Better SEO Option, 1 Site 3 Subdomains or 4 Separate Sites?
-
Hey Mozzers,
I'm working with a client who wants to redo their web presence. They have a a main website for the umbrella and then 3 divisions which have their own website as well.
My question is: Is it better to have the main site on the main domain and then have the 3 separate sites be subdomains? Or 4 different domains with a linking structure to tie them all together?
To my understanding option 1 would include high traffic for 1 domain and option 2 would be building Page Authority by having 4 different sites linking to each other?
My guess would be option 2, only if all 4 sites start getting relevant authority to make the links of value. But right out of the gates option 1 might be more beneficial.
A little advice/clarification would be great!
-
If you already have the 4 sites running on different domains, each has different content, and you linking sparingly and appropriately between the domains, I'd call it a toss up as to whether it's better to keep them separate or bring them together. Have you looked into buddypress for managing the separate domains within a single CMS? I think it can handle that.
-
Hey Tom,
Thanks for answering our question. Basically our sites are a parent company/ministry, a kids mentoring/tutoring ministry, a medical center ministry, and a food pantry ministry.
They all have their own domain and website currently but need to be updated. We are looking at combining the sites administrative functionality to allow for authors of each individual site as well as super authors for all sites.
So, the question is, should each site continue to have its own domain as they each will have unique content or should they be setup with subdomains becasue they are all apart of the same network.
Here is an example of a website setup very similar --> http://www.interlochen.org/
Thank you for further clarification/time on this matter.
-
I think the main question should be what these 3 'sub-sites' are.
Are they individual brands/businesses that can stand-alone and offer unique content on each domain? Do they cover different industries/niches?
If the answer to either of those is no, then I'd keep it all on the same domain. Option 2 runs the risk of looking like a link network (existing solely to boost up the main website), which, if discovered, could heavily penalise your website.
Even if that was to be avoided, I'd still recommend keeping all of your content on one domain, unless the other sites are completely different. This is because that any content you do produce that may accrue links or social shares will go straight to the main domain - that direct link will be the strongest SEO signal out of the lot. Building sub-sites just to blog/build content to accrue links to the main site is pointless unless those sites get their own links - in which case, why not have that content on your site anyway, in the form of a subdomain or sub-folder?
I'd only consider splitting the sites up if they target very different industries/niches. If they do, they will need to be fleshed out with considerable content to avoid looking like a link-network.
Simply creating microsites to create content that links to the main site just seems pointless, particularly if that content can be hosted on your domain, which would then get all the links/social signals anyway.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Seo for my medium.com site
I have my regular site blog at www.Guideyourhealth.org and a blog on www.medium.com, should I try to get back links for my medium articles as well that are on topics not competing with my site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BuyKratomPowderInfo0 -
Different URL structure Desktop VS Mobile Regarding SEO when building a new seperate mobile site
Hi I have a old OScommerce webshop, that i will keep for now, but i have build a complete new mobile site for mobile devices, but it has another url structure. Can i launch this site without any problems when its Google Mobile Search Engine that index the mobile site, and then just make the neccesary rel alternate tags for the desktop site for the product pages and main categories that i can. There will be some differences in the urls i cant make a alternate for.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | noerdar0 -
International SEO
We want to expand to a few new regions internationally. My question is if we register sites in different geographies and upload our exact site to these web addresses (exact duplicates) so our web addresses will then be www.mysite.co.uk (current site) www.mysite.com (new intended site) www.mysite.com.au (new intended site) and add rel=“canonical” linking elements to prevent duplicate content issues.Will our content production on our current site www.mysite.co.uk retain its value within all the other sites. Is this the best way to do it? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aquaspressovending0 -
Need opinion to split the site for speed up the SEO process
We have two versions of our website English and Arabic. Arabic is in a sub-directory www.oncarx.com/ar (Not a Sub Domain). When we started SEO, we found that most of our Articles are plagiarized and contain non-original content. We are almost done with the optimization of our Arabic articles. English site contains too many articles and are not optimized for SEO. For getting good results and speed up the process, which of the following idea is better? We should separate the English and Arabic sites. We should remove most of the articles from English site. If there is any other good option, please let us know.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sagha0 -
Has this site been a victim of negative seo?
The rankings for our client's site - www.yourlifeprotected.co.uk fell off the face of the earth back in June. Despite trying a huge number of things to try and help the site recover, we've seen no real positive improvements since then. Examples of things we have tried: Disavowed & manually removed poor quality Links Removed any internal Duplicate Content Removed any broken links Re-written all website content to ensure unique & high quality No-Followed all outbound links Added any missing title tags changed hosting Rewritten content to ensure no duplication internally or externally The most recent issue we've picked up is that some highly spammy sites seem to have copied extracts of text from the website and hidden them in their pages. This is a rather puzzling one, as there aren't backlinks, pointing to our site - just the copy. For example - Cancer Page and Diabetes Page.It feels very much as though this could be a negative SEO attack which could be responsible for the drop in rankings and traffic the site has experienced. If this is the case, what can we do about it?! Having already re-written the copy on the site, we obviously dont want to do this again unnecessarily - especially if this could just happen again in future! Any help or advice would be hugely appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digirank0 -
Change Joomla to Wordpress (Better SEO)
Hi, I'd like to change my cms but I am afraid 😞 I have lots of content in Google, so I know I should make 301 list but what do you think about the change? Now I am in good position and I don't want to make bad my rank 😞 Please let me know which way is the best and secured 🙂 Thanks, Misi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netkreativ0 -
I had most of my sites down for a month for technical problems, how do I recover my SEO status ?
I had most of my sites down for a month for technical problems, how do I recover my SEO status ? I did everything possible to not get offline, but I did, some months before my domais were extremely slow, leading to failures over failures. I got them down and moved to another host. What should I do in SEO know that the mess is done ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aamato0 -
3 Sites Covering Similar Topics & Panda
My question will take a bit of explaining, so here goes: I have 3 blogs on the same server: 1. personal finance blog; 2. credit card blog; 3. prepaid credit card blog. The personal finance blog is my flagship site started in 2007, which feeds my family and pays the mortgage. By contrast, the other two sites (started in 2008 and 2010) I would gladly kill if the result would help my personal finance blog. In the fall of 2010 (before Panda) the prepaid card blog was penalized by Google. This has been confirmed by Google in response to a reconsideration request. Of course, they don't say why. I've tried a number of things and resubmitted the site, but with no luck. Both the personal finance blog and credit card blog were hit by Panda 2 (April 11, 2011) and have not recovered. While the personal finance site covers many topics (e.g., investing, credit, debt, money management), its income comes largely from credit cards. We review individual credit cards and have pages that list cards by category (e.g., balance transfer, cash back, travel). The credit card blog does the same thing, but of course covers credit cards in more depth. There is a similar overlap between the prepaid card blog on the one hand, and the credit card blog and personal finance blog on the other. However, all content is unique. I do not currently link between the sites, although until a few months ago I had blogroll links between the sites and a few (less than 10) content links. If you've made it this far (and I hope you have), here are my questions: 1. Could the existence of the credit card and prepaid credit card sites be hurting my personal finance blog's rankings in Google, whether via Panda or otherwise? 2. If there is a reasonable chance that the answer to question 1 is yes, what would you suggest I do? Of course, I could just take down the sites, but I wonder if there are other options. One thought I had was to deindex the two card sites (I assume I can do this by disallowing googlebot via robots.txt) and give it time. Would Google treat this as if the sites did not exist? Both sites get a fair amount of traffic from bing and yahoo, so this option appeals to me. Of course, for all I know the existence of the two card sites are hurting my personal finance blog's rankings in bing and yahoo, too. I thought about selling the sites, but if they are hurting my personal finance site, I grow concerned about how google distinguishes between a site being sold and a webmaster just trying to make the sites look like they are owned by different people. In this regard, I've never tried to hide the common ownership of the sites and have no intention of doing that now. If I kill the sites, should I redirect them to my personal finance site? For the penalized prepaid card site, this seems both risky and unhelpful. But perhaps redirecting the credit card site is an option. Given that the personal finance site is my livelihood, I greatly appreciate your thoughts on my dilemma.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bergerlaw0