Hi there

I wouldn't do this. What I would do is offer both sets of products under one site with distinctive brand names and markup. That way, your products will appear for their branded searches, with their own pages and rich snippets. I would not "mask" anything or try to trick search engines / users, because that's how you get penalized.

Hopefully I am understanding your question. I would really focus on what Dan Thorton said here...

"If there's no differentiation between the two brands, then there's no point in having them. But if one is targeting a different demographic, then there's a reason to create unique content which will appeal specifically to their audience. The actual product and data may be the same, but the benefit of bespoke content for the right audience will be an increase in conversion rates to actually purchase your services, rather than simply avoiding any SEO penalties..."

You have an opportunity here to have content that's targeted to two different audiences, and increase the overall conversion rate of your website by doing so. I would stick to this route and focus on building great content for each product, pleasing it's target audience.

Let me know if this helps or if you have any questions. Good luck!
Patrick

Hi there

No idea if it works or doesn't, but I'd be interested in hearing about it from a curiosity standpoint. My thought is if someone has thought to make a service / try it, Google is five steps ahead in preventing it from working in their algorithm. But yeah, would love to hear thoughts if someone has used it as well!

Thanks for starting what could be a really interesting discussion dude!
P

Hi there

Great answer above from Andy. My clients and I both use LinkedIn and Medium and have yet to see an issue. I have found it to be a great method of distributing content and gaining a wider audience while building my personal brand. Two things I'd like to throw in to easy worries...

First, I always include a link at the bottom of the content that says:

**This post was originally written and posted on MarcelDigital.com **- with a link to the post on Marcel Digital's website.

Second, another technique that I like is how Neil Patel posts on LinkedIn. He posts a good chunk of the article, BUT if you want to read the whole thing, you have to click a link about half way through the article that says "[click to continue reading...]". That way you're doing two things - giving credit to your website for the post and also driving traffic to your website.

Let me know if this makes sense or if you have any questions - good luck!
Patrick

Hi there

If the PDF's URLs are changing, then yes you should redirect the old URLs to the new URLs. Even more so than a search engine perspective, if users have bookmarked or saved the link to your content, they need to be redirected. My vote - include them, be on the safe side. Also make sure internal links and the sitemap XML is updated to include the new URLs.

Hope this helps! Good luck!
Patrick

Hi again

Utilize the /blog/ in the URL. Otherwise, you're creating a flat architecture to your site. Always include /blog/ in your URL if it is in fact a blog piece of content.

Hi Peter

I personally love local tracking - especially for clients I have that tend to serve certain cities or areas, and don't compete nationally in their industry. If you find some of your clients or websites aren't meant to rank and perform nationally, then I highly suggest focusing on local SERP performance. Just keep in mind that adding local keywords to track also takes away spots from your overall allotted keywords you can track in your campaigns - just be mindful!

You can learn more here from Moz.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi Amy

Before assuming it is the subdomain that is the reason for your root domain's issues, I would take a look at your Webmaster Tools and analytics.

From the Webmaster Tools standpoint - login to Webmaster Tools (if you don't have it, you'll have to sign up - there is information on the site). Click the website you want to check (and the subdomains - if they don't have a WMT profile, set one up for each), goto "Search Traffic" under Dashboard on the left sidebar menu, and then click "Manual Actions". Make sure your site doesn't have any Site Wide or Partial Match Actions. If it does, there is your answer (at least part of it). You'll need to remove those penalties and also start making headway to make sure whatever caused those penalties won't happen again.

If you're not seeing anything there, for your analytics, note when the root domain started seeing declines in traffic and conversions from an organic traffic standpoint, and then I would check your keyword rankings to see what keywords and landing pages (you can also check landing pages in analytics) saw the biggest drop offs.

From there, you can line up this information with Moz's Algorithm Update Change History. Here, you can read about specific updates that have happened over time, a short description of what they affected, and links to resources for more information. Based on pages or keywords you saw drops in, you can line up against these algorithm changes and line up if it's a content, backlink profile, or another issue.

I would also have someone do an audit of your website to see if you are having fundamental SEO onsite/offsite issues, make sure redirects are properly in place if content moved, and also make sure your backlink profile isn't giving you any issues.

To me, without knowing anything about your site beyond what you have talked about here, it sounds like there are underlying issues that could be giving you trouble, not the subdomain. Especially since you are saying there were issues, including duplicate content - that sounds like a big reason there.

Let me know if this helps or if you need any more guidance on this - it could be a lot of things! Good luck!

Hi there

I would check out Moz's post Local Landing Pages: A Guide To Great Implementation In Every Situation, particularly in the section National company desiring a local presence.

I would also take a look at Google's Service area maps resource.

Hope this all helps! Good luck!

Hi Amy

Subdomains CAN impact root domain performance, it's just a matter of how they interact. But it's odd that your sub domains are performing fine, but your root domain is seeing the impact. That just sounds odd to me.

I will have to do a little more research on your particular site to see if I find anything else. Thanks for your patience in my response on this one!

Hi there

I would make sure you mind your canonical tag, but I would also look into opportunities that search engines provide such hreflang and language tags. If you have translated variations of your site, you can also look into country targeting for both Google and Bing.

Here's some more information on international SEO if you need it.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi there

There really is no right or wrong answer to this but the real question you should be asking is the following: are the links that are pointing to your website from another site relevant and helpful to those who see it?

Having a bunch of links from a site isn't necessary if it's not relevant to your site, or if they are just strewn about in random categories. I will take one really good link over 100 redundant links any day.

So just make sure whatever links you are getting are actually beneficial and useful to those seeing it. If it's not relevant or helpful, or just a bunch of links, then chances are they aren't worth having.

I actually have more points here that you can read - https://moz.com/community/q/about-link-building-in-2015#reply_290945

On my phone and can't link! Will update that when I can, sorry!

Hope this helps! Good luck!

Patrick

Hi there

This is heavily dependent on the industry and searches done by users historically.

One thing you can look into is Google Trends. Put in phrases or keywords that matter to your business and see the historical performance over the years. You can get the same idea through Google Keyword Planner.

You could also interview the client as well as their customers for seaonalities and get an idea of what they are searching for during peak seasons and off seasons. There may be opportunities there to write content and grow traffic during down periods that will help you for (potentially) years to come. Here's some great tips from experts.

Hope this all helps! Good luck!