New domain or subdirectory?

[VSphoto]

I noticed my domain authority has dropped slightly in the recent update, and it has me re-thinking a strategy for a website I just recently launched. I purchased the domain name kansasisbeautiful.com about a year ago and have been working on building it for most of that time. Earlier in August, I went ahead and launched it. However, towards the end of the development of the website, I decided to just put it in a subdirectory of my parent company (my photography business) at mickeyshannon.com/kansas and redirected the kansasisbeautiful.com domain to the subdirectory. mickeyshannon.com is my photography business website. The Kansas website has it's own distinct design, but is powered completely by my photography. I created it for a few purposes, including promoting tourism to the state of Kansas and to publish a book on Kansas travel next year, but one of it's main goals is also to help sell my photography prints. I decided to put it in a subdirectory (mickeyshannon.com/kansas) as I had hoped it might drive more traffic into buying photo prints if it lived on my main website.

However, I've been re-thinking my strategy and have been wondering if I'm competing against myself too much. Many of my photography prints have the name of a location in them and have their own URL per photo (for example: "Flint Hills Spring Sunrise" is at http://www.mickeyshannon.com/photo/flint-hills-spring-sunset/). It makes me wonder if the new Kansas travel website page for the Flint Hills (http://www.mickeyshannon.com/kansas/flint-hills/) is competing for that keyword. Would I be better moving mickeyshannon.com/kansas to kansasisbeautiful.com? I was worried having so many backlinks back to my photography site would send up red flags with Google as if the kansasisbeautiful.com website was just a spammy website created to push traffic to mickeyshannon.com when it really has it's own purpose.

Any thoughts on whether using the domain name or keeping it at the subdomain level is better? Hopefully that made sense.

Thanks,

Mickey

[GastonRiera]

You're welcome.

Take a look of the links that are pointing to your sites. There might be some to disavow. Use also complementary platforms: ahrefs, magestic, or others.
A spam score of 2 is not big deal. Monitor your backlinks and do not do spam

Best Luck!
GR.

[VSphoto]

Thanks Gaston!

I'll probably stay the course within the subdirectory. I slightly wonder if the kansasisbeautiful.com domain is hurting me in some way. I originally developed the site there, then about a month before launch, moved it to mickeyshannon.com/kansas. I redirected everything in the domain to the new location before launching. kansasisbeautiful.com has a spam score of 5. My mickeyshannon.com always had a spam score of 1, but recently jumped to 2 around the same time as this. Could the redirects be hurting me in some weird way? I never advertised the domain name. I mainly use it to link to the site on social media (so that it looks like it's coming from the TLD).

Thanks!

[GastonRiera]

Hi Mickey,

There are 2 ideas to say here:

1. Sudirectory. Staying within your main site will give you authority because it's a part of a bigger site.
2. Separate site. This will  create a different site (of course) that will need its own authority, and will take time to build.

Regarding the "competition" between sites, it depends whether they are focused on to the same kwywords. That would not be right. There should be different targeted term for every page/site.

My opinion: Stay as a sudirectory. Work hard in on-page optimization.

Best Luck.
GR.