Need to move highest content pages into a sub-domain and want to minimize the loss of traffic - details inside!

[PatBausemer]

Hi All!

So the company that I work for owns two very strong domains in the information security industry. There are two separate sections on each site that draws a ton of long tail SEO traffic.

For our corporate site we have a vulnerability database where people search for vulnerabilities to research, and find out how to remediate. On our other website we have an exploit database where people can look up exploits in order to see how to patch an attackers attack path.

We are going to move these into a super database under our corporate domain and I want to ensure that we maintain or minimize the traffic loss. The exploit database which is currently on our other domain yields about three quarters of the traffic to the domain. It is obviously OK if that traffic goes directly to this new subdomain.

What are my options to keep our search traffic steady for this content? There are thousands and thousands of these vulnerabilities and exploits so it would not make sense to 301 redirect all of them. What are some other options and what would you do?

[rhutchings]

Not quite sure that I understand the need to put these on a subdomain.  Why not have both of these reside/exist on the corporate domain?  One of them already exists on your corporate, so you can keep that database/search there, and then move the other over to a similar location.  yes, that would require a ton of 301 redirects, but that should be ok given the scope of the project.

In my experience, moving to a new domain or even a subdomain, you always experience some traffic loss that never really comes back (unless you are naturally growing anyway).  Keel the main company domain going, put everything under a folder off the root, dont worry about the subdomain issue.

[Chris.Menke]

Would like to offer an opinion but can't quite figure out what you're saying in paragraph 3.

[PatBausemer]

Hi Chris,

Sorry for the confusion. The plan is to merge both databases (our vulnerability database on our corporate site and our exploit database on our other website) into one and place them on a subdomain off of our corporate site. Right now the exploit database that is on our second website gets a LOT of traffic, it contributes about three quarters of the traffic to the domain. I would like to minimize the loss of traffic when placing this on this subdomain and looking for ways to do this.

@ryan - I am not sure exactly why, but our web producer told me that we need to use a subdomain and cannot put this on our domain. I will follow up with her to find out why.

Update - I guess one of the databases is written on a different platform (ruby) so it cannot be hosted on the same server - changes are harder to make as a result. I guess this could still be done however it may be a little harder to update - anybody have experience with this?

Thanks for the help guys!

Pat

[Everett]

Hello Pat,

I do not have experience merging a Ruby site with another type of site, but I think we are confusing issues here anyway. You can have content in a database that gets served up anywhere. That is, you can pull that content into ten different websites if you wanted to. The database issue is almost irrelevant to the SEO issues, which have mainly to do with loss of pagerank from URL changes, and possible duplicate content issues. A 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one would take care of both of these issues.

If you are unable to redirect all of the old content my suggestion would then be to figure out which URLs have external links and redirect those. Let all of the other ones return a 404 or 410 status code so those URLs will be removed from the index since the content will exist on the new URL and you don't want two URLs with the same content indexed simultaneously.

Please let us know if we have missunderstood the question or if we can provide more help with your original question. You may want to post your Ruby question in another thread to ensure the right people see it.

Thanks!