Worth Splitting Up Main Site into Several Microsites?

[CleanEdisonInc]

The company I work for offers a variety of very different products, that are sold to different audiences.

Right now (and for the past 4 years) all the products have been listed on one main website.

Over the years, we have accumulated over 200,000 links and rank relatively well in most of the product-specific keywords.

Still, for business purposes we really feel that having a unique site specific to each product would be more beneficial than having them all on one site.

What are the pros and cons of making a move to different subdomains from a main site.

(i.e. instead of www.cleanedison.com/solar we would set up a solar.cleanedison.com)

[irvingw]

Keep it all under one domain.

a) subdomains won't help you rank better

b) they will be considered as new sites

c) navigation and user experience is worse

d) harder to maintain separate sites

e) the bigger the one site the more powerful and you already have a lot of links

f) excessive interlinking can be an SEO issue

g) bounce rate will increase and time spent on site will decrease on the main site

there is no need to do it from an SEO perspective, what are your "business purposes" that make you feel that this would be more beneficial

[TakeshiYoung]

I agree with Irving.  By creating 4 different sites, you quadruple the amount of link building you need to do and lose out on your established domain authority.

It would be better from an SEO perspective to run with subdirectories (domain.com/product) rather than subdomains (product.domain.com).  You can still create a unique looking site for each subdirectory, you can even have them look completely different from each other with different navigation, and the homepage would just have links to the 4 different sections of your site.

With subdirectories, you can still create 4 distinct sites with their own branding & navigation, but you still benefit from the site's overall domain authority.

[CleanEdisonInc]

Thank you for your feedback Irving and Takeshi!  It's much appreciated.

To answer Irving's question, there's two main reasons we are thinking about using "productA.domain.com" rather than "domain.com/productA". 1) if it would help us rank better in SERPS, and 2) to improve the user experience.  Our hunch is that if users think they are dealing with a company that specializes in Product A, they will be more inclined to buy than if they realize that our company sells Products A, B, C, and D.

So far, we have been linkbuilding for each product separately rather than for the top-level domain as a whole.  For example, we will create content about Product A and get other sites that specialize in content about Product A to link back to "domain.com/productA".  We then repeat the process for Products B, C, etc.

So changing over to subdomains would not create more work for us from a linkbuilding perspective.  The main thing we are concerned about is, will this improve or hurt our rankings?  We only have 4 main product types, but they are all quite different from each other and targeted to different audiences.  From everything that I've read, domain authority and trust does pass from the main domain to subdomains if you only have a small number of them.

[EGOL]

If they break up that domain they need to have their heads examined.