Subfolder marketing issue - buying a new domain and 301 to subfolder on existing domain
-
Hello, I have a specific question and I'll try to be as precise as possible.
I have a well ranked domain with good PA. When we were starting our new service I found out that for SEO purposes it would be best to put it under subfolder instead of subdomain or new domain all together because of PA that our domain has.
Now, that went pretty well and our new service started appearing in SERPs and is improving rapidly since our link builing strategies were quite sucessful.
But there is a problem - we can't advertise our service with a link like this - www.domain.com/subfolder. It's just really messy. And I was wondering if we buy a new domain and 301 redirect it to our subfolder what impacts will that have? If people start linking us as www.newdomain.com will it pass all the juice to www.domain.com/subfolder?
Marketing wise I see a lot of benefits using newdomain but I'm afraid it can have SEO downsides and I'm asking for your help to clarify these.
Thank you in advance,
Best regards,
Ivan
-
Hi Chris,
First, thank you for your response. We are builing links to that subpage and that's working fine. Probably I was not clear enough.
My problem here is offline marketing and building brand awarenes. We'll have printing material, stickers, tshirts etc. and link www.domain.com/subpage on it is really going to look ugly. That's why I was thinking on buying a new domain so it can 301 to this subpage and we can use it offline and online for branding purposes. So if at one point number of links to that new domain surpasses number of links to subpage will that have any negative impact and will all the juice be transfered to subpage.
Best regards,
Ivan
-
Hi there!
To answer your question directly, I'd suggest having a read through this post from Cyrus a few months back. In short, 301s should now pass all strength through... but this is Google we're talking about here so please read the whole post before taking any action.
With that out of the way, I should also point out that there seems to be a bit of a misconception here. Having backlinks point directly to your subfolder(s)/subpage(s) is exactly what you should be doing with your link building efforts, it's just something that most don't think to do or don't know they should be doing!
If you drive 100% of your links to the home page, that's great for the home page's strength but if you want to be ranking subpages as well, plenty of effort should be going into building links for that pages too. While backlinks to any page on the site will help the entire domain's strength, each page is also weighed up by it's own metrics.
My suggestion here would be to forget about the complications of buying another domain, driving links to it and redirecting them all and just build links to each of your landing pages directly instead. There's nothing awkward about linking to website.com/subfolder because nobody will ever even see that link, all the user will ever see is just the anchor text, just like the link I provided above. You see "this post from Cyrus" in blue text but the actual link is https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo"
URLs (URIs) are rarely user friendly, that's exactly why we use anchor text!
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
-
Should our rebranded company update our existing Instagram profile or delete it and start from scratch?
Our company just did a complete rebrand with a new name and logo. Instagram allows us to change our name, username, logo, and information, unlike Facebook, but there isn't a lot of online content about whether or not that's the best route. Any thoughts?
Branding | | RyanHeffernon0 -
Switch to naked domain that has higher page authority
Brilliant Moz community! I just started here and find it so helpful and am confident that I can get an answer to this. Our domain is currently https://www.example.com. I have been wanting to move to https://example.com just for a cleaner URL. To my surprise, https://example.com has the same DA but a significantly higher page authority than our current https://www.example.com. Of course my immediate reaction is to 301 to the https://example.com but I wanted to get some advice and anything we should consider before doing this. My other question would be - how is this possible? I don't remember that we ever used that domain but we also had some rather bad developers a couple of years back. Thank you so much in advance!
Branding | | kris-fannin0 -
Domain authority vs indexed pages
Hello, There are many articles and from our personal experience we can say that you can rank a page without backlinks with high DA but we cant figure out if DA of domain help to rank as the link juice ( so the link juice going from home page thru all pages to specific page) or it will rank a page even if its not linked in any way from homepage or any other pages and even if it not linked in any way from other pages and still ranks just because of high DA, does that DA value will spread even above all indexed pages if you have lets say 100,000 pages, i mean if domain has 100 indexed pages and DA of 50 and another domain has 100,000 and DA of 100, if both pages are the same on those domains and have no backlinks to it from my understanding page on domain with 100 indexed pages and DA of 50 suppose to rank higher ? Please share what you think
Branding | | maxdelop0 -
What is the best way to market/raise awareness about new clothing products?
We are an Outdoor Clothing Company that designs our own range. We primarily sell through Retailers & distribution networks, but around 2 years ago went online. We update our collections twice a year, and we really struggle to get attention and awareness of our new designs. Can anyone recommend the best practice for getting newly launched products successfully "marketed"?
Branding | | Target-Dry0 -
Linking new domain to existing domain or....
We have a client's domain that has been live for 8 years. truthbook.com. With the new changes to Google, no matter what we do, we cannot get the words Urantia Book to connect with the website and lift it's search engine returns to the first page where it was for the past 4 years.. It is clear, that no matter what Google may say, the most important factor is having the actual words urantiabook in the domain is imperative. We know it was that way before Google changes (they were always on the first page) but now the client cannot get back on the front page. The mission and theme of the site is Jesus in The Urantia Book. So it is not a stretch to acquire urantiabookandjesus.com and forward it to truthbook.com The question is, "will they get any bang for the change? If they considered changing the actual main domain to urantiabookandjesus.com or .org and forward truthbook.com to it, will they be hurt by that strategy? " Thanks, Jim
Branding | | jimmyzig0 -
How to leverage celebrity interactions for online marketing?
Recently one of my clients has become involved with a group of A-List celebrities, and we expect to have some very good photos and meetings happening. I know this might be more of traditional PR concern, but I am wondering (aside from the obvious "post it to FB/Twitter/Tumbler") how to best leverage this for online marketing. If we have photos or videos, we can make writeups, etc. Can someone give me some suggestions?
Branding | | storemachine0 -
Do Dashes in Domain names hurt SEO ranking?
I have found conflicting reports online whether or not dashes in domain names hurt/help ranking. Example yourbrandonline.com vs your-brand-online.com? I found Rand's write up on how to select a domain and he suggests staying away from hyphens but mainly because its hard to remember or people my enter it in wrong. Here's his comment. "Reject Hyphens and Numbers
Branding | | JoshKimber
Both hyphens and numbers make it hard to give your domain name verbally and falls down on being easy to remember or type. I'd suggest not using spelled-out or roman numerals in domains, as both can be confusing and mistaken for the other." Aside from people possibly struggling to get there directly because of the domain name, are they OK to use? Or, are domains with hyphens considered spammy? Thanks in advance.1 -
Need help on redirects and which domain to make my main
Hi there i have at the moment abcecigs.com as my main domain for my electronic cigarette company, I have now aquired abcelectroniccigarettes.co.uk and abcelectroniccigarettes.com which one would be best for my main domain? i will be having mostly UK customers to keep postal cost down ect, what would be the best way to go about having my main domian changed to one of the better electroniccigarettes.co.uk or .com domains, and still have abcecigs.com used as I have a few links posted to there. Thanks alot
Branding | | cars1110