Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Chris, Bernadette and Donna for your thoughtful answers.  After considering your advice (and the resources you shared), I think it's worth a try.  If nothing else, it will be a good experiment (and fairly low risk -- even though the pdf ranks #1, it's not a high-volume term).  I think it will be important for the landing page to provide a really meaty, useful synopsis (as Chris suggested) that still offers some value on its own.  Thanks again!

-John

Hi!  We have a pdf of a white paper on our site that ranks #1 for a niche term.  We are now exploring the idea of building a landing page for this paper with an overview (2-3 paragraphs) and a registration form for interested parties to fill out in order to access the paper.

Do you think there'd be any hope of ensuring the new landing page would rank almost as well eventually (top 3)? I'm thinking a key consideration would be preserving the link juice from the existing links that are coming into the pdf, and that 301 redirecting the pdf URL to the new landing page URL could help with that.  Am I right?  Or would it be better to try to reach out to the linking sites and ask them to update their links (seems daunting).

Any advice/opinions on this situation would be appreciated.  (If folks think that there would be a significant risk of permanently dropping out of the top 5 by attempting this, we would likely choose to leave the pdf ungated as is.)  Thanks!!

-John

Thanks Robert and Erick for your quick and thoughtful answers!  Robert, to clarify based on your foursquare dilemma, we are currently in situation 1) and it sounds like we ought to move to situation 4).

Erick, regarding the point you make in reason #4 ("the way you have it set up right now you may not be getting the DA of your parent site anyway") -- It appears that in terms of DA, www.parent.com and blogs.parent.com are the same.  However, the TF and CF for blogs.parent.com are significantly lower than www.parent.com (and lower than www.child.com), so I think your point is valid.

I hear what you're saying regarding the Parent/Child relationship and the need to be careful.  I think our situation is very much analogous to the P&G example, so I think we'd be fine.

Thanks again to you both for the great insights!

Hello wonderful Moz community!  I need some advice.  Here is the situation:  I work in a small division within a much larger company.  We each have our own domain, i.e. www.parent.com and www.child.com.  We (the child) have a domain authority of 57, while our parent has a domain authority of 86.  Our blog lives on blogs.parent.com/child.  My understanding is that www.brand.com/blogs is better for SEO than blogs.brand.com (we had no control of directory structure decisions at the parent level).

Given all that, in terms of maximizing traffic to our domain, would we be better off moving our blog to www.child.com/blogs? Here are a couple of potential pros/cons bouncing around in my newbie brain:

a) By moving the blog to our domain, our whole site could benefit from having any external links our blog posts earn point back to our domain vs. our parent's domain.

b) On the other hand, leaving the blog on our parent's domain and then linking to our content from posts over there might give our content a boost.  (Of course, that theory is shot down if Google recognizes our parent/child relationship and doesn't reward our site with the benefit of linkbacks coming from our parent domain.)

What say you?  Are there other angles to this I’m not even considering?  If you think the right decision is to move the blog over to our site, any suggestions on how not to screw that up?  (301’s, etc.) Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

-John

Thanks Chris, Bernadette and Donna for your thoughtful answers.  After considering your advice (and the resources you shared), I think it's worth a try.  If nothing else, it will be a good experiment (and fairly low risk -- even though the pdf ranks #1, it's not a high-volume term).  I think it will be important for the landing page to provide a really meaty, useful synopsis (as Chris suggested) that still offers some value on its own.  Thanks again!

-John

Thanks Robert and Erick for your quick and thoughtful answers!  Robert, to clarify based on your foursquare dilemma, we are currently in situation 1) and it sounds like we ought to move to situation 4).

Erick, regarding the point you make in reason #4 ("the way you have it set up right now you may not be getting the DA of your parent site anyway") -- It appears that in terms of DA, www.parent.com and blogs.parent.com are the same.  However, the TF and CF for blogs.parent.com are significantly lower than www.parent.com (and lower than www.child.com), so I think your point is valid.

I hear what you're saying regarding the Parent/Child relationship and the need to be careful.  I think our situation is very much analogous to the P&G example, so I think we'd be fine.

Thanks again to you both for the great insights!