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Fellow Mozzers,

I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around a redirect issue and thought it was worth posing the question to the Moz community.  I did a search first but couldn't find the exact answer I was looking for.

How does a 301 redirect work when you redirect a sub domain example.homepage.com to www.homepage.com but you keep the sub directories of example.homepage.com/page-1 active and are trying to rank them?  I'm dealing with a current project where this is happening and this doesn't make sense to me, to redirect the subdomain if you're also trying to rank/create search traffic for pages, sub directories on example.homepage.com. This also get's into the debate of if a sub domain site is viewed as it's own website and therefore has to rank itself.  If this is true, it seems like we're kind of killing the authority of the site by redirecting it.

Additionally, www.homepage.com has a much stronger link profile than example.homepage.com

I hope this makes sense.  Any thoughts are appreciated.  Thanks for your time.

Max, thanks for your input.

The url would change as well as the brand name keywords. The content would pretty much stay the same.  The importance of the keywords is they're currently a part of the brand name, that also draws significant search traffic.  I don't believe this to be a good idea, I'm just looking for the time/cost if it did happen.

Agreed on a page for page redirect.  I've seen first hand when that doesn't happen.  Not good.

From an SEO agency perspective.  What would be the estimated man hours and hard cost to rebrand a large site (1000+pages)?  And all that would go into it, like 301 redirects and etc.?

I have a pretty good idea, of what it would take and how perilous it could be from an SEO perspective. Because of anchor text / 301 redirects / organic potential traffic loss and etc. I just don't know the man hours and hard cost would be.