Umbrella company is taking Domain and link strength!

[Therealmattyd]

Hi everyone! First thanks for reading this, I really appreciate it. The company I work for has two sites one is an event website and the other is a blog. The blog gets a great amount of the traffic and propels sales. The event website doesn't get much traffic but has been around for awhile and has garnered a 6 Google Page rank with a lot of backlinks and referring domains. The event website, though, has the same name of the company and this sometimes gets confusing when talking to businesses so the executives in charge want to make the event website an umbrella site for the company (very similar to Virgin's website). They will keep the event website but rebrand it with a new domain and basically start over. The good news about this is the event website, even though it has high link strength, has a lot of 404s because they had a previous database that they dumped leading to a lot of 404s (I made them change those to 410s).

Here's my issue. I want to keep the SEO strength of the event website for the event website. Could I do a 301 redirect for a couple months and then take it off and make the umbrella site? Would the strength pass? Or would it be possible to do a 301 redirect in the subfolders where most of the content and links are? Or would you recommend another method of transferring the strength of the site?

[spencerhjustice]

If I understand correctly the executives at your company want to use the domain that the current event site is on to create an umbrella site, but you want to keep SEO strength of that site but on a different domain?

I don't think that that would work how you want it to, because as far as I know once you take that 301 off, all of the links leading to the original domain are going to start counting towards that umbrella site and the even site will likely drastically drop in rankings.

The temporary might help to boost the new domain for the event site, but it's definitely a complicated situation and I'm not sure that there's a good way to go about it.

Also, you mentioned a blog at the beginning of your post but after reading it, it kind of seems somewhat irrelevant to your question.

[Therealmattyd]

I see what you mean about the relevancy for the blog now. What would you recommend that I do. Do you know of any way I could keep the SEO strength? Would doing a 301 on subfolders work?

[MikeTek]

Hi Matt,

Not sure I have a clear understanding of what you mean by "Could I do a 301 redirect for a couple months and then take it off and make the umbrella site?"

Any 301s you set up to pass link equity must be maintained permanently.

You can absolutely use 301s at the subfolder/page level, and if you can leave those redirects in place permanently this may be a solution for you.

The other option is to reach out to webmasters for your most valuable links and get those changed over to the new events site - can take a lot of time and isn't always successful, but it's often the best option to ensure link equity is maintained.

If you'd like to share more detail, I can circle back and provide more specific info. Hopefully the above helps to some degree.

Best,
Mike

[Therealmattyd]

Thanks Mike. The URL in question is Flavorpill dot com. There's been some talk of moving it to a new domain. Currently the site redirects you to new york or sf or la and all the events live on /events. I was thinking of, if we were to go to a new domain, to do 301 redirects on subfolders (new york, events, etc) and that might save some of the Google equity. There is a huge amount of links to the site and the site has been around for awhile so I'd like to keep that strength. There's also a lot of rebranding going on and I have said that I would like the rebranding to happen first before moving so some advice on that would be good as well.

Thanks,

Matt

[MikeTek]

Hi Matt,

In general, my advice would be to achieve permanent 301 redirects at as granular a page/folder level as possible (prioritized by the current number of linking root domains - Open Site Explorer's Top Pages report is a great tool for this).

Where the rebranding & migration is concerned, I would strongly recommend reading through two resources here at Moz:  

1. Ruth Burr's overview of Moz's own fairly recent move (from SEOmoz.org to Moz.com) and
2. Aleyda Solis's handy "Achieving an SEO-Friendly Domain Migration" infographic

Between both, I think you'll have your bases covered.

Best,
Mike