With the increase of Do-it-Yourself Websites, many professional people and businesses are on the verge of creating their own newly designed CMS Websites and don't want to lose any SEO page ranking and/or existing links.
Here are some things to consider when directing people from your old to your new Websites:
Domain Names
A popular SEO debate is if one should use multiple domains, sub-domains or folders when he/she has various categories.
This decision can heavily affect the performance of the Website in the major search engines and it is extremely difficult to make changes if someone makes the wrong call. The truth is that there is not a single best practice due to several pros and cons.
Below you will find one example URL for each method:
- SEO.com & floridaSEO.com (multiple domains)
- florida.SEO.com (subdomains)
- SEO.com/florida/ (folders)
Multiple Domains
Multiple domains are used when we want to be Location (GEO)
targeted. This solution allows us to have different website layout, structure and categories and it helps us increase the number of results in SERPs. Creating Microsites is a good way to promote individual products and services and they can help you achieve better rankings especially if you can incorporate your keywords in the domain name.
There are several business, marketing and SEO reasons that can affect your decision on whether you should have multiple domains.
Examples:
www.example.com
www.example.net
www.example-blog.com
www.micro-example-product.com
Subdomains
Experiments showed that in some cases, when the main domain has a relatively small amount of subdomains, part of the authority passes to the subdomain. According to other theories, the subdomains are handled like different domains and thus none of those metrics pass to them.
However, there are strong indications that some authority and trust passes to the subdomains only when the domain has a small number of subdomains and when the link structure of the main website passes enough link juice to them. An additional factor can be whether the subdomain keeps the same website and link structure as the main website.
Creating multiple subdomains usually means that you have additional parts of the website that need to be handled separately. The sub domains can be hosted on the same or on different servers, they can execute the same code or have a completely different technology to support them. The same happens when you use multiple domains.
Subdomains are also used when you have different products and services that you want to present by using a different website structure (Google example: Adwords = adwords.google.com). Subdomains can also be used for GEO targeting, or for increasing your results in SERPs. However, in many cases, websites use subdomains because they use hosted blog services to power their blogs. Finally for dynamic multilanguage websites, subdomains are a great solution because they can be easily coded and they can achieve good SEO Results.
Examples:
product.example.com
blog.example.com
florida.example.com
Folders
Search engines use several metrics to determine the authority, the trust and the strength of a domain. The best choice is to use Folders (ex:SEO.com/blog/). Since the folders are part of the main site, all of the domain metrics are maintained. When you use different domains (ex:SEO-blog.com) then none of the metrics pass to the new domain.
The most straight forward and safe solution to increase SEO is to use Folders, because no special code is needed to handle the different parts of the website.
The folders are the most common and easy. It is the safes method in terms of SEO and Web Development. You should use folders when you have a relatively small website and when you want to maintain the authority of the domain in the main categories.
Examples:
www.example.com/product/
www.example.com/blog/
www.example.com/fr/
Design & Web Structure
Mainly for usability reasons, keep the same design and structure across all the pages. This helps users navigate easier and find what they are looking for. Additionally by keeping the same website structure we help search engines understand which are the basic components of our website (menus, footers, headers, etc). That is why when we use folders, which are considered to be parts of the same website, we usually tend to have a similar layout in all pages.
On the other hand, when we use subdomains, we can consider them as different websites and thus we can have a different layout and website structure. The same applies when we use different domains.
Link Building & Link Structure
When you use Folders, the link building campaign of your website is not affected. Depending on your plan, you can add the links directly to your homepage, or place them on the internal pages to boost their rankings.
When you use subdomains and especially when you have different domains, it is highly recommended to launch separate link building campaigns for them. You will need to ensure that those subdomains/domains receive enough links from external domains in order to speedup indexing and increase authority, trust and PageRank. Additionally in the case of subdomains make sure that you place links from the parent domain. Finally when you have multiple domains make sure you cross link them in a whitehat and transparent way (avoid hidden links in HTML and cloaking).
