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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.
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,
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.
Hi there,
It would be much trickier to do this with blog content given that it is naturally archived in a chronological way, unlike static web pages which can be updated with new dates. If you found you had a selection of blog posts that you wanted to update like this, I'd say you needed to turn these into static articles first and use the method Rand suggests going forward. Obviously that would require new URLs and redirects.
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.