ECommerce Sites: Sub domain vs. Unique Domains

[brad.s.knutson]

Hello everyone!

I manage 3 large eCommerce sites that sell textbooks, digital learning solutions, electronic teaching resources, etc., to three different markets in the education space (K-12, College, and Post-College/Career Search).

Currently, the 3 sites live on three different sub domains of the companies main domain.  Is this best practice?  I assume we want all three under the same domain to consolidate domain authority. But...

What if I told you that we have dozens of sub domains of the companies main domain?  Some are for marketing sites, some are for digital products, some are customer-specific sites, etc.  We probably have close to 100 sub domains that are used regularly.

Then what if I told you that the company doesn't hardly even use the root domain (other than a handful of old pages)?  Even the root domain redirects to a sub domain.

Just looking for some insight on this, as I will be doing an SEO/marketing/conversion overhaul going forward.

On a side note, we use Magento as an eCommerce platform, and it's rampant with duplicate content, duplicate page titles, pages with too many links, and so on and so forth.  That's another problem for another day...

[EGOL]

I assume we want all three under the same domain to consolidate domain authority.

I agree with this - 100%.

What if I told you that we have dozens of sub domains of the companies main domain? We probably have close to 100 sub domains that are used regularly.?

I'd say that you guys ran wild with subdomains. 

Then what if I told you that the company doesn't hardly even use the root domain (other than a handful of old pages)?  Even the root domain redirects to a sub domain.

• slaps forehead *

OK....  Here's what I can say from experience.

I had a site with a few subdomains.  One of them was much more powerful than the root domain.  I 301 redirected them to folders in the root domain.  The results were kickass.  Kickass.  Rankings were up everywhere because the strength of the subdomains seemed to be united into the root after the merger.

Now... the guys who did your site created an obscene number of subdomains.  If you had ten I would say merge them with confidence.  But, this is a wild ass site.. so I am not betting on anything. 

If you want to experiment, get rid of the redirect that sends the root into a subdomain.  When that gets into the index and stable then start redirecting other subdomains into folders of the root.  I would do it a few at a time to see what happens.

On a side note, we use Magento as an eCommerce platform, and it's rampant with duplicate content, duplicate page titles....

Are you sure that you want to work at this place?  

[brad.s.knutson]

Thanks for your response

I've been pushing to take back the root domain, but have so far hit resistance.  Perhaps I can convince people to at least give it a try.

As far as moving everything into sub-folders of the root domain, as opposed to an obscene amount of sub domains, we could give that a try for some of the sub domains, but not all of them.  Unfortunately, several of the sub domains are _extremely _large sites that require a lot of processing power on the server.  Nearly every single one of these sites has it's own dedicated server.  I think it would be heinous to move them all - but I will see what we can do about moving some.

Thanks again!

[EGOL]

Unfortunately, several of the sub domains are _extremely _large sites that require a lot of processing power on the server.  Nearly every single one of these sites has it's own dedicated server.

Holy smoke!

but I will see what we can do about moving some.

I run a site that gets a lot of traffic...  It is on a dedicated server and when I needed more capacity they have added drives, memory, new processors...  You can have multiple boxes running a single site.

Have you talked with any hosts who specialize in running really busy sites?

I've been pushing to take back the root domain, but have so far hit resistance.

I would say...  If we are BigCompany.com then why are we sending our traffic to outhouse.BigCompany.com?

I used to work at a place that did this (I was not on the web team)... they would move important stuff all of the time, abandon URLs without redirects... it was really rude to the institutions who linked to them.  All of these moves were done on whim... Without thinking of how it impacted visitors, partners and the bottom line.