Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Joe,

When I worked for MaritzCX.com we had this same fight and dilemma all of the time. There are definitely pro's and con's to doing either option, but I strongly believe option 2 to be your best course of action.

The main reason to stick with one domain for your entire organization is domain authority. While you can have drastically different sites for each subfolder (if you want), you will be building domain authority to company.com from each and every subdomain folder. It is smart to purchase company.fr and redirect it to company.com/fr for ease of use.

If you build out sites on different domains (i.e. company.com, company.fr, company.br) then each domain will have separate domain authority.

Tracking one domain is much easier with tools such as Moz, Brightedge, Google Search Console, etc.

Hope this helps. If you want more info, let me know, but I think subdomain folders will search your company and search efforts the best.

I work for Teem.com. Here is the story:We used to be Eventboard.io and we enjoyed strong rankings and a healthy organic presence. We changed our name, our website, and expanded upon on our product offerings and launched Teem.com. A lot of content was very similar from Eventboard.io. We had 11 of our big keywords ranking in the top 3 positions. We launched the new website in early October of 2016.Here is what we have done:

• We setup a network of 301 redirects for the homepage, company pages, events page, blog posts, and each and every long tail page. Everything from the old site had a new place to live on the new site with very similar content. This list was then passed to our server/it folk to implement (we run a StaticPress site so we don't control those from within WordPress).
• Both the old and new site are WordPress websites.
• Setup a site domain move through Google Search Console
• Combed through Teem.com to take care of SEO issues using various tools. We know there are still some issues (speed, etc.) that aren't helping us, but we are in a good state overall in terms of technical SEO.
• Deep dive into the domain name history, backlinks, internal linking (which could be better).
• Developed more long-tail content (more coming).

Here is what is weird:

• We have almost no organic traffic (or traction) since our rebrand. We understood we would be hit hard as the domain name was changed, the content changed, and the CMS was revamped.
• The only real organic search traffic we get is branded to our old name (which is luckily the name of one of our products): Eventboard. We rank well for this and see high conversion from this keyword.
• We rank very well for "conference room displays" on Bing for our long tail and home page, but we show up at position 23 for our iTunes app page on Google and 33 for the long tail page.
• We dominate in bing for our company name "Teem" and finally show up Google for our Facebook page in position 13th. Our website is way way down the list (beyond page 5) for the exact company name with super low competition.
• Site performance has been good, user feedback has been good, site uptime has been great. No red flags here.
• No blaring errors in search console besides maybe a few 404 pages that are cleaned up every few weeks.

We have no idea what to do. Have engaged with multiple SEO agencies. Been told over and over to be patient because of the changes we have made, but we still see no progress 6 months later.We think the issue might be related to something misfiring with our 301 redirects, based on some referral information.Any insight would be greatly, greatly appreciated. We are stumped. Thanks for any help!

Hey Joe,

When I worked for MaritzCX.com we had this same fight and dilemma all of the time. There are definitely pro's and con's to doing either option, but I strongly believe option 2 to be your best course of action.

The main reason to stick with one domain for your entire organization is domain authority. While you can have drastically different sites for each subfolder (if you want), you will be building domain authority to company.com from each and every subdomain folder. It is smart to purchase company.fr and redirect it to company.com/fr for ease of use.

If you build out sites on different domains (i.e. company.com, company.fr, company.br) then each domain will have separate domain authority.

Tracking one domain is much easier with tools such as Moz, Brightedge, Google Search Console, etc.

Hope this helps. If you want more info, let me know, but I think subdomain folders will search your company and search efforts the best.