative sites. But the sub domain idea is something I am unsure about from an SEO perspective.

Should we do this with sub domains? Or do you think we should keep the sites separate? How do Panda and Penguin play into this?

Thanks in advance for the help!

SD

P.S. I'm not a huge advocate in using PR as a measurement tool, but since I can't reveal the actual domains, I figured I would list it as a reference point.

[essdee]

Thanks for the reply.

I think at the end of the day, yes it does help the user to have it all in one place.

And thanks for reiterating what I already thought... directories are better than sub-domains.

To be honest, this article is what had me questioning sub-directories in the first place: http://www.seobook.com/subdomains-google-panda

[NakulGoyal]

I agree with what you are thinking. The biggest effect would be if you can move them all onto one domain name (sub-folders) and setup 301 redirects. Keep hosting those domains forever since the 301s would stay only as long as you own the domains and continue to host them to serve the 301.

Moving them to sub-domains might be minimal / zero effect. I only see risk in doing that.

Ask yourself: Does it help the users in integrating all the content into one big website ?

[essdee]

Thanks for the reply.

I guess my biggest concerns are getting the biggest SEO bump I can by consolidating this content, but avoid any content farm penalties.

I was thinking subdomains would be safer, but provide the little to no SEO value.

Thanks again, that's a nice little checklist for moving domains.

[essdee]

Thanks for the reply. Yes, that was my thinking as well.

I have been concerned that I would be in essence creating a content farm because like I mentioned, these sites have hundreds or thousands of articles on them. And they publish 1-3 articles a day on average.

So you did this in early 2011 and found no ill effects from Panda?

[EGOL]

Subdomains are often viewed by google as different domains.  That means, links that hit one of them benefit that subdomain but transfer fractional benefit to other subdomains and to the root.

If this was my project I would use folders instead of subdomains.  Your designer can make them look unique if that is needed, however, with them all being in the root directory all of the incoming links will benefit the entire site.

In early 2011 I redirected two subdomains of a busy site (one more powerful than the root domain) into folders and the results have been kickass.  Kickass.

[Unity]

As long as your content is well structured amongst the sub-domains and root domain I can't see why there would be any issues. When making the change ensure that you:

1. Tell Google that the URL is moving (do this via Google Webmaster Tools)
2. Add permanent  301 redirects from the old URLs and point to their respective URLs on the new domain (this is to ensure that any backlinks the old websites had will pass some link juice through)
3. Don't stop hosting the old domains for say 6 months.
4. Run a backlink check on the old URLs and try get those websites (provided they are of good quality) to update the link to the new sub-domain. For those that don't update the 301 redirect will help.

Have fun!
Davinia