Should we consider redirecting a high ranking subdomain page to our homepage?

[bradwayland]

My site bluecotton.com sells custom printed t-shirts.  Our DA is 46.  Our homepage is PA 55.  The design studio is where users create their designs.  Over the years the design studio has received a lot of fan fair including links from gizmodo and adobe.  When I rank against our biggest competitors customink, ooshirts, uberprints.com I find that our domain as a whole doesn't look all that great.  However, when I look at the history of our subdomain I see that we are more trusted and credible than all of our competitors.  We have 10k links pointing to the design studio.  Here is my question.  What if I did 301 redirect of bluecotton.com/studio.html to bluecotton.com?  Then I created a new url for the DS.  This would not cause users any problems.  In fact for many they would get more context around what we are trying to do and what we offer.  Is this crazy?  I never find results in google for the design studio.  It always shows our home.  That is pretty much what happens to all of our competitors on the higher traffic terms that are driving real sales.

So why do i ask?  If my subdomain is more valuable becuase of the design studio links then I wonder if I redirected it to the homepage if it would supercharge my homepage and propel is forward in the serps.

Thoughts?

[MoosaHemani]

Ok, this is tricky one Brad!

There are situations that you should consider before you go ahead and start doing this, but before everything just go to your Google Analytics and see how much search traffic you are receiving to your design studio page and what keywords are they using to search your page.

If good %age of people who are landing from search are using your brand name then I think you can go with it but if they are using specific design studio related keywords, this action can really hurt their user experience.

In my opinion you can also test this idea by adding 302 redirect for few days instead of 301. If things works well for you then you can always change from 301 to 302 but if you see bounce rate is increasing or something you can always change by removing 302 and then the new page you have created, 301 it to the design studio page.

It’s difficult to say how people will react to it but testing the stuff (while being on the safe side) is a good idea.

[Talooma]

Redirecting your studio to your home page wouldn't help your home page at all. The authority is on the actual studio.html page and if you are redirected from it, no one (including Google's crawler) can see it anyway.

The other problem you are going to have is how are your visitors going to use the studio if they are being redirected from it each time?

Remember there is no way to "trick" Google into believing one page is better than it actually is. You need to concentrate on keeping a great usability throughout your website, especially with the latest panda updates.