Subfolder marketing issue - buying a new domain and 301 to subfolder on existing domain

[mintmediadu]

Hello, I have a specific question and I'll try to be as precise as possible.

I have a well ranked domain with good PA. When we were starting our new service I found out that for SEO purposes it would be best to put it under subfolder instead of subdomain or new domain all together because of PA that our domain has.

Now, that went pretty well and our new service started appearing in SERPs and is improving rapidly since our link builing strategies were quite sucessful.

But there is a problem - we can't advertise our service with a link like this - www.domain.com/subfolder. It's just really messy. And I was wondering if we buy a new domain and 301 redirect it to our subfolder what impacts will that have? If people start linking us as www.newdomain.com will it pass all the juice to www.domain.com/subfolder?

Marketing wise I see a lot of benefits using newdomain but I'm afraid it can have SEO downsides and I'm asking for your help to clarify these.

Thank you in advance,

Best regards,

Ivan

[mintmediadu]

Hi Chris,

First, thank you for your response. We are builing links to that subpage and that's working fine. Probably I was not clear enough.

My problem here is offline marketing and building brand awarenes. We'll have printing material, stickers, tshirts etc. and link www.domain.com/subpage on it is really going to look ugly. That's why I was thinking on buying a new domain so it can 301 to this subpage and we can use it offline and online for branding purposes. So if at one point number of links to that new domain surpasses number of links to subpage will that have any negative impact and will all the juice be transfered to subpage.

Best regards,

Ivan

[ChrisAshton]

Hi there!

To answer your question directly, I'd suggest having a read through this post from Cyrus a few months back. In short, 301s should now pass all strength through... but this is Google we're talking about here so please read the whole post before taking any action.

With that out of the way, I should also point out that there seems to be a bit of a misconception here. Having backlinks point directly to your subfolder(s)/subpage(s) is exactly what you should be doing with your link building efforts, it's just something that most don't think to do or don't know they should be doing!

If you drive 100% of your links to the home page, that's great for the home page's strength but if you want to be ranking subpages as well, plenty of effort should be going into building links for that pages too. While backlinks to any page on the site will help the entire domain's strength, each page is also weighed up by it's own metrics.

My suggestion here would be to forget about the complications of buying another domain, driving links to it and redirecting them all and just build links to each of your landing pages directly instead. There's nothing awkward about linking to website.com/subfolder because nobody will ever even see that link, all the user will ever see is just the anchor text, just like the link I provided above. You see "this post from Cyrus" in blue text but the actual link is https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo"

URLs (URIs) are rarely user friendly, that's exactly why we use anchor text!