Manufacturer, New Direct-to-Consumer Site (Separate Site, or Sub-Domain?)
-
Hi All!
Working with an established manufacturer, been around for many years, it's an internationally known brand, and their products are sold by thousands on distributors. They recently started a new website (separate from their old established B2B manufacturer site) which will be used to sell direct to customer. The new site is great, with a nice responsive design, clean look, flexible, etc. The problem is, it's a new site with low Domain Authority.
The manufacturer's B2B site has been around a while, very high Domain Authority. So, I'd like to be able to harness all the link equity they've build instead of trying to optimize a brand new site. The problem with this old established site is that it IS in fact old. The design is terrible, it's not responsive, old code, bad look and feel, etc.
We could incorporate the new B2C site (which has its own CMS) into a sub-domain, like store.site.com. But, I'd worry that site.com's crapiness will limit growth potential for the new pages at store.site.com. Same issue were we to add the new site into a sub-folder, like site.com/store/.
On the other side, we could just keep the new site, with it's own domain, sitestore.com, and have product pages and/or category pages from the manufacturer's B2B site link to the relevant pages on the new B2C site.
Thanks!
-
Thanks for the responses. Yes, we are worried about too much interlinking and that being seen as manipulative.
I do think we're leaning towards a completely separate domain. I'll just have to be careful with the links.
-
You don't have a benefit with a new domain or subdomain at the start (without some myth I never saw) - but in future: a link of a former new domain to the old B2B site would be worth more, than a link from a subdomain or folder. Its a benefit for the old B2B site (when u link to it and that will happen several times) - the new B2C site is hard work
-
Andreas is right—the subdomain will be considered a new site by the search engines, so you won't get any SEO benefit from the existing domain. I'm not aware of any benefit you'd have a a totally new domain over a new subdomain, either, but Andreas may be able to give more information on that.
-
A: Subdomain: I think to take the subdomain is pretty useless - it is just like a new domain. May be worther (internal links b2b-b2c)
B: Subfolder: Of course you have a bonus in that case, the growth potential shouldn't be limited that much, as long as you won't chose the old CMS (you wrote that you wont).
A new site: I would try that way (but that is my liking). I would Link both sites to each other where ever (natural and relevant) possible. The way for the B2C site is long, in both ways B or C, but in case C, you can link back to the B2B site, so the old site can benefit. There are so many opportunities. I think it should be also possible to link them sitewide, I guess Google wouldn't see that as a manipulative linkbuilding. To much fear? Ask John Mueller in a webmaster hangout for his best practice tipps.
ok, that would be my choice. But one thing is clear, A is not really an option wich brings you in a better position from start up.
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
-
Specifying image dimensions for site speed vs. responsive
I'm working on improving site speed from an SEO perspective, and one bit of advice I see often is to specify the dimensions of the images you're using so the browser knows the size of the image it needs to download. However, I am wondering what impact this may have if the site is responsive? If you specify the large dimensions suited for a desktop browser, would you be forcing a mobile browser to use that sized image? Has anyone seen dramatic improvements in site speed using the <picture>tag for responsive images?</picture> Thanks! Jannette
Web Design | | JannetteP1 -
Multiple Sites for an Attorney Practicing Different Areas of Law
Hello, I'm trying to make sure I give a potential client the correct advice. This person is an attorney whose current site ranks well. The site deals solely with his traffic ticket defense practice. He's considering building a new site to highlight his personal injury practice but is unsure whether to build an altogether new site or redesign his current site in such a way that it includes his personal injury practice along side his traffic ticket defense practice. Obviously he doesn't want to lose his current rankings, but my concern is that he'll actually dilute his rankings somewhat with the multiple sites. Both practices have pretty different sets of keywords they would need to rank for, with pretty different difficulty levels. Any advice? Thanks.
Web Design | | lawfather2 -
Does having too many wordpress portfolio pages with little content hurt a site's SEO?
I have a site that is for a service company, not image based like a photographer or artist. We utilize the Portfolio feature to create a gallery of floor coating finishes (images of all the flooring finish options available) but this solution has created /portfolio/file-name pages for each image. These pages have no other content besides the image. I've run SEMrush audits on this site which shows a high percentage of pages with low text/code ratio and duplicate content (a lot of the finishes have very similar names). This site has been extremely slow to improve any visibility online (more than 9 months) and I'm wondering if this is a factor by possibly having a negative effect on our site. We initially chose the portfolio option because it was the best-looking solution for our users but we can certainly change it to another format if that is better. Thanks!
Web Design | | WillGMG0 -
SEO Searchable? Starting a New Forum for Company Community
Hi Mozzers, I'm new here and am looking forward to learning from this awesome group of SEOs As my company's Web Optimization Manager, I'm in charge of just about anything SEO related. We are an education company and we are looking to build a new forum so students (both new and old) and continue interacting within our community. We also want to use this as a tool for new users and potential new customers through search (obviously). We are in an internal debate as to how we should make the forums and the implications on search it may have. Some managers want the content available only to members, others want the content read-only to the public, and the tech team building the forum says that "it'll be an issue making the content available to the public without a log-in." So my questions are: (1) Will we still be searchable if we make our content "read-only" for non-members? Members will have the ability to log-in and comment and post etc (similar to this forum). (2) Will be searchable if we make the content completely private and available only to members. What I mean by private is perhaps, we'll make the title of the forum thread public but not the actual responses. Along these lines, what would happen if we made everything private (including the tite). Will Google still pick up on our content in a search result and a potential user only not be able to see anything? (3) What would you all suggest to make this flow the right way? Hope to hear from you all soon. Thanks
Web Design | | Pedram_SEO1 -
Nav / Sitemap Question. Using a "services" page vs just linking directly to individual service page?
Okay, so our company offers video production, web design, and web marketing services. While we do offer these services individually, our goal is to get our clients to integrate these services together. Our nav is currently like so : home - about - video - web design - web marketing - blog - contact Now I've seen businesses and agencies also use a nav with a "services" button instead of listing out their service offerings (if they have more than 1, like us). The services button usually links to a category page or has a drop down with links to the company's individual services. I'm wondering if there is any benefit to having a main services page like this and linking to the individual pages off of it (video ,web design, marketing, etc). Or if we should just keep it the way we have it now (since we've already got some page authority on the individual service pages). I know this may not be the most important aspect of our site and we may be over-thinking it but any thoughts/ideas would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
Web Design | | RenderPerfect0 -
404 page not found after site migration
Hi, A question from our developer. We have an issue in Google Webmaster Tools. A few months ago we killed off one of our e-commerce sites and set up another to replace it. The new site uses different software on a different domain. I set up a mass 301 redirect that would redirect any URLs to the new domain, so domain-one.com/product would redirect to domain-two.com/product. As it turns out, the new site doesn’t use the same URLs for products as the old one did, so I deleted the mass 301 redirect. We’re getting a lot of URLs showing up as 404 not found in Webmaster tools. These URLs used to exist on the old site and be linked to from the old sitemap. Even URLs that are showing up as 404 recently say that they are linked to in the old sitemap. The old sitemap no longer exists and has been returning a 404 error for some time now. Normally I would set up 301 redirects for each one and mark them as fixed, but there are almost quarter of a million URLs that are returning 404 errors, and rising. I’m sure there are some genuine problems that need sorting out in that list, but I just can’t see them under the mass of errors for pages that have been redirected from the old site. Because of this, I’m reluctant to set up a robots file that disallows all of the 404 URLs. The old site is no longer in the index. Searching google for site:domain-one.com returns no results. Ideally, I’d like anything that was linked from the old sitemap to be removed from webmaster tools and for Google to stop attempting to crawl those pages. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | PASSLtd0 -
Site Redesign: Bounce rate, converstion, page views, etc.
Hi Fellow Mozzers, I had a few questions regarding some analytics data we have been seeing since our redesign. Just last week we did a site design overhaul at www.lylif.com. One of the biggest changes we immediately saw was a 15-20% increase in our bounce rate. However, our conversion rates, page views, pages per visit, and site duration has increased. If anyone has some insight as to why we may be having such a large increase in our bounce rate that would be most helpful!
Web Design | | lylif11 -
Finally have a budget for a great seo ecommerce site but need help choosing wordpress, joomla, modx, magneto or? Thank you in advance for your generosity of time
We finally have a budget and want to dump our intuit/homestead site www.originalartbroker.com Our budget is 5k-10k but could do more if needed. I am slowly catching my competition with this homestead site that I built. But I do realize it is time to step back, figure out what is best, and hire a pro to get the job done. I am green in the seo and web development arena so please go easy on me and please help to point me in the right direction. Just went out on a limb a couple years ago playing with homestead.com site software and built what we have today. Didn't know anything about website development...it sort of just happened. I feel and know that homestead.com solution is hindering what we could be doing due to the bloated nature of the site and inability to perform such task as 301 redirects etc.... I have been able to slowly attain first page seo rankings on keywords based of the artists we carry using this po-dunk homestead platform to build my site after a ton of work education thanks to seomoz and a lot of you. But, have never asked for help and could really use some generosity of time in explaining a solution that would work best for our business. Do we just go with a wordpress site that is similar to our current setup and use their plugins? Do we use a cms software solution like magneto or joomla? We will only have 200-300 pieces at any given time. We are constantly selling and buying new pieces providing us content. We are need of a site that can perform well in terms of seo. I have heard of a lot of people talking about joomla, wordpress, and magneto. Would like to be able to have a product catalogue that ultimately sends whatever inventory we are uploading to our social sites and blogs so I don’t have to pump the product out to all of these sites. We offer free custom framing with our pieces and it would be nice to have a program that could wrap the photos of the pieces with the different frames for our customers. When I add a new piece I would like this software to have a predesigned product page that it plugs the information into. I would like it to create the url extension based of the artists name, medium used, and piece name to create unique and individual urls. I would like it to also create its own H tags throughout that product page according to the artist name description, and medium used. I would like to be able to sink this up to google merchant and other sites to carry our product. Bottom line is we sell art. We sell pieces by specific artists. We are constantly buying and selling. I need something powerful that keeps up with our content
Web Design | | forecastedinvestments1