Website Consolidation To Sub Domains or Leave Stand Alone

[jfeitlinger]

For a real estate SEO client they have their corporate site and then for each of their communities (10 of them) each community has their own website domains.

One of their team members met with another search agency who recommended they move (consolidate) all their community domains under the corporate site as a sub domain. For example let's say their main site was www.maincompany.com and one of their communities was www.localcompany.com the other firm recommended they move that existing site to become localcompany.maincompany.com and for the other 9 communities to do the exact same thing. They shared that it would really help the corporate site and each of the communities improve search rankings.

I am struggling to see how this could be possible and was hoping to get some perspective as the client has asked me to come in and give my opinion if they should proceed with this consolidation.

Google has indexed each of their community sites and each site gets a decent amount of search traffic and rankings. Due to that I can't see any benefit to doing this. Since each sub domain would be considered a different site than it essentially is what they already have today so it does not raise domain authority for the main company site. Since, each community has a very different brand there would be little reason to go the main company site. What I mean by that is if a user went to localcompany.maincompany.com site I thought that some may (at least out of curiosity) remove the sub-domain to see the maincompany.com site. The look and feel of each are so different it would potentially cause user confusion too.

So my thoughts are this would be a negative for both the search engines and user. So I can share factual pros/cons with clients, do you have any thoughts to the pro's / con's of this approach to consolidate/move other existing sites under a sub domain of the main corporate site?

[Matt-Williamson]

Well I would not go down the route of sub-domains if you were bringing all your sites under one for SEO purposes. I personally would consider putting each of the sites in a sub-folder on your corporate site and then 301 each domain to that folder. You need to remember that sub-domains are often viewed by Google as separate domains, which means any links pointing to the sub-domains pass little benefit onto the root domain (in this case the corporate site). This in my opinion defeats the object of raising the domain authority!!