Adding academic content for a school in a sub folder, sub domain, or different site?

[AISFM]

I manage the website for a school and we are planning to put our academic policies/student handbook online. I’m curious if there is any SEO value to including this content in our main website?

This isn’t stuff that anyone is going to link to externally (student orientation procedures, how to enroll/drop credits, academic warning policies etc) and there would be limited internal linking as well (someone looking for course information doesn’t want to see this type of stuff).

I’m not interested in SERPs for this content, but I’m wondering if the additional content could help the site’s SEO overall? It is naturally rich with ‘academic’ keywords and the only websites that use this type of content are universities.

On a similar note, I need to put up student profiles for potential employers to view. Like the policies, this is not priority content for someone visiting our website, but it is still keyword-rich content, which would add to the overall 'size' of the site.

Should this stuff go in a folder, a subdomain, or in a different location altogether?

[AlanBleiweiss]

If the information contained in the academic policies is not needing to be kept confidential, and if that information is valuable to students (or even perhaps people considering becoming students, or parents of existing or potential students), then for those reasons, it would be legitimate to make it accessible from the main site without them having to go hunt for it.

Given those reasons, I believe it would be perfectly valid to have it be crawlable and indexable by search engines.

I would also group it all together in a dedicated location (such as a sub-folder hierarchically) with it's own sectional sub-navigation because it's no different than any other quality content - grouping topically focused similar content is proper for user experience.

As for the student profiles that's a completely different issue.  This one involves the reality that it is most likely most student profiles are going to have very little depth of unique content.  I assume students will fill out the content themselves. That leaves the door open for all sorts of good, bad and ugly.

Further, if there is some reason for students, faculty or other staff to be able to access it without having to sign in to a secure area, that is not a reason to have it found in search engines.

There are privacy concerns (so a secure area is then in fact, the best option if that's the case).

Most likely being "thin" or even some low quality or perceived duplicate content, if it's not hidden behind a log-int, it really should be blocked from search engines in a robots.txt file or use noindex,nofollow meta tags.  (no valid reason to do noindex,follow).

Having said all that, I would suggest it could just as well go in a sub-folder of the main site or a separate sub-domain.  Since it will be blocked from indexation/crawling, either would work.

One final reason it shouldn't be indexed or followed is as students come and go, that way you don't need to worry about a "301" redirect system to deal with them.

[AISFM]

Thanks - great answers.

Beyond the technical considerations, is there an SEO benefit to having a larger site with more content, especially if the content is keyword-rich?

Again, I'm not looking for this additional content to rank in search results (students who want it can navigate from the home page themselves) but does the additional content help the overall domain credibility/authority?

[AlanBleiweiss]

The more content that ends up ranking for it's own topical focus, the better the whole site does - it all gets a lift.  The critical key though is topical relationships. If the content becomes too diverse across a site, it can weaken the site's topical consistency.  The exception to this concept is if the site is intended to be a "general information" site covering a vast range of topics.  However even in that case, when a site gets too diverse, it becomes increasingly more difficult to get individual topics to rank because only so much time and energy can go into supporting any individual topic.