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Site split. Subdomains or separate domains?

by capecods
7 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Situation:
Current, website has three distinct portion, content and target demographics. This is causing confusion both for customers and for search engines. For instance it is selling service A & service B. So the site also ranks high for AB service although it is not provided. Currently, using subfolders but this has proven less than ideal. Pre-existing, domain needs to be replaced at some point regardless. We are splitting the site, it will be service A, service B and a corporate section which will include all the content unrelated to either service. Services being sold are in a highly defined geographic local area. Each section is distinct. The debate is how to do this. The new divisions will be cross-linked.

We can do three things.

Opt 1.
GeolocationServiceA.com
GeolocationServiceB.com
Name.com

Opt 2. (subdomains)
GeolocationServiceA.Name.com
GeolocationServiceB.Name.com
Name.com

Option 3
NameGeolocationServiceA.com
NameGeolocationServiceB.com
Name.com
#domains #separate #site #split #subdomains
  • Profile picture of the author dave_hermansen
    It sounds to me like you need to do a better job with your title tags and meta descriptions if people are clicking through for things that you do not provide. If they are landing on your site and are confused, you need to do a far better job at providing clear navigation and explaining the services you do and do not provide.

    We all have search terms that we rank for that we do not want to rank for. Google is far from perfect and splitting things into separate domains is unlikely to solve the "problem". Frankly, there are worse problems to have. This costs you nothing and gives exposure to your website to people who may need the services you DO provide someday.
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  • Profile picture of the author capecods
    Hi thanks for the reply. We need to move the current main regardless, the URL is not good. I am very conflicted about splitting the site or how to accomplish it best. The idea is behind a full split is twofold first the movement to a more relevant URL. Secondly to increase the keyword density. Unfortunately, no one around here knows enough to bounce ideas off of.

    What would you do in this situation
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  • Profile picture of the author dave_hermansen
    Unless the URL is horrendous, I'm not sure it matters. Most people don't remember URLs anyway. There are a lot of headaches and loss of traffic can definitely happen with a URL switch so just make sure it is really that important.

    I'm not sure what you mean when you say you need to switch domains for keyword density. Keyword density is an old SEO practice that does not work where you try to get a keyword on a page as a certain percentage of the total words. If you are talking about getting the keywords in the domain name, it is VERY unimportant. It has no actual SEO benefit, although it does offer a slight SEO advantage when people use the domain name as the anchor text in a link. That's not enough of a benefit to move a whole site, though.
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    • Profile picture of the author capecods
      https://www.thefuriesonline.com/

      Issue with the preexisting domain is that it is given out very very often. Has the word "the" which makes it hard to give out literally has to be spelled to people. Also "online" dates the domain, also makes it sound like an isp or game.
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  • Profile picture of the author dave_hermansen
    Another more simple thing you might consider doing is getting a simpler domain name and forwarding it to this site (instead of the other way around).
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  • Profile picture of the author James Clifton
    My suggestion is to go with the first option i.e.
    Opt 1.
    GeolocationServiceA.com
    GeolocationServiceB.com
    Name.com

    The reason is that the URLs will be the simplest in this. You can provide easy navigation in your sites. You can link these three sites through external linking. You can manage things in this option such that the search engine and the visitors will not be confused. And to my mind, this is the best option from the SEO point of view.
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Either way, one of the sites won't get any use of the old backlinks, assuming you have old followed backlinks currently ranking pages today.

    In other words, one of the new sites will be starting over and not ranking for any keywords.

    Keep in mind even a 301 redirect can't always save a ranked position on Google SERPs. It's a gamble messing with ranked pages/URLs.
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