Hi Peter,

I understand that the platform only allows for subdomains. From a purely SEO point of view, subfolders or pages are preferable to subdomains because authority does not appear to pass between a parent domain and its subdomains in the same way as it does between subfolders and parent domains. If your landing page sites are only one pagers, they may be seen as quite thin as well.

However, there is no reason why you can't build quality content like this - it just may take more link building to establish the authority for the subdomains than it would for pages on the same site. You will need to ensure that as much unique content as possible is placed on the landing pages to increase their 'worth' in Google's eyes, given that they are separate from each other on subdomains.

Hi Peter,

In some ways, subdirectories seems even more sensible when you're dealing with single landing pages, as they'll work together somewhat to look like a fuller site from Google's perspective, rather than just a collection of subdomains happening to exist on the same domain.

Hi there,

If you are using the canonical tag and it is displayed properly on the UTM URLs, pointing to the canonical URL, then these links will pass value if they are followed. There are a range of reasons why someone might use UTM tags - a lot of services tag outbound links with this for tracking purposes. I would definitely try to get links nofollowed if the UTM (or another metric) clearly identifies that they are paid links and could be picked up by Google either manually or algorithmically, but the fact that the link contains the tracking code won't absolutely determine it as paid, and you can still gain authority from these links with correct canonicalisation.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi,

CleverPhD has a great response, but I wanted to add specifically that if you do this move, you will not lose the authority of those 13k links / 1,200 linking domains if you do the 301 redirection process properly. The guides linked to in CleverPhD's comment will help.

301 redirects pass the majority of authority from one URL to another, but you may also want to create a list of the top linking websites from that 1,200 and contact them after you have completed the move, asking them to update their links to you. This will ensure that you retain your best links on top of properly redirecting all the others.

Hosting these pages as subfolders instead of subdomains should be fine, and is the "traditional" way of presenting new content with the highest likelihood that the content will inherit authority from its parent domain from an SEO point of view. They should rank just as well as if they were on subdomains or separate domains.

Separate installations and themes should not make a difference; Google will be absolutely clear in its understanding that these sub-brands are related to the main brand and to each other, so assuming you are fine with this, different design and CMS installations will not make a difference.