Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Breaking up a site into multiple sites
-
Hi,
I am working on plan to divide up mid-number DA website into multiple sites. So the current site's content will be divided up among these new sites. We can't share anything going forward because each site will be independent. The current homepage will change to just link out to the new sites and have minimal content.
I am thinking the websites will take a hit in rankings but I don't know how much and how long the drop will last. I know if you redirect an entire domain to a new domain the impact is negligible but in this case I'm only redirecting parts of a site to a new domain. Say we rank #1 for "blue widget" on the current site. That page is going to be redirected to new site and new domain. How much of a drop can we expect? How hard will it be to rank for other new keywords say "purple widget" that we don't have now? How much link juice can i expect to pass from current website to new websites?
Thank you in advance.
-
I had 2 business websites & it became an issue because our backlinks were all from the same sources & were competing & I do not believe Google liked us being 1 business with multiple websites.
We combined ours into 1 & it's going well as we managed to retain rankings.
If it's a business website you have then in my opinion you should keep things the same as more & more people are creating multiple websites & Google will eventually be forced to act against it.
I type this as someone who battles a Competitor with 5 websites.
Personally I think your rankings will nosedive as your homepage will be thin content & Google won't like the new domains with no authority or backlinks.
I'm no expert but i'very been around the block.
What has prompted you to want to split the domains?
-
Yes, I do understand the site would be stronger if it remained one site but that is not going to be possible. Yes, I know all new sites wont rank as well. We will do aggressive content and link building to help the recovery. What I was looking for was some people who have experience doing this to see how big of an impact I can expect and how long it takes to recover based on other's experiences.
-
A long-time military strategy has been "divide and conquer".
The same holds true for a website. The strength of one part of the website supports the strength of other parts of a website.
If you remove one part, the remaining part will take a hit if the part that was removed had valuable links. The part that was removed will not perform as well as it was partially supported the the strength of the rest of the site.
I'd like to spin off a couple parts of my site - and I have good business reasons for doing that. However, I know that I will suffer traffic hits and income hits. I will also suffer visibility hits because one part of the site promotes other parts of the site, and lots of my visitors click back and forth through these different parts of the website.
So, instead of being happy about having a bunch of tidy little sites, I am sticking with the big site because it kicks ass.
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
-
Event Schema for Multiple Occurrences
I am wondering the best way to mark up an event page with multiple occurrences. For example, we have an event that happens over the course of 4 sequential weekends:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Your_Workshop
9/28-9/29
10/5-10/6
10/12-10/13
10/19-10/20 Our website allows us to enter multiple occurrences that results in a single event listing page which outputs all dates (to eliminate duplicate content, titles, metas, etc.) but allows each occurrence to output individually on our events calendar in the respective individual date. Each time the event is shown, it links to the same listing page. I am wondering if we can add event schema on a single listing multiple times to cover each occurrence. In the above example, we would have 4 schemas on the listing page for each date range/weekend. In our current schema, we end up with a start and end date identified as 9/28-10/20 but it is not clear that the event is just happening on the weekends with gaps in between. Any suggestions are welcome however, we are really trying to NOT list each as an individual event on the website both for the duplicate content issue and the extra burden on our client that lists events for a very large geographic area.0 -
Same site serving multiple countries and duplicated content
Hello! Though I browse MoZ resources every day, I've decided to directly ask you a question despite the numerous questions (and answers!) about this topic as there are few specific variants each time: I've a site serving content (and products) to different countries built using subfolders (1 subfolder per country). Basically, it looks like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GhillC
site.com/us/
site.com/gb/
site.com/fr/
site.com/it/
etc. The first problem was fairly easy to solve:
Avoid duplicated content issues across the board considering that both the ecommerce part of the site and the blog bit are being replicated for each subfolders in their own language. Correct me if I'm wrong but using our copywriters to translate the content and adding the right hreflang tags should do. But then comes the second problem: how to deal with duplicated content when it's written in the same language? E.g. /us/, /gb/, /au/ and so on.
Given the following requirements/constraints, I can't see any positive resolution to this issue:
1. Need for such structure to be maintained (it's not possible to consolidate same language within one single subfolders for example),
2. Articles from one subfolder to another can't be canonicalized as it would mess up with our internal tracking tools,
3. The amount of content being published prevents us to get bespoke content for each region of the world with the same spoken language. Given those constraints, I can't see a way to solve that out and it seems that I'm cursed to live with those duplicated content red flags right up my nose.
Am I right or can you think about anything to sort that out? Many thanks,
Ghill0 -
Multiple H2 tags
Is it advisable to use only one H2 tag? The template designs for some reason is ended up with multiple H2 tags, I realise if any think it's that each one is that are important and it is all relative. Just trying to assess if it's worth the time and effort to rehash the template. Has anyone done any testing or got any experience? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman101 -
SEO for multiple languages [Arabic]
Hello all, I am currently managing a Marketplace that comes in two different languages: English & Arabic. The English website is, fortunately, doing quite well in terms of SEO performances but, not the Arabic one. The website has two kinds of content: Static content: controlled by me. It includes menu items, navigation, static pages etc which is properly translated among the two languages User-uploaded content: It includes ads/news posted by the user which may not be translated to Arabic if they chose not to do it. Now if somebody goes to the Arabic website and check a news item that doesn't have an Arabic translation, it will show the English title. I am assuming, serving content in a different language that is specified in the hreflang is a straight no, right?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MozammilStorat0 -
Regional and Global Site
We have numerous versions of what is basically the same site, that targets different countries, such as United States, United Kingdom, South Africa. These websites use Tlds to designate the region, for example, co.uk, co.za I believe this is sufficient (with a little help from Google Webmastertools) to convince the search engines what site is for what region. My question is how do we tell the search engines to send traffic from other regions besides the above to our global site, which would have a .com TLD. For example, we don't have a Brazilian site, how do we drive traffic from Brazil to our global .com site? Many thanks, Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Clickmetrics0 -
Multiple 301 Redirects for the Same Page
Hi Mozzers, What happens if I have a trail of 301 redirects for the same page? For example,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
SiteA.com/10 --> SiteA.com/11 --> SiteA.com/13 --> SiteA.com/14 I know I lose a little bit of link juice by 301 redirecting.
The question is, would the link juice look like this for the example above? 100% --> 90% --> 81% -->72.9%
Or just 100% -----------------------------------------> 90% Does this link juice refer to juice from inbound links or links between internal pages on my site? Thanks!0 -
Outbound Links to Authority sites
Will outbound links to a related topic on an authority site help, hurt or be irrelevanent for SEO purposes. And if beneficially, should it be Nofollow?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VictorVC0 -
URL Structure for Directory Site
We have a directory that we're building and we're not sure if we should try to make each page an extension of the root domain or utilize sub-directories as users narrow down their selection. What is the best practice here for maximizing your SERP authority? Choice #1 - Hyphenated Architecture (no sub-folders): State Page /state/ City Page /city-state/ Business Page /business-city-state/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knowyourbank
4) Location Page /locationname-city-state/ or.... Choice #2 - Using sub-folders on drill down: State Page /state/ City Page /state/city Business Page /state/city/business/
4) Location Page /locationname-city-state/ Again, just to clarify, I need help in determining what the best methodology is for achieving the greatest SEO benefits. Just by looking it would seem that choice #1 would work better because the URL's are very clear and SEF. But, at the same time it may be less intuitive for search. I'm not sure. What do you think?0