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
-
Can you combine YouTube and on-site hosting as part of a Video SEO strategy?
My question is sparked by how Moz uses its Whiteboard Friday videos. We are currently capturing video stories from our customers. Its excellent and engaging content we'd love to share with a wider audience. I'm puttting together a strategy for video SEO to drive traffic to our site and Moz's approach intrigues me. As we know, the world of video rich snippets changed in 2014 - their appearance in universal search reduced dramatically and what remained was almost entirely (90%+) YouTube snippets. Useless if you're looking to drive traffic to your own site. Of course, it's still possible to earn SERPs for video in Google video search, but I imagine the search volume is greatly reduced. From what I can see, first Moz host their Whiteboard Friday video on Wistia, complete with transcript and whiteboard capture. Suprisingly, I see no Schema markup for video. Can anyone shed a light as to why this might be a good idea? 3-6 months later the same video is then uploaded to youtube, with the same title and a similar description. The end result is multiple SERPs in universal search, almost always in the following order: the original post on Moz a YouTube result complete with a video rich sippet This has me asking the following questions - I have some theories - but i'd love your input: Why use two platforms to upload and host the video? Why not just YouTube? Why avoid using Schema on the Wistia video hosted on the original post? Surely, this would allow an additional result in Google Video Search? Why wait 3-6 months after the first post to upload the YouTube video?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobertChapman0 -
Moving multiple Sites to One Site and SEO Impact/Ideas
Hi there, We are in the process of moving 2 sites with higher page authority to another site we own (that is our company brand), so essentially 3 sites into one. We're at risk of losing a lot of SEO from the original 2 sites that have all the product information. We are doing this since we merged companies a couple years back and need one web precense. Anyhow, the site launch date is in 3 months and the recommendation is to start moving content over prior to that for top pages, which is a big undertaking when we are launching all the pages again with new content, redeisgn and moving sites in 3 months. If it's the right move, we should do it, but I just wanted to get opinions on how others have handled something similiar when moving to a site with lower site authority and trying not to lose rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lauramrobinson320 -
Global SEO
Hey there Mozzers! I have a question about global SEO. I have a website that has multiple tlds (.com.au .co.uk .com etc ) Each of these are redirecting depending the user location. Where should my link building be focused on? What are some Global SEO Techniques you suggest ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AngelosS0 -
Subdomains + SEO
Hi everyone, So a little background - my company launched a new website (http://www.everyaction.com). The homepage is currently hosted on an amazon s3 bucket while the blog and landing pages are hosted within Hubspot. My question is - is that going to end up hurting our SEO in the long run? I've seen a much slower uptick in search engine traffic than I'm used to seeing when launching new sites and I'm wondering if that's because people are sharing the blog.everyaction.com url on social (which then wouldn't benefit just everyaction.com?) Anyways, a little help on what I should be considering when it comes to subdomains would be very helpful. Thanks, Devon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EveryActionHQ0 -
Launching V2 of my site - what questions to ask the SEO Agency
Hi I am in the process of launching a new version of my site and I know I need to get my current SEO Agency to check and test certain aspects of the site so that I don't lose any rankings. The problem is I am unsure of everything to ask them and I was wondering if someone could help me out. I don't want to have missed something basic and therefore want to give them a checklist to confirm they are happy before go live. Any help appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy-Halliday1 -
Why are these sites outranking me?
I am trying to rank for the phrase "a link between worlds walkthrough" I am on page 1 but there are several results that just outranks me and I cannot see any reason that they would be doing so. My site is hiddentriforce.com/a-link-between-worlds/walkthrough/ For that page I have 5 linking domains, varied anchor text that spans from things like "here" to a variety of related phrases. All of the links come from really good sites My page has 1400 likes, 90 shares, and about 20 each in tweets and +'s DA of 44 PA of 37 The 4 and 5 ranked sites both have WAY less social interactions, lower PA and DA, less links, etc Yet they outrank me why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Worth contributing articles to a Page Rank 1 site?
My intuition tells me that it is not going to help with any SEO link benefit by posting an article as a guest writer on a Page Rank site of #1. It's a rather new fashion content site. The article would be informative and not a sales pitch. The only link is to our url home page in the bio. I've been told that links from low page ranking sites don't help anymore. But maybe over time the site will achieve higher PR status, and then the link in it would help us? Any thoughts? Thanks! ron
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yatesandcojewelers0 -
Strange situation - Started over with a new site. WMT showing the links that previously pointed to old site.
I have a client whose site was severely affected by Penguin. A former SEO company had built thousands of horrible anchor texted links on bookmark pages, forums, cheap articles, etc. We decided to start over with a new site rather than try to recover this one. Here is what we did: -We noindexed the old site and blocked search engines via robots.txt -Used the Google URL removal tool to tell it to remove the entire old site from the index -Once the site was completely gone from the index we launched the new site. The new site had the same content as the old other than the home page. We changed most of the info on the home page because it was duplicated in many directory listings. (It's a good site...the content is not overoptimized, but the links pointing to it were bad.) -removed all of the pages from the old site and put up an index page saying essentially, "We've moved" with a nofollowed link to the new site. We've slowly been getting new, good links to the new site. According to ahrefs and majestic SEO we have a handful of new links. OSE has not picked up any as of yet. But, if we go into WMT there are thousands of links pointing to the new site. WMT has picked up the new links and it looks like it has all of the old ones that used to point at the old site despite the fact that there is no redirect. There are no redirects from any pages of the old to the new at all. The new site has a similar name. If the old one was examplekeyword.com, the new one is examplekeywordcity.com. There are redirects from the other TLD's of the same to his (i.e. examplekeywordcity.org, examplekeywordcity.info), etc. but no other redirects exist. The chances that a site previously existed on any of these TLD's is almost none as it is a unique brand name. Can anyone tell me why Google is seeing the links that previously pointed to the old site as now pointing to the new? ADDED: Before I hit the send button I found something interesting. In this article from dejan SEO where someone stole Rand Fishkin's content and ranked for it, they have the following line: "When there are two identical documents on the web, Google will pick the one with higher PageRank and use it in results. It will also forward any links from any perceived ’duplicate’ towards the selected ‘main’ document." This may be what is happening here. And just to complicate things further, it looks like when I set up the new site in GA, the site owner took the GA tracking code and put it on the old page. (The noindexed one that is set up with a nofollowed link to the new one.) I can't see how this could affect things but we're removing it. Confused yet? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0