Is repurposing an old sub domain better than creating a new sub domain?
-
We have a good sub domain like** art.ourwebsite.com** which currently sells custom canvas art. We have owned the domain since 2013 but it has only been live for the past few weeks. We want to redesign & repurpose the page to continue to sell custom canvas art but will eventually include other merchandise like mugs, tshirts, etc which wouldn't be custom.
Would it be best to keep art.ourwebsite.com since is a shorter/more memorible & older sub domain or would it be best to update the name to something that encompasses our new products? Our marketing team has suggested yourart.ourwebsite.com
-
Hi,
Great question. Normally it is best to use an old sub domain. Said that, it will depend if it has good inbound links highly thematically related with the new products/content.I think it is not accurate that the url should contain an exact match to the products. It is best if it contains a comprehensive keyword as "a full picture" for products related to "art" in this case.
When I face these facts I question myself, when a visitor will arrive, will he find the product/knowledge as I said in the page title and the meta description?. If so, I keep the sub domain and the pages of interest, as well.
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
-
Old forum with 404s, what should I do?
Hello, So I'm helping out some friends with their SEO. I've just run a Screaming Frog crawl of their entire site (which took hours and hours I might add). They used to have a forum connected to the site, which is no longer active. Google is still indexing all of the old URLs, which unsurprisingly return 404 errors. What should they do to prevent Google from indexing these pages? That's assuming they need to do anything at all. They don't have access to these old forum posts and therefore won't be able to fix the URL or resource adding a 301 redirect pointing to the most relevant alternate page. I'm new to SEO but my instinct is that they need to have the page return a 410 ‘Gone’ response code to give search engines a clear signal that the page no longer exists and won’t be returning, and removing the internal links to that URL or resource. 1. Is this interpretation correct?
Technical SEO | | jordanayresaira
2. What is the impact of leaving these 404s? There are over a thousand, so there's a lot 3. What should I recommend?0 -
Spammers created bad links to old hacked domain, now redirected to our new domain. Advice?
My client had an old site hacked (let's call it "myolddomain.com") and the hackers created many links in other hacked sites with links such as http://myolddomain.com/styless.asp?jordan-12-taxi-kids-cheap-T8927.html The old myolddomain.com site was redirected to a different new site since then, but we still see over a thousand spam links showing up in the new site's Search Console 404 crawl errors report. Also, using the links: operator in google search, we see many results of spam links. Should we be worried about these bad links pointing to our old site and redirecting to 404s on the new site? What is the best recommendation to clean them up? Ignore? 410s? Other? I'm seeing conflicting advice out there. The old site is hosted by the client's previous web developer who doesn't want to clean anything up on their end without an ongoing hosting contract. So beyond turning redirects on or off, the client doesn't want to pay for any additional hosting. So we don't have much control over anything related to "myolddomain.com". 😞 Thanks in advance for any assistance!
Technical SEO | | usDragons0 -
New site - http or https?
Hi. We are currently in the process of creating a new website. We will be using our old domain name. However, the current website is currently live on both http and https protocols, with no re-directs in place. When we launch the new website, we would like to redirect everything to one or the other. Would the preference be to use https as the preferred protocol?
Technical SEO | | Lexica0 -
I have a sub domain that has live content on it but the root domain redirects to another URL. I know this is not great but what are the implications?
I have a subdomain that is populated and has content. The root domain that the sub lives on redirects to an entirely different URL. I am trying to make a case as to why this isn't great besides the fact that it is just weird user experiences. What are the SEO implications etc. Would any equity that gets built up on the subdomain get passed along in the redirect? Or will there be indexation issues with Google? Cheers, Mark
Technical SEO | | mjsikorsky0 -
Root domain ranks higher than sub pages
Our website is over 10 years old and has been very successful with google. We rank highly for our keywords, but recently a strange thing has happend. Google has indexed a video from our front page (which no longer exists) and shows this listing instead of the sub pages. This means the listing is irrelevant to the search term. Term is "Junior Cricket Bats"
Technical SEO | | NickKer
https://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLL_en-GBGB377GB377&q=junior+cricket+bats should some up with this page
http://www.cricketsupplies.com/junior-cricket-bats.asp but shows the root domain
http://www.cricketsupplies.com/ with this video link which does not exist We should be ranking really well , and were , but now not so good , even though SEOmoz loves our pages if anybody can see anything obvious i would be thanksful. regards0 -
Need some help with an old wordpress site we just merged with a new template
Sorry. URL is awardrealty.com I have a new website that we merged into a new wordpress theme. I just crawled the site with my seomoz crawl tool and it is showing a ridiculous amount of 4xx pages (200+) and we cant find the 4xx pages in the sitemap or within wordpress. Need some help? Am i missing something easy?
Technical SEO | | Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.0 -
Keyword in Domain or not?
My on page optimization grade is an "A" with the following factors; Factor Overview <dl class="scoreboard clearfix"> <dt>Critical Factors</dt> <dd>4 / 4</dd> <dt>High Importance Factors</dt> <dd>7 / 7</dd> <dt>Moderate Importance Factors</dt> <dd>8 / 9</dd> <dt>Low Importance Factors</dt> <dd>11 / 11</dd> <dt>Optional Factors</dt> <dd>5 / 5</dd> </dl> The main thing I appear to be missing is keywords in my URL. How truly important is that in today's SEO world and how much time or ranking would be lost if I do not have control to change the external links to my website if I decided to migrate to a keyword relevant url?
Technical SEO | | classa0 -
Selecting a new domain name
If a two word domain is already taken (e.g. onetwo.com), which of the following is a better alternative? 1. one-two.com 2. onetwo.org Best,
Technical SEO | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher0