Thoughts on my change of address delima?

[bearpaw]

Currently our corporate website and store website are under two domains.

• internationalcompany.com (DA: 51; Corporate Website)
• companystore.com (DA: 34; US Store Website)

We were hoping to piggyback on the corporate website domain authority by moving our store to internationalcompany.com/store and when we learned that couldn't happen we opted for us.internationalcompany.com/store. The reason we are leaning towards the route of us.internationalcompany.com is because it is likely that we will be taking over the US branch of the corporate website so we thought it better that the store be a sub address of that.

My main concerns...

1. From what I have gathered it seems that I can't do a change of address to a subdomain within Webmaster Tools - I'd have to have access to internationalcompany.com which won't happen soon. So, is a 301 just as good in this case?
2. As a subdomain, we won't actually reap the benefits of the domain authority of the parent domain will we?
3. Are we just as well off considering a new domain and asking that regional tags be established on the current internationalcompany.com so that the content does not interfere with our SEO efforts?

This is a broad explanation for a complicated issue. Please ask any question that may help clarify.

[SErOb]

Re: 1-  Tough call.  Why can't someone have access to the main site?

Re: 2- Subdomains now have the same DA as the rest of the domain.

Re: 3-  Great company to study,

http://www.shop3m.com/

http://www.3m.com/

[bearpaw]

1. The company outsourced the website to a 3rd party development company. My team has been told by the corporate office that the dev company owns the code and servers that the website resides on and we're simply using what they were paid to develop for us. To get the access that we want we'd have to buy the code and from what I've gathered it won't come cheap.
2. That sounds comforting. So in this scenario a strong emphasis on establishing proper 301's and maintaining page authority should leave us in a better position than when we started?

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Tyler. Here's another case study that might give you some ideas about what you decide: http://moz.com/blog/2-become-1-merging-two-domains-made-us-an-seo-killing.  From that example, you can see all the factors they took into consideration before combining the two. If it's great enough, you might convince the Corporate Website that it could be worth it.

As for the DA of a subdomain, that's not quite right. While the DA of internationalcompany.com won't be affected by the creation of us.internationalcompany.com, us.internationalcompany.com will start out as a new site. With the 301 redirection from your old domain to the new, it should pick up strength quickly, but it won't mirror the DA of the parent company's root domain.  You can check this with PA comparisons of many sites that are hosted on subdomains as companies like wordpress and tumblr offer.  Whatever you decide it looks like you'll need solid by in from corporate if you're working off of their servers so that you can address things like the robots.txt file, adding GWT verification code, and so on.

As a technical note, you can point a subdomain at a unique IP address by using an A Name instead of a cname in DNS. This means that us.internationalcompany.com could point at your servers as long as they have a static IP.  That would give you more flexibility in working with file transfers, code and the like.

[bearpaw]

This post is deleted!

[bearpaw]

Can we put a percentage on 301 link dilution? We can't stay on the current domain so the question becomes what is the recovery time of newdomain.com (with Webmaster Tool site transfer) vs us.internationalcompany.com?

P.S. Thank you both for the continued responses.

[RyanPurkey]

This kind of depends on the size of the site, how frequently Google tends to crawl the site, strength of site, etc. Since this change is part of a larger structural change within corporate I'd ask them for a press release and link(s) from the main site to the new domain in conjunction with its launch.  That will add another additional layer to what you're planning to do:

1. GWT change of address
2. 301 Redirection
3. New links at time of redirection pointing to new site.

All three of which will induce further crawling by the engines and help speed up the process. Since you're dealing with mature sites it shouldn't be a dramatic amount of time if you stay on top of it.