Two company websites - should 1 be nofollow?
-
We are an automotive dealership that is required to keep a manufacturer appointed website. It's pretty terrible so we are having a new site developed in addition to that. We plan on transferring our current domain name to the new site but I am not sure what to do with the older, less useful site. Should I try to have both sites appear in the search results to capture more traffic? Or is that inefficient? Should I make the new site no follow?
-
Alan is right. I'll only add that you'll really want to look through the links he provided. Local SEO is a related, but very different animal than regular SEO.
Also, unless I missed an important detail, you may want to look into canonicalizing the manufacturer's site to your own site, assuming you don't care whether the manufacturer's site appears in the SERPS.
-
Ah well don't you just love terms and conditions?
I'm going to offer my own opinion here - others may see things differently...
If you are allowed to maintain a 2nd site, then that is what I would definitely recommend doing - focusing all your attention on the new site. Not doing any no-follow or blocking for search engines.
Why? Because as much as you may get traffic to the MFR linked site, and having a link from the MFR IS a good thing, without the ability to present the image, the message or the experience you want to convey, you're at the mercy of their marketing ability. And as you've described, the low volume of traffic you currently get seems to indicate a not-so-savvy ability.
Here's the difficulty though - you're essentially starting from scratch with the new site. So you're going to need to pull out all the stops.
High quality unique content is vital, of course. Local optimization on-site, backed by maximized off-site local SEO, social media and link-building are going to be what make the long-term difference though. If done properly, you should see your preferred site show up consistently in location based search results.
And then if the MFR site happens to show up, so be it. Unfortunate to need to deal with, yet a necessary evil in this case. More important is to push the site you control so you can have as much control over your message as possible.
Here's a few resources for local optimization
-
Hi Alan, thanks for the reply.
The manufacturer appointed website is one that we are required to maintain. We have very minimal control over look, feel, and content but we have enough control to customize it a bit (including access to the of the code).
The existing site will get assigned a new domain name of our choosing. We are not required to use a domain that the manufacturer chooses.
We are not required to use the manufacturer site as our primary site; however, the manufacturer will only link to the site that they provide from their parent site. This will be the sole reason we even care about that site. We literally don't have to do any maintenance whatsoever to the manufacturer site in order to keep it running. Fortunately, we don't get too much traffic from them so all of our marketing channels will direct people to the newer site.
-
I'm not sure what you mean by "a manufacturer appointed website". Does this mean you have no choice but to maintain a site they provide and where you have no control over it's look, feel, or content?
If you are planning on setting up a new domain and transferring your current domain name to that, what domain name would the existing site have? A 2nd newly obtained domain name? Or one available through the MFR?
Are you required by the MFR to use their provided site as your primary forward-facing promotional point of contact on the web?
These are all important points to help determine how you proceed.
If you make the new site nofollow, what would you use the new site for?
Having the need to maintain / promote two separate sites is always more challenging than focusing all your efforts on one site and really should be avoided at all costs if possible.
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
-
Website rank 5th position than bounce
Hello A website client won't rank dor branded keyword (site name) for several months, i optimize onpage seo, did some backlinks, the DA jump to 8 (from 1). Yesterday the website rank for branded keyword 5, than 4, tomorrow can't found it.
Technical SEO | | Zidani0 -
How do I optimize a website for SEO for a client that is using a subdirectory as a seperate website?
We launched a subdirectory site about two months ago for our client. What's happening is searches for the topic covered by the subdirectory are yielding search results for the old site and not the new site. We'd like to change this. Are there best practices for the subdirectory site Specifically we're looking for things we can do using sitemapping and Webmaster tools. Are there other technical things we can do? Thanks you.
Technical SEO | | IVSeoTeam120 -
How can I index several systems used for my website?
My site is built on PHP, but has a help.website.com page based on a helpdesk platform. I also have a wordpress blog. So, these are three "different systems" under the same domain. When I crawl my site, neither the blog nor the help page show up. How can I make them show up? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | rodelmo880 -
Moving a website from one domain to another
Hi Guys, I figured I'd investigate this fully before potentially ruining a client's traffic. The rundown:Two websites; one is an ecommerce store and the other is just a brochure website which has references to the ecommerce store. The ecommerce store is hosted on a server we control whereas the brochure one isn't, the URL for the brochure store is nice and simple which is the reason for the switch, as the ecommerce URL is very long and hard to remember. Now from an SEO point of view will it be a case of 301 redirecting every URL from the old domain name to the new one one or is there an easier option? Any tips or links to more information would be much appreciated. Thanks, Dan
Technical SEO | | Sparkstone0 -
Website redirects
We consolidated websites. All the international sites have been brought under the roof of our mothership site based in the US: www.crisisprevention.com ... We mapped out all of the URLs and where they should be redirected. However, if someone types in, say, www.crisisprevention.co.uk it redirects to the mothership site, BUT the old URL hangs around no matter what page you navigate to. I feel like it has duplicate content ramifications or worse. I would like opinions on this, so I can take my findings to IT and figure out a solution. Here’s another example: http://www.positive-options.co.uk and another http://www.positive-options.com
Technical SEO | | spackle0 -
Google Indexed Only 1 Page
Hi, I'm new and hope this forum can help me. I have recently resubmit my sitemap and Google only Indexed 1 Page. I can still see many of my old indexed pages in the SERP's? I have upgraded my template and graded all my pages to A's on SEOmoz, I have solid backlinks and have been building them over time. I have redirected all my 404 errors in .htaccess and removed /index.php from my url's. I have never done this before but my website runs perfect and all my pages redirect as I hoped. My site: www.FunerallCoverFinder.co.za How do I figure out what the problem is? Thanks in Advance!
Technical SEO | | Klement690 -
Transfer of website to maintain SEO
I am nearly finished building a new wordpress website to replace the old static HTML site which is currently doing very well in SERPs. My old site is currently hosted by a company who owns the site, my domain is registered with a different company and I have the nameservers pointed at Cloudflare. I have built my new site and have it hosted with a different company and I wish to keep the domain name registered with the company it is currently with.Is there an order that I should follow to move from the old site to the new site using my current domain name so that I minimize any impact on SEO. I built the new site with the same URL structure to maintain linking benefit. thanks
Technical SEO | | casper4340 -
Should an international company also be marketing locally?
I've just watched the very helpful video on Google Local best practices at http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/all-about-google-places and see MANY areas in which we are not utilizing our local marketing efforts. Given that we do not have TOO much local demand, I would say that the main reason for doing this work is to gain momentum in our broad-scale Google SEO efforts/results. But I am worried that Google might see us as a local company and stop showing us in the SERPs for non-local searches. Is this a good strategy to market locally, or to stick to backlinks on a broad international-based scale. Does it even help my overall SEO rankings (for broad keywords like Point of Sale and POS Software) to have a strong local and hyperlocal presence? Thanks! Derek M
Technical SEO | | DerekM881