Need to move highest content pages into a sub-domain and want to minimize the loss of traffic - details inside!
-
Hi All!
So the company that I work for owns two very strong domains in the information security industry. There are two separate sections on each site that draws a ton of long tail SEO traffic.
For our corporate site we have a vulnerability database where people search for vulnerabilities to research, and find out how to remediate. On our other website we have an exploit database where people can look up exploits in order to see how to patch an attackers attack path.
We are going to move these into a super database under our corporate domain and I want to ensure that we maintain or minimize the traffic loss. The exploit database which is currently on our other domain yields about three quarters of the traffic to the domain. It is obviously OK if that traffic goes directly to this new subdomain.
What are my options to keep our search traffic steady for this content? There are thousands and thousands of these vulnerabilities and exploits so it would not make sense to 301 redirect all of them. What are some other options and what would you do?
-
Hello Pat,
I do not have experience merging a Ruby site with another type of site, but I think we are confusing issues here anyway. You can have content in a database that gets served up anywhere. That is, you can pull that content into ten different websites if you wanted to. The database issue is almost irrelevant to the SEO issues, which have mainly to do with loss of pagerank from URL changes, and possible duplicate content issues. A 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one would take care of both of these issues.
If you are unable to redirect all of the old content my suggestion would then be to figure out which URLs have external links and redirect those. Let all of the other ones return a 404 or 410 status code so those URLs will be removed from the index since the content will exist on the new URL and you don't want two URLs with the same content indexed simultaneously.
Please let us know if we have missunderstood the question or if we can provide more help with your original question. You may want to post your Ruby question in another thread to ensure the right people see it.
Thanks!
-
Hi Chris,
Sorry for the confusion. The plan is to merge both databases (our vulnerability database on our corporate site and our exploit database on our other website) into one and place them on a subdomain off of our corporate site. Right now the exploit database that is on our second website gets a LOT of traffic, it contributes about three quarters of the traffic to the domain. I would like to minimize the loss of traffic when placing this on this subdomain and looking for ways to do this.
@ryan - I am not sure exactly why, but our web producer told me that we need to use a subdomain and cannot put this on our domain. I will follow up with her to find out why.
Update - I guess one of the databases is written on a different platform (ruby) so it cannot be hosted on the same server - changes are harder to make as a result. I guess this could still be done however it may be a little harder to update - anybody have experience with this?
Thanks for the help guys!
Pat
-
Would like to offer an opinion but can't quite figure out what you're saying in paragraph 3.
-
Not quite sure that I understand the need to put these on a subdomain. Why not have both of these reside/exist on the corporate domain? One of them already exists on your corporate, so you can keep that database/search there, and then move the other over to a similar location. yes, that would require a ton of 301 redirects, but that should be ok given the scope of the project.
In my experience, moving to a new domain or even a subdomain, you always experience some traffic loss that never really comes back (unless you are naturally growing anyway). Keel the main company domain going, put everything under a folder off the root, dont worry about the subdomain issue.
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
-
Duplicate page content errors stemming from CMS
Hello! We've recently relaunched (and completely restructured) our website. All looks well except for some duplicate content issues. Our internal CMS (custom) adds a /content/ to each page. Our development team has also set-up URLs to work without /content/. Is there a way I can tell Google that these are the same pages. I looked into the parameters tool, but that seemed more in-line with ecommerce and the like. Am I missing anything else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | taylor.craig0 -
Why are these pages considered duplicate content?
I have a duplicate content warning in our PRO account (well several really) but I can't figure out WHY these pages are considered duplicate content. They have different H1 headers, different sidebar links, and while a couple are relatively scant as far as content (so I might believe those could be seen as duplicate), the others seem to have a substantial amount of content that is different. It is a little perplexing. Can anyone help me figure this out? Here are some of the pages that are showing as duplicate: http://www.downpour.com/catalogsearch/advanced/byNarrator/narrator/Seth+Green/?bioid=5554 http://www.downpour.com/catalogsearch/advanced/byAuthor/author/Solomon+Northup/?bioid=11758 http://www.downpour.com/catalogsearch/advanced/byNarrator/?mediatype=audio+books&bioid=3665 http://www.downpour.com/catalogsearch/advanced/byAuthor/author/Marcus+Rediker/?bioid=10145 http://www.downpour.com/catalogsearch/advanced/byNarrator/narrator/Robin+Miles/?bioid=2075
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DownPour0 -
How many links would you need to rank up in page rank?
White hat **** Can 20 website with page rank of 3 make your site rank higher?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spidersite0 -
Pages with Little Content
I have a website that lists events in Dublin, Ireland. I want to provide a comprehensive number of listings but there are not enough hours in the day to provide a detailed (or even short) unique description for every event. At the moment I have some pages with little detail other than the event title and venue. Should I try and prevent Google from crawling/indexing these pages for fear of reducing the overall ranking of the site? At the moment I only link to these pages via the RSS feed. I could remove the pages entirely from my feed, but then that mean I remove information that might be useful to people following the events feed. Here is an example page with very little content
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andywozhere0 -
Duplicate content on sub-domains?
I have 2 subdamains intented for 2 different countries (Colombia and Venezuela) ve.domain.com and co.domain.com. The site it's an e-commerce with over a million products available so they have the same page with the same content on both sub-domains....the only differences are the prices a payment options. Does google take that as duplicate content? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniel.alvarez0 -
My Domain rank is falling but my traffic is improving?
I have been here for one month today and have been reworking many pages to improve my On-Page results for my site www.antiquebanknotes.com I have seen some really nice improvement in my organic, search and non paid keywords. (up 38%, 21% and 29% this week) But last week all of a sudden my domain authority dropped from 10 to 9. Not tragic but still odd since I have been getting some decent results from my optimazations. My competitors have domain authority in the 20's so it's something I am sure I need to work on. I have added links out to relevant sites and added lots of content but my domain authority falls? Is this common when a site makes lots of changes?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Banknotes0 -
Very basic - domain authority vs page authority
what does that mean and how is that information valuable? thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thirsty31 -
Is site:domain.com + keyword a good indicator of the quality of a page?
Are the results provided by site:domain.com + keyword a good indicator of the quality of certain pages? For example, should the first result be more relevant, have a higher number of links, etc than the second result?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0