Better SEO Option, 1 Site 3 Subdomains or 4 Separate Sites?
-
Hey Mozzers,
I'm working with a client who wants to redo their web presence. They have a a main website for the umbrella and then 3 divisions which have their own website as well.
My question is: Is it better to have the main site on the main domain and then have the 3 separate sites be subdomains? Or 4 different domains with a linking structure to tie them all together?
To my understanding option 1 would include high traffic for 1 domain and option 2 would be building Page Authority by having 4 different sites linking to each other?
My guess would be option 2, only if all 4 sites start getting relevant authority to make the links of value. But right out of the gates option 1 might be more beneficial.
A little advice/clarification would be great!
-
If you already have the 4 sites running on different domains, each has different content, and you linking sparingly and appropriately between the domains, I'd call it a toss up as to whether it's better to keep them separate or bring them together. Have you looked into buddypress for managing the separate domains within a single CMS? I think it can handle that.
-
Hey Tom,
Thanks for answering our question. Basically our sites are a parent company/ministry, a kids mentoring/tutoring ministry, a medical center ministry, and a food pantry ministry.
They all have their own domain and website currently but need to be updated. We are looking at combining the sites administrative functionality to allow for authors of each individual site as well as super authors for all sites.
So, the question is, should each site continue to have its own domain as they each will have unique content or should they be setup with subdomains becasue they are all apart of the same network.
Here is an example of a website setup very similar --> http://www.interlochen.org/
Thank you for further clarification/time on this matter.
-
I think the main question should be what these 3 'sub-sites' are.
Are they individual brands/businesses that can stand-alone and offer unique content on each domain? Do they cover different industries/niches?
If the answer to either of those is no, then I'd keep it all on the same domain. Option 2 runs the risk of looking like a link network (existing solely to boost up the main website), which, if discovered, could heavily penalise your website.
Even if that was to be avoided, I'd still recommend keeping all of your content on one domain, unless the other sites are completely different. This is because that any content you do produce that may accrue links or social shares will go straight to the main domain - that direct link will be the strongest SEO signal out of the lot. Building sub-sites just to blog/build content to accrue links to the main site is pointless unless those sites get their own links - in which case, why not have that content on your site anyway, in the form of a subdomain or sub-folder?
I'd only consider splitting the sites up if they target very different industries/niches. If they do, they will need to be fleshed out with considerable content to avoid looking like a link-network.
Simply creating microsites to create content that links to the main site just seems pointless, particularly if that content can be hosted on your domain, which would then get all the links/social signals anyway.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Linking to one of my own sites, from my site
Hi experts, I own a site for castingjobs (Site1) and a site for selling paintings (Site2). In a long time, I've had a link at the bottom of Site1, linking to Site 2. (Basicaly: Partnerlink: Link site 2). Site1 is for me the the only important site, since it's where Im making my monthly revenue. I added the link like 5 years ago or so, to try to boost site 2. My question is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KasperGJ
1. Is it somehow bad for SEO for site 1, since the two sites have nothing to do with each other, they are basically just owned by me.
2. Would it make sense to link from Site 2 to Site 1 indstead?0 -
Panda 4.0 Update Affected Site - What should be a the minimum Code to Text Ratio we should aim for ?
Hi All, My eCommerce site got hit badly with the Panda 4.0 update so we have been doing some site auditing and analysis identifying issues which need addressing. We have thin/duplicate issues which I am quite sure was part of the reason we were affected by this even though we use rel=next and rel=prev along with having a separate view all page although we don't concanical tag to this page as I dont' think users would benefit from seeing to many items on one page. This led me to look at our Code to Content Ratio. We have now managed to increase it from 9% to approx 18-22% on popular pages by getting rid of unnecessary code etc. My question is , is there an ideal percentage the code to content ratio should be ?.. and what should I be aiming for ? Also any other Panda 4.0 advice would also be appreciated thanks Sarah
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
2 Ecommerce sites & SEO
Hi, i am managing 2 ecommerce sites that sell a lot of identical products. snowsupermarket.co.uk - public webshop shop.snowbusiness.com - trade webshop Should i optimise the 2 sites to target different keywords for all products or, should i keep the keywords the same but, vary the meta data/ description etc. to avoid duplication. Is there a clear argument to have to ecommerce websites ranking high for our products & dominating page 1, even though they will be technically competing against each other? Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SnowFX0 -
Sitemaps and subdomains
At the beginning of our life-cycle, we were just a wordpress blog. However, we just launched a product created in Ruby. Because we did not have time to put together an open source Ruby CMS platform, we left the blog in wordpress and app in rails. Thus our web app is at http://www.thesquarefoot.com and our blog is at http://blog.thesquarefoot.com. We did re-directs such that if the URL does not exist at www.thesquarefoot.com it automatically forwards to blog.thesquarefoot.com. What is the best way to handle sitemaps? Create one for blog.thesquarefoot.com and for http://www.thesquarefoot.com and submit them separately? We had landing pages like http://www.thesquarefoot.com/houston in wordpress, which ranked well for Find Houston commercial real estate, which have been replaced with a landing page in Ruby, so that URL works well. The url that was ranking well for this word is now at blog.thesquarefoot.com/houston/? Should i delete this page? I am worried if i do, we will lose ranking, since that was the actual page ranking, not the new one. Until we are able to create an open source Ruby CMS and move everything over to a sub-directory and have everything live in one place, I would love any advice on how to mitigate damage and not confuse Google. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheSquareFoot0 -
Local SEO (Rankings) + UK-wide SEO (national rankings) - achieving both
Hi All, For clients wishing to sell online / generate leads nationally, yet still want to have a local online presence to attract town / county-wide customers, I've often placed Town / County locations within both the Title Tag (or just County if space is limited) and Meta Description, plus within the Hx headings, Alt-text and within the footer of every page. My question is, does adding the location of the client within these fields really infringe their attempts to rank nationally, as some nationally ranked pages have no mention of location while others have their location (Town, County or Both) shown within them? Any help, insight or feedback greatly appreciated 🙂 Happy New Year Tony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tony-Dimmock0 -
3 results for a site on page one?!?
Hi, I've never seen a website rank on page 1 in position 2, 3 and 4 for one query, completely separate results as well. I thought they limited the amount of results from a website on each page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
How do you prevent the mobile site becoming a duplicate of the full browser site?
We have a larger site with 100k+ pages, we need to create a mobile site which gets indexed in the mobile engines but I am afraid that google bot will consider these pages duplicates of the normal site pages. I know I can block it on the robots.txt but I still need it to be indexed for mobile search engines and I think google has a mobile crawler as well. Feel free to give me any other tips that I should follow while trying to optimize the mobile version. Any help would be appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseseo0 -
Blog - on the domain or place on separate site, now that Panda ranks for bounce, TOP, depth of visit
Over 10 years ago, we decided to run our blog external to our main website. contrary to conventional wisdom then, we thought we’d have more control/opps for generating external anchor text links, plus working in a bona fide blog software environment (WP). As we had hoped, the blog generated alot of strong inbound links, captured inbound links of it own from other sites and I think, helped improve our SERPs and traffic. Once the blog was established and with the redesign of the website, we capitulated, and finally moved the blog onto the main domain. After reading a number of pieces on Panda and the new reality of SEO, sounds like bounce rates (in particular), time on page, and other GA measures may have a more profound influence on google rankings now. Given that blogs are notoriously for high bounce rates (ours is), low time on site, depth of visit, seems logical that it adversely affects our site averages for the main domain). Is it time to re-consider pulling our blog off the main domain to reassert the ‘true’ GA measures of the main domain? I guess it still gets down to the question... is the advantage of all the inbound links to the blog on the main domain of greater value than moving the blog off-site and reasserting better 'site stats' for google's pando algo? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ahw0