A subdomain or a new domain?

[Grumpy_Carl]

Hi all

Mind it I pick some of your brains for a second opinion on something....

The current situation is thus: I have a fashion website which has over 10,000 free articles and videos, support forums with thousands of posts and user blogs. Also on the site is an affiliate store which is built using datafeedr. The store has about 90,000 products from hundreds of retailers. The goal of the site being a one stop fashion community site where people can get information, chat with other fashion fans and then use the store to search all the fashion sites at once.

The problem I am having is despite endless seo work it is proving very difficult to rank the domain for even terms with low competition (We are used to ranking our clients for very competitive terms, often with several hundred million competitors including government websites, bbc, wiki etc). After testing we have come to the conclusion that it's the duplicate content in the store which is hindering our progress. Despite the exact layout of the store being unique, there is no original content on the product pages.

There, we have decided to remove the store from the current url and on to it's own site. The question we have is would putting it on store.domain.com still hinder the main site? I recall reading that google are considering the subdomains and root domain as one these days, or if we were to put it on samedomainname.net would google then consider us to be sending users to another website?

From a branding point of view I would favour the store.domain.com approach but the .net approach could be easier.

Finally, if we were to move the store we have about 45,000 pages indexed which would all return 404's so I guess it would be best to set up 301 redirects from the old url to the new?

Many thanks

[AlanMosley]

Many say that sub domains are sperate, but i have never seen any evidence for this. i have used subdomains and find that they act just as sub-folders. Matt Cutts has said using sub-folders of sub-domain is a matter of personal chioce.

But many people have been moving their duplicate content to subdomains to aviod the panda update effect. I have no idea if this works to protect the root domain long term or at all, it just may take time for google to find it and call it as duplicate again.

i would go with the .net myself, why risk it, time is money.

As for the 301's, if you are keeping the same site structure then you can ddo this with one 301 redirect, if not I would go to WMT and find the pages with incomming links and 301 those pages only, there is nothing to gain from 301ing pages with no links. Ok maybe someone has a url bookmarked and may not find your new site, but it not too likly thats going to be a big problem

[Grumpy_Carl]

thanks for swift reply. I agree with you about the notion of sub domains being seen more like sub folders.

The only trouble i have is that my store has well over 50,000 backlinks in webmaster tools. While it wouldn't be the end of the world to lose these links, it would be nice if I could redirect as much of the link power as possible.

[AlanMosley]

Well if you are keeping the link structure it would easy.

you easly do somthing like replace oldomain.com/folder to newdomain.com

What sort of server are you using?

[Grumpy_Carl]

yes I will be using the same structure. The site will be an exact copy so instead of being domain.com/store it will be domain.net/store so easily enough to set up the redirects I think, just time consuming.

The server is unix. Was a directadmin system now a cpanel system

[SEOPA]

You may find some helpful comments on a discussion I started last week. We were in a situation where we are starting a new video/content blog with issues putting it on the root. Finally made the decision to move to a platform that allows us more flexibility with this (for this and other reason).

http://www.seomoz.org/q/a-blog-structure-dilemma-we-re-facing

[EGOL]

There is a lack of consensus in that thread... so what you read becomes less important than what you decide to believe. 

[AlanMosley]

If it was a windows server, i could of written the rule for you,

yes time consuming, rrom for error, and you will lose some ranking from 301 link juice leaks. but beter to do it now then next year

[Grumpy_Carl]

Thanks for the opinions everyone. After careful consideration of this and on the other thread I posted about my tights website the other day I have decided upon a complete redesign of both sites. Still using wordpress!

The affiliate stores will be dropped from both sites and instead moved to a .net domain. The .net version of the site is design not to rank in the search engines as it will be 1005 duplicate content. If it does rank, then bonus. The design of the .net will be more or less identical to the .com site, save different menus.

The .com will change from being an affiliate store with some articles and videos tacked on to try and provide some unique content, to being a place with 100% unique content. They will still have 1,000s of unique articles and videos and forum, but this they will server just as a community section and to promote the store. This approach will then allow detailed review on specific product ranges; for example, article on why red tights would be good this winter followed by a promotion of the store where the user can find all the red tights from all the retailers.

This narrowed approach will have great seo benefits too as it will allow me to rank specific pages of the site for specific keywords rather than trying to rank the general homepage for everything.

Thanks for making me question my whole approach. While my seo company moves with the time and is very successful, my marketing company is still stuck in a pre panda frame of mind where it was easy to take a merchants datafeed, put it on your own site and be ranking at the top of google 48 hours later.

[SEOPA]

Ha, I agree, though I think it gradually starts skewing in one direction.