If we remove all of the content for a branch office in one city from a web site, will it harm rankings for the other branches?
-
We have a client with a large, multi-city home services business. The service offerings vary from city to city, so each branch has it's own section on a fairly large (~6,000 pages) web site. Each branch drives a significant amount of revenue from organic searches specific to its geographic location (ex: Houston plumbers or Fort Worth landscaping).
Recently, one of the larger branches has decided that it wants its own web site on a new domain because they have been convinced by an SEO firm that they can get better results with a standalone site.
That branch wants us to remove all of its content (700-800 pages) on the current site and has said we can 301 all inbound links to the removed content to other pages on the existing site to mitigate any loss to domain authority.
The other branch managers want to know if removing this city-specific content could negatively impact search rankings for their cities. On the surface it seems like as long as we have proper redirects in place, the other branches should be okay. Am I missing something?
-
Thanks, Kyle. I appreciate the thorough response. These are great points, many of which, I tried to make without success.
Everyone tried to keep the site together, and indeed the majority of the concern is definitely for the defecting office, but this particular branch seems pretty determined to go its own way. Some SEO companies can be so persuasive...top 3 ranking for every keyword under the sun...guaranteed.
So, now the main goal for the group is to ensure that the rest of the branches in the organization to not have any negative SEO impact as a result of this switch.
Thanks again.
-
Thank you for your response. Just to be clear we are pointing all redirects from the deleted pages to the current (original) site, not to the new site.
Thanks
-
As long as you have the redirects in place, I wouldn't expect there to be much effect for the other branches. Depending on how you redirect the pages and how many inbound links they have, you may actually be able to give some other branches a little boost.
The only ways I can think of that there would be a negative effect for the other branches would be if...
- There's some crossover of traffic between branches. So, not getting traffic to the one branch's pages (the one moving) would mean that none of that traffic moves on to other branches.
- If the branch that is moving is particularly good at getting inbound links, then you would lose that ongoing increase of links.
I'd be more concerned for the branch that is moving off site and for the user experience.
Let's call the branch that is moving "Branch A." For the user experience, if you redirect all the pages that are currently hosting Branch A pages to other pages on your parent company site. All those people who are trying to get services from Branch A that would have landed on one of those pages end up on an irrelevant page. That's not good for Branch A (or probably the parent company).
For the Branch itself, assuming they currently are getting traffic to the site and have built some level of authority in the niche/region, they will lose all that if they go setup a new site. They will be starting from scratch. They'll have a new site with no rankings, no inbound links, and no traffic. Maybe in the long-run they can improve on things, but in the short-term. It's going to stink.
For both of these issues, the solution would be to redirect all the Branch A pages on the parent site to the new Branch A site. That way the user experience is good (users land on the pages they expected to) and Branch A has a site that, from the start, already has authority and traffic. The down side to this, is that the loss of authority to the parent site by redirecting all these pages, could hurt the other branches. It's hard to say how much without knowing how many branches there are, how many links are going to the various pages, etc.
Just some things to think about.
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com -
Yes, there is a possibility. If there are links the disconnecting branch, it can impact the juice flow throughout your site. And 301 redirecting to another site will point all the juice over there as well.
Depending on the amount of links and internal linking structure of your site, it can possibly hurt your overall rankings but it depends(as always).
If they must, I suggest linking back to the original company's site just to be sure they are still connected in a way.
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
-
Breaking up a site into multiple sites
Hi, I am working on plan to divide up mid-number DA website into multiple sites. So the current site's content will be divided up among these new sites. We can't share anything going forward because each site will be independent. The current homepage will change to just link out to the new sites and have minimal content. I am thinking the websites will take a hit in rankings but I don't know how much and how long the drop will last. I know if you redirect an entire domain to a new domain the impact is negligible but in this case I'm only redirecting parts of a site to a new domain. Say we rank #1 for "blue widget" on the current site. That page is going to be redirected to new site and new domain. How much of a drop can we expect? How hard will it be to rank for other new keywords say "purple widget" that we don't have now? How much link juice can i expect to pass from current website to new websites? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timdavis0 -
Why my site not ranking
Hello everyone, can anyone suggest me, where i am having problem in my site www.suntechengineers.com, i know content is less,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | poojathakar
but any other things that i am missing in my site? Is There any on page query please let me know, i need urgently getting up this,please help thanx in advance0 -
Removing content from Google's Indexes
Hello Mozers My client asked a very good question today. I didn't know the answer, hence this question. When you submit a 'Removing content for legal reasons report': https://support.google.com/legal/contact/lr_legalother?product=websearch will the person(s) owning the website containing this inflammatory content recieve any communication from Google? My clients have already had the offending URL removed by a court order which was sent to the offending company. However now the site has been relocated and the same content is glaring out at them (and their potential clients) with the title "Solicitors from Hell + Brand name" immediately under their SERPs entry. **I'm going to follow the advice of the forum and try to get the url removed via Googles report system as well as the reargard action of increasing my clients SERPs entries via Social + Content. ** However, I need to be able to firmly tell my clients the implications of submitting a report. They are worried that if they rock the boat this URL (with open access for reporting of complaints) will simply get more inflammatory)! By rocking the boat, I mean, Google informing the owners of this "Solicitors from Hell" site that they have been reported for "hosting defamatory" content. I'm hoping that Google wouldn't inform such a site, and that the only indicator would be an absence of visits. Is this the case or am I being too optimistic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | catherine-2793880 -
Does duplicate content penalize the whole site or just the pages affected?
I am trying to assess the impact of duplicate content on our e-commerce site and I need to know if the duplicate content is affecting only the pages that contain the dupe content or does it affect the whole site? In Google that is. But of course. Lol
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Lost all ranking after site-wide 301 redirect
Hi all I did a complete site-wide 310 redirect about 3 weeks ago for a site that had consistently been in Pos 1-5 for my targeted keyword ("low glycemic foods"). I changed the domain from low-glycemic-foods-org to low-glycemic-diet.com because I thought that was a more appropriate title and thru my readings I believed that if I carefully followed the recommended procedures I would quickly regain my SERP. Webmaster tools is showing that I have over 800 inbound links - many from very trustworthy sources including .edu, etc BUT my home page is nowhere to be found for the keyword search "low glycemic diet". My Seomoz onpage SEO score is an "A" Any enlightenment would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | veezer0 -
Can a Hosting provider that also hosts adult content sites negatively affect our SEO rankings on a non-adult site hosted on same platform?
We're considering moving a site to a host that also offers hosting for adult websites. Can this have a negative affect on SEO, if our hosting company is in any way associated with adult websites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grapevinemktg0 -
Should I change site link structure? Will that make things worse?
I've got an Exact Match Domain that has just started to do well in Google for say the past year. I've always received good rankings from Bing and Yahoo but I love the traffic levels that Google sends. Long story short on the 25th according to webmaster tools, my impressions on their search engine have been destroyed. No problems, not de-indexed, just not showing my site anymore. I like this site and have been careful, built some links and the anchor text is suspect but also not suspect because its the same as the domain. What I feel the problem may be is the site structure. I set it up a long time ago like this: Exact-Match-keyword. com/ Exact-match-keyword.php/state I thought it looked kinda spammy at the time but also thought it may help. Now I'm wondering if I shorten all the page titles to the state name and 301 the old links if I will regain rankings, or if I may lose some from other search engines. I used to think Penguins were cute......
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TEGS1 -
Mobile Site - Same Content, Same subdomain, Different URL - Duplicate Content?
I'm trying to determine the best way to handle my mobile commerce site. I have a desktop version and a mobile version using a 3rd party product called CS-Cart. Let's say I have a product page. The URLs are... mobile:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grayloon
store.domain.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.catalog#products.view&product_id=857 desktop:
store.domain.com/two-toned-tee.html I've been trying to get information regarding how to handle mobile sites with different URLs in regards to duplicate content. However, most of these results have the assumption that the different URL means m.domain.com rather than the same subdomain with a different address. I am leaning towards using a canonical URL, if possible, on the mobile store pages. I see quite a few suggesting to not do this, but again, I believe it's because they assume we are just talking about m.domain.com vs www.domain.com. Any additional thoughts on this would be great!0