One website with multiple advertising domains?

[Jazee]

Working on a website for a business with distinct lines of business, one is more B2C and one is B2B yet the type of service is related.  To think of an example, let's say it's for a photographer who does weddings, but also does real estate photography.  He wants to make sure he can market to each audience separately so when they go to his homepage the homepage content is oriented for the services that audience is looking for.

If you use two separate websites, they have to be totally unique to avoid dupe content flags, and you also end up diluting each website's domain authority since you are spreading your inbound links between two different websites.  However would this be the optimum strategy then?

One website hosted on: bozophotography.com

A second domain: bozoweddings.com that has a 301 redirect to the wedding section home page on bozophotography.com

A third domain: bozorealestatephotos.com that has a 301 redirect to the real estate section home page.

So on certain advertising, business cards, etc, the business could choose which domain they want to publicize to insure the audience sees a home page related to that line of business.

I suppose you could publicize it as a subdomain like: realestate.bozophotography.com or as a slash address: bozophotography.com/weddings but those seem much less professional, visually, than just having bozoweddings.com.

There is rumor you don't quite get 100% of the link juice, but the main domain would be used the majority of the time so I really see no downside?

[Jazee]

The domains in question are brand new and have no website associated with them.  As I described, they are just being used for advertising to certain audiences.

Essentially instead of using subdomains (department.domain.com) or sub folders  domain.com/department, I want to use domaindepartment.com  so I can print domaindepartment.com on business cards and those recipients when they go to domaindepartment.com they will be redirect to the department section of domain.com

[EGOL]

If the domain being moved has pages with good content that are ranking, the content of those pages should be moved to the new domain.  That will help preserve traffic that comes into those pages.  Get these pages ready, but don't publish they until you are ready to make the switch.

The hosting for the domain being moved should be kept permanently.  You can reduce the plan to low traffic levels but it needs to be there with your redirects.  If you abandon it then any traffic that clicks through links will not be redirected and the value of links pointing to the domain will be lost.

If there are links on other sites that you can have edited to their new destination, contact those webmasters after the redirect has been made.

Starting soon, before the switch. Place notices that click to short announcements on the domain being moved telling customers about the switch.  That will hold current customers and not surprise them when the switch occurs.

After the switch, the links to the domain that was moved will now point to the combined domain.  If these sites have different link sources then they will be combined in the new domain.  If the domain being moved had lots of different links that the domain being moved to that will give maximum benefit.  If they duplicate one another's links then the benefit will be very small.

You can notify google of the redirect in your search console.

There are many fine points of redirecting that might not be covered above.  If you have not done this before it would be wise to have an experience SEO help you plan and execute the move.  That way all of the things that you do will be checked and they will watch to be sure that nothing is missed.  I am not saying this because I am looking for work.  I don't do work for others.  I only work on my own sites.  I am saying this because its a smart thing to do if you don't have a bit of experience with moving domains.

[Jazee]

So The strategy being considered at this point is to have the domain name used for advertising one of the service types to do a 301 redirect to the subsection home page of that service on the main website.

I'm curious what Google will do when it sees this domain in links on Yelp, etc and sees there are no pages for this website and it only redirects to this other domain?  I assume Google won't index it, which is fine, but could it somehow have a negative effect on the main website, other than maybe losing 10% of the 'link juice' for backlinks using the alternate domain name?  Or should we put a robots.txt on the domain's website (that isn't redirected) with a noindex directive to be safe?  Or could that trigger some sort of red flag with Google Places for business that we are using a domain for advertising that is redirected and not indexed?

[EGOL]

Everything that I believe about SEO tells me that a big and diverse photography site will perform better than two little photography sites.  So I would offer multiple photography services on the same domain.

I don't think that a person who shoots photos at weddings is going to be a total bozo about shooting photos of houses or offices.  Great photographers are great photographers and their body of knowledge is versatile and transferable to different subjects.

Also, I think that a person who lands on a website about photography and is given choices for weddings, real estate, product, and other types of photography is going to think that they should leave right away.  They might find respect in the individual or the team that offers these many services.

I think that for every customer that you lose because he thinks that you can't do more than one type of photography, you will gain a customer who gets wedding photos done and then comes back for more good work related to real estate.  Lots of people who are getting married are also going to be in the process of selling a home.   They hopefully will not be hiring you for another wedding any time soon.  Repeat customers are easier sells than a potential customer who knows nothing about you.