Question about breaking out content from one site onto many
-
We have a website and domain -- which is well-established (since 1998) -- that we are considering breaking apart for business reasons. This is a content site that hosts articles from a few of our brands in portal fashion. These brands are represented in print with their own magazines so it's important to keep their presence separate.
All of the content on the site is related to a general industry, with each brand covering a unique segment in the industry. For example, think of a toy industry site that hosts content from it's brands covering stuffed animals, electronics and board games.
The current thinking is to break out the content from a couple brands to their own sites and domains. The business case for this branding purposes. I'm of the opinion that this is a bad idea as we would likely see a noticeable decline in search traffic across the board, which we rely on for impressions for our advertisers.
If we take the appropriate steps to carefully redirect pages to the new domains what kind of hit should we expect to take from this transition? Would it make much difference if we were transition from 1 to 2 sites vs 1 to 4? Should this move be avoided all together? Any advise would be appreciated.
-
Our site hosts b2b content and while I agree with your scenario in general, we do have some niche content that some users would have no interest in.
A better example instead of a toy industry site might be a construction industry site. Let's say our content is generally related to the construction industry and our readers work in or own construction businesses. We might have brands and individual publications that cover everything from concrete innovations to lumber pricing to interior design. While all of the content is generally is related to construction, most interior design professionals may have zero interest in lumber pricing.
That's essentially where we're at. For branding purposes the interior design folks think it would be better to have their own uniquely branded website, but they'll obviously feel the pain of the break from the main construction site.
-
In your example you say....
.... think of a toy industry site that hosts content from it's brands covering stuffed animals, electronics and board games.
If that is your website, do you think that a shopper will be pleased that she can do gift shopping there and add a stuffed animal and a board game to the shopping cart. If you split these sites all of that cross shopping will be gone. How many of your current shopping carts mix items from the different parts of your website. All of that is gone. And, if people are like me, they don't like go buy one item here, another item there, another item at still another site and then wait for all of these packages to arrive and be interrupted or stay home because you have a package scheduled to arrive.
I have retail sites. How many of my customers add products to their shopping cart from multiple product categories? I'll tell you how many.... enough that if that was taken away that my business might not make a profit. You don't make much money selling one item at a time. You make the real money when people fill the cart.
If you publish magazines, don't you think that a visitor will see that you publish Magazine A and Magazine B and Magazine C.... they will think... Wow! This company publishes all of these magazines, they must know what they are doing. And if someone likes Magazine A a lot, don't you think they might be on your site and see that you also publish Magazine C and decide to take a look at it. Lots of people subscribe to many magazines.
The people who want to break up this site are not thinkin'.
-
I agree with you and I'm hoping that I can talk them out of it. Hearing words like "enormous traffic loss" is enough for me to fight this.
-
I am willing to bet good money that breaking up this site will result in an enormous traffic loss.
Why? You are going to take a large authoritative domain that is probably a nice brand and break it up into a bunch of hotdog stands.
Google likes big brands. Google likes authority. Visitors like to be impressed. I would not do this.
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
-
Duplicate Content for Locations on my Directory Site
I have a pretty big directory site using Wordpress with lots of "locations", "features", "listing-category" etc.... Duplicate Content: https://www.thecbd.co/location/california/ https://www.thecbd.co/location/canada/ referring URL is www.thecbd.co is it a matter of just putting a canonical URL on each location, or just on the main page? Would this be the correct code to put: on the main page? Thanks Everyone!
Technical SEO | | kay_nguyen0 -
Site hit by algorthithmic update in October 2014 - filters and thin content queries.
Back in October 2014 last year, a site we are working with had a significant drop in organic traffic. This coincided with Google's algorithmic update. The side in question uses filters extensively and at the time did not have any canonical tags in place. The lions share of these filter pages had little or no written content just products. The website now has canonical tags throughout and content has started to be added to the top level categories and we will continue to add more, however there is still a large amount of pages with little or no content. Webmaster tools shows that there are large amounts of internal links (for instance 42,000+ to the homepage) which must be due to the filtered pages. I am looking for advice on what is the best way to proceed. Do I edit robots.txt, start adding no follow tags or something else entirely?
Technical SEO | | bfinternet0 -
PR / News stories across multiple sites - is it still duplicate content?
I was wondering does Google make an exception for news stories where duplicate content is concerned? After all depending on the story there can be a lot of quotes and bulk blocks of the same details. Is Google intelligent enough to distinguish between general website content and actual news stories? Also like a lot of big firms we publish news stories on our website, but then they get passed on to other websites in the form of PR, and then published on other websites. So if we put it on our website, then within a few hours or the same day other websites publish the story at the same time (literally copied and pasted) - how does this affect our website in terms of duplicate content? Will Google know automatically that we published it first? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Brabian0 -
Hello I have an ecommerce site where many of the products are variations.
Hello I have an ecommerce site. Many of the products are variations. I am using the Yoast Woo Commerce plugin. My meta descriptions for each product category might only vary for length for example. 10 foot microphone cable: Hand soldered heavy-duty 24 gauge cable braided shield, CBI nickel XLR connectors Bulk pricing - Call for your price 615-406-3255 20 foot microphone cable: Hand soldered heavy-duty 24 gauge cable braided shield, CBI nickel XLR connectors Bulk pricing - Call for your price 615-406-3255 From a Moz report I am getting tons of duplicate content issues. What can I do to correct this issue? Thank you for your help.
Technical SEO | | edwardfrebow0 -
Any one worked on a sites.google.com/ website ?
Hi I have a client that has a sites.google.com/ website, Has anyone ever used one ? or had to do SEO on one ? Any help would be very much appreciated Thanks
Technical SEO | | tempowebdesign0 -
Redirect from old wordpress site to new php site? Best approach
Hi I have two websites one legacy site done in wordpress the other in php. However I would like to merge the two together and remove the wordpress site. However it has a good link profile and the pages rank well. What is the best approach to do a 301 redirect from the old site with all its pages pointing to the homepage of the new site? If so what's the best way to do this in wordpress? Many thanks
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
Optimizing one site for multiple countries
I am working on a project, where we have one website, with a country specific domain, which is currently ranking well in local search. The client now wants to expand his business into two new countries (all english speaking) and would like to rank for the same keywords in these two new countries. The customer do not want to create new websites for the new countries. Because its a local domain and the website is setup for local search in GWT with locally hosted server, i expect challenges in optimizing for new countries without impacting the current local ranking. Question 1: What would be the recommended approach for maintaining their existing ranking on local search, while optimizing for the new countries.
Technical SEO | | petersen0 -
Duplicate content
I have to sentences that I want to optimize to different pages for. sentence number one is travel to ibiza by boat sentence number to is travel to ibiza by ferry My question is, can I have the same content on both pages exept for the keywords or will Google treat that as duplicate content and punish me? And If yes, where goes the limit/border for duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | stlastla0