Subdomains vs. Subfolders vs. New Site
-
Hello geniuses!!!
Here's my Friday puzzle:
We have a plastic surgery client who already has a website that's performing fairly well and is driving in leads. She is going to be offering a highly specialized skincare program for cancer patients, and wants a new logo, new website and new promo materials all for this new skincare program.
So here's the thing - my gut reaction says NO NEW WEBSITE! NO SUBDOMAIN! because of everything I've read about moving things on and off subdomains, etc (I just studied this: http://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday). And, why wouldn't we want to use the authority of her current site, right?
While she doesn't necessarily have a high authority domain - we're not talking WebMD, here - she does have some authority that we've built over time.
But, because this is a pretty separate product from her general plastic surgery practice, what would you guys do? Since we'll be creating a logo and skincare "look and feel" for this product, and there will likely be a lot of information involved with it, I don't think we'll be able to just create one page.
Is it smart to:
a) build a separate site in a subfolder of her current site? (plasticsurgerypractice.com/skincare)
b) build a subdomain? (skincare.plasticsurgerypractice.com)
c) build her a new site (plasticsurgeryskincare.com)
-
i don't see any reason, in your exposition, to choose any different route than first option
check the domain authority of the second level domain your client is currently using and evaluate how much time and money you need to replicate the same DA to a new domain, then ask yourself and your client if it's worth it. Don't forget to mention all that work to rank for the new domain is not going to help the old one, and when same DA is reached you will still have to face duplicate effort to improve DA of both.
of course there are other factors which could still weight in favor of the separate domain, like banaly if she want to take distance from her main practice, if the existing domain suffered from penalization, etc...
but without knowing much I don't see a reason to go that 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
-
M.ExampleSite vs mobile.ExampleSite vs ExampleSite.com
Hi, I have a call with a potential client tomorrow where all I know is that they are wigged-out about canonicalization, indexing and architecture for their three sites: m.ExampleSite.com mobile.ExampleSite.com ExampleSite.com The sites are pretty large... 350k for the mobiles and 5 million for the main site. They're a retailer with endless products. They're main site is not mobile-responsive, which is evidently why they have the m and mobile sites. Why two, I don't know. This is how they currently hand this: What would you suggest they do about this? The most comprehensive fix would be making the main site mobile responsive and 301 the old mobile sub domains to the main site. That's probably too much work for them. So, what more would you suggest and why? Your thoughts? Best... Mike P.S., Beneath my hand-drawn portrait avatar above it says "Staff" at this moment, which I am not. Some kind of bug I guess.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
SEO question regarding rails app on www.site.com hosted on Heroku and www.site.com/blog at another host
Hi, I have a rails app hosted on Heroku (www.site.com) and would much prefer to set up a Wordpress blog using a different host pointing to www.site.com/blog, as opposed to using a gem within the actual app. Whats are peoples thoughts regarding there being any ranking implications for implementing the set up as noted in this post on Stackoverflow: "What I would do is serve your Wordpress blog along side your Rails app (so you've got a PHP and a Rails server running), and just have your /blog route point to a controller that redirects to your Wordpress app. Add something like this to your routes.rb: _`get '/blog', to:'blog#redirect'`_ and then have a redirect method in your BlogController that simply does this: _`classBlogController<applicationcontrollerdef redirect="" redirect_to="" "url_of_wordpress_blog"endend<="" code=""></applicationcontrollerdef>`_ _Now you can point at yourdomain.com/blog and it will take you to the Wordpress site._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Anward0 -
New Site Structure and 301s
We're moving towards a new site with new site structure. The old site has numerous backlinks to past events that won't be published on the new site. The new site will have about 60 future events that are currently active on the old site as well. I was wondering the best way to move forward with the 301 redirect plan. I was considering redirecting the old site structure to an "archive.ourdomain.co.uk" subdomain and redirecting the 60 or so active events to their equivalents on the new site. Would this be a sensible plan? Also for the active events, is there any difference between: _redirecting the old page to the archive page and then forwarding to the equivalent on the new page _ and redirecting the old page directly to the new page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chanm790 -
301 entire site
Is there a good 301 code snippet to change just the root domain but keep the ending extensions? I just bid on a domain that I think would be much better for me moving forward, but do not want to have to try going through thousands of pages to do their 301 individually My site is almost 4 yrs old. Well established and has a large fanbase. Several of our social networks are under the name of the new branded domain, hence part of the desire to switch.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Micro sites?
Hi, I have been speaking to seo firms regarding strategies and they mentioned setting up micro sites under domains that are relevant. i.e setting up armanidoamin.co.uk and we use it as a blog type site to update all info, product reviews, news relating to armani. Whats peoples thoughts on this? Does it work? Is it worth the effort? Im not so sure but obviously looking for ideas. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA0 -
Duplicate content on subdomains.
Hi Mozer's, I have a site www.xyz.com and also geo targeted sub domains www.uk.xyz.com, www.india.xyz.com and so on. All the sub domains have the content which is same as the content on the main domain that is www.xyz.com. So, I want to know how can i avoid content duplication. Many Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HiteshBharucha0 -
SubDomain vs. SubFolder
I know this subject has been discussed many, many times before. But it is now 2013, and Google continues to tweak and change their algo to build upon the best delivered results for users. So the questions are: Does Google still treat subdomains as a completely separate and unique domain from the root? If so, is it a good SEO strategy to split up, when it fits, a website into subdomains with links pointing back to the root or main domain? As a company we have several subdomains with some of our categories. For example our main site is www.iboats.com. This site has all our boat products. But we set up subdomains several years ago for the following: boatcovers.iboats.com boatpropellers.iboats.com biminitops.iboats.com And we have our fourms as a subdomain: forums.iboats.com Splitting them out were originally done for SEO reasons, but now is more for better managing our main categories. It appears that Google is treating our subdomains as part of our main root domain anyway, so I don't see the SEO value anymore. If we were to move the subdomains into subfolders of the root, I'm wondering if we might see a boost in SEO value having more pages within the main website? I'd be interested in everyone's thoughts on this subject.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tdawson090 -
Any SEO suggestions for my site?
Site in question: http://bit.ly/Lcspfp Does anyone have any suggestions for any on-site SEO that would benefit my website? Any recommendations, big or small are appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichardTaylor1