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
-
Main Site and eCommerce Site URLs for SEO
My client currently has a main website on a url and an eCommerce site on a subdomain. The eCommerce site is currently not mobile friendly, has images that are too small and are problematic - and I believe it negates some of the SEO work we do for them. I had to turn off Google Shopping ads because the quality score was so low. That being said, they are rebuilding a shopping cart on a new platform that will be mobile friendly BUT the images are going to be tiny until they slowly replace images over several months. Would you keep the shopping cart on a subdomain, or make it part of the main website URL? Can it negatively impact the progress we have made on the main site SEO.
Technical SEO | | jerrico10 -
Duplicate content question
Hey Mozzers! I received a duplicate content notice from my Cycle7 Communications campaign today. I understand the concept of duplicate content, but none of the suggested fixes quite seems to fit. I have four pages with HubSpot forms embedded in them. (Only two of these pages have showed up so far in my campaign.) Each page contains a title (Content Marketing Consultation, Copywriting Consultation, etc), plus an embedded HubSpot form. The forms are all outwardly identical, but I use a separate form for each service that I offer. I’m not sure how to respond to this crawl issue: Using a 301 redirect doesn’t seem right, because each page/form combo is independent and serves a separate purpose. Using a rel=canonical link doesn’t seem right for the same reason that a 301 redirect doesn’t seem right. Using the Google Search Console URL Parameters tool is clearly contraindicated by Google’s documentation (I don’t have enough pages on my site). Is a meta robots noindex the best way to deal with duplicate content in this case? Thanks in advance for your help. AK
Technical SEO | | AndyKubrin0 -
If you are organizing the site structure for an ecommerce site, how would you do it?
Should you use not use slashes and use all dashes or use just a few slashes and the rest with dashes? For example, domain.com/category/brand/product-color-etc OR domain.com/anythinghere-color-dimensions-etc Which structure would you rather go for and why?
Technical SEO | | Zookeeper0 -
Two sites
Hi there just joined had nightmere of a time trying to get a website up and running..... now i have 2 .... one marketing person did and one i did the one i did performing better on google but other onre looks more profetional is there a way i can conbine the 2 under one site..... the one that looks better and getting the benifit of the one thats performing better...... Thanks steve......
Technical SEO | | stevetemple0 -
What would you do if a site's entire content is on a subdomain?
Scenario: There is a website called mydomain.com and it is a new domain with about 300 inbound links (some going to the product pages and categories), but they have some high trust links The website has categories a, b, c etc but they are all on a subdomain so instead of being mydomain.com/categoryA/productname the entire site's structure looks like subdomain.mydomain.com/categoryA/productname Would you go to the effort of 301ing the subdomain urls to the correct url structure of mydomain.com/category/product name, or would you leave it as it is? Just interested as to the extent of the issues this could cause in the future and if this is something worth resolving sooner than later.
Technical SEO | | Kerry220 -
I have found this on a site that i have seen many times where can i get one from
Hi i have seen this great map system that i have seen on many sites which i think makes a site look great but i have tried looking for the past few weeks but cannot find where i can get one from. http://www.hypnoslimmer.co.uk/consultant.html does anyone know how these sites do it and where you can get the product from. I use joomla for all my sites Any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Will 301 redirecting a site multiple times still preserve the original site value?
Hi, All! If site www.abc.com was already 301 redirected to site www.def.com, and now the site owner wants to redirect www.def.com to www.ghi.com - is there any concern that it's not going to work, and some of the original linkjuice, rank, trust, etc. is going to vanish? Or as long as the 301s are set up right, should you be able to 301 indefinitely? Does anyone have any experience with actually doing this and seeing good/bad/neutral results? Thanks in advance! -Aviva B
Technical SEO | | debi_zyx0 -
Ecommerce site with currency selectors giving dupe content?
Hi everyone,
Technical SEO | | BeachDude
One of my ecommerce sites uses BigCommerce. They have a feature where you can add different currency buttons to change the currency that the customer can shop as. This is great because if people from the UK visit our site, they can change the currency to their own rather than US. It just ads a variable on the end of the URL string to change the currency. However, in my webmaster tools I noticed that I think i am getting a bunch of duplicate content. For example, it thinks i have duplicate title tags for the following: domainname/pages/my-cool-widget.html
domainname/pages/my-cool-widget.html?setCurrencyId=1
.domainname/pages/my-cool-widget.html?setCurrencyId=2
domainname/pages/my-cool-widget.html?setCurrencyId=3
domainname/pages/my-cool-widget.html?setCurrencyId=4 I thought about adding "rel=no-follow" but unfortunately I don't have access to this file to edit the code. Any suggestions?0