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Moving Portion of Site to Different Domain

by consultant1027
2 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I've got a site that started out as greatwidgets.com (widgets is just an example).

It ranked great for the keywords like widgets, blue widgets, red widgets etc.

But then the business started selling beebops, zeezoos, and prossies. The business than moved to a new domain, greatstuff.com since it no longer just sold widgets. We thought about putting each product type on its own domain, greatbeebops.com, greatzeezoos.com, but decided against it for branding purposes primarily.

We're unhappy with our ranking for zeezoos and they are an imporant part of our revenue. What if we copied all the zeezoo product pages over to greatzeezoos.com and then put a 301 redirect to the new domain. Won't this effectively decrease rankings for some if not all of the greatstuff.com pages because now there are less total links going to greatstuff.com?

What if some of the inbound links never get updated to the new domain. Does Google eventually discount the value of those links or will the 301 pass the link juice through indefinitely?

Anyone tried this? It seems it could be a big risk. But the greatstuff.com site is beating all the competitors ranks in most of the other keywords (we rank like top 3 for many competetive keywords). But on the super competitive keywords, our competitors with the keyword in their domain, are ranking a lot higher than us even though we have more total inbound links in most cases.
#domain #moving #portion #site
  • Profile picture of the author BarryWheeler
    I've gone through several site redesigns where link structure was changed dramatically but it was all onsite stuff. Never splitting content from one domain to another like that.

    The 301 redirects eventually did pass their link juice but it did take 3-4 months for me to actually see it happen.

    The few webmasters that responded to my request to update their links did so, but some added the rel=nofollow tag to their original links and that cost me. However, traffic was never really impacted.
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    • Profile picture of the author dburk
      Hi consultant1027,

      While changing URLs can be disruptive, you can mitigate the damage by using Permanent 301 Redirects. The link juice will pass through 301 redirect as long as they remain in place (indefinitely).

      Don't worry about the total links going to greatstuff.com. Search engines do not rank websites, they rank individual web pages. You can have you pages spread across as many different domains as you like, as long as you crosslink them the same way you would if they were on the same domain there is no difference to the search engines.

      Using your keywords in the URL is helpful for ranking, it doesn't have to be in the domain name, it can be any where in the URL.
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