Rebuilding a site with pre-existing high authority subdomains

[jonathanwashburn]

I'm rebuilding a real estate website with 4 subdomains that have Page Authorities between 45 and 50.

Since it's a real estate website it has 20,000+ pages of unique (listing) content PER sub-domain.

The subdomains are structured like: washington.xyzrealty.com and california.xyzrealty.com.

The root domain has a ~50 Page Authority.

The site is about 7 years old.

My preference is to focus all of my efforts on the primary domain going forward, but I don't want to waste the power of the subdomains.

I'm considering:

1. Putting blogs or community/city pages on the subdomains

2. 301 redirecting all of the existing pages to matching pages on the new root domain.

3. Any other ideas??

[RobertFisher]

Jon

Given it is a real estate site, here is how we would proceed.

We would use 301's in the .htaccess file from url to url. One issue with RE is that your listing content changes so you may not want to go to the trouble of making the change on listings that have previously sold unless you are wanting the archived data to be seen for a reason. (In TX only RE brokers and agents can access past sales data - don't get me started )
Now, if your sub domains are such that people have them bookmarked or have specific reasons for going to them versus your new site, you could add a blog, etc. You would lose the links going from pertinent urls, but it would be over time and, if you kept fresh content along with adding new links, you may find one to be beneficial. It is really a judgement call for you and a work/benefit call.

Some RE sites utilize Iframes to bring the data in so you need to be aware of any limitations around that. We handle a some RE sites in TX and there are issues as the result of MLS systems being on IFrames and being tied to Explorer as the only usable browser.

Hope this helps a bit.

[jonathanwashburn]

Hi Robert,

Thanks for the help!

I think we have a lot of deep links to specific city pages. I am concerned about losing that juice, but I guess the 301's will mitigate that somewhat.

The site isn't built in frames.

I don't think people have many pages bookmarked.

I'm not 100% sure I fully understand your solution, but I'm still left feeling that I don't have a solid idea of which direction to go.

Best,

~jon