Partner Login as subdomain?

[DerekM88]

Hi MozTeam,

We have a website that is used as our partner login for our Partners to see their stats, but it is located on a SEPARATE domain from our main corporate website. We currently have thousands of people logging into the external portal every month, which we are obviously not getting good SEO credit for. I am considering bringing the entire login portal into our main corporate website, so that Google sees how popular and useful our site becomes when thousands more people are visiting... We only get a few thousands organic visits to the corporate site per month and about 3x that to the partner login portal. This is why I originally thought we could benefit from bringing it into our corporate site.

Challaneges: our website is in .asp but we are launching a new version of it next month, switching it to Wordpress and into .php....but the current partner login website is still in .asp!

Questions:

1. How will bringing this site into the main corporate site benefit us as far as SEO?

2. What is the proper way to combine an .asp site with a .php site?

3. If we have to use an iFrame because we can't mix the two languages, will that affect our SEO benefit?

Pls advise, as if this is actually a good idea, I'd like to get it launched along with the site redesign that is currently under way.

[matbennett]

Hi Derek,

This question is trickier than it first appears, as a lot of the answer depends on how your back-end is set up.

My suggestion would be to move the login form to the main site, and leave the partner site where it is.  You can probably have that form target the existing login routine quite easily.  That would mean that you could direct people to the main site (lots of direct visitors) where they fill in the form and are then transferred to the existing partner site.

You wouldn't get any benefit from the dwell times, as these would be on the other domain, but the work involved is probably significantly less - even if your partner site is quite simple.

So - keep that possible solution in mind and I'll answer your questions from that viewpoint.

1. Very hard to say. It's a good signal though, so as long as it makes sense to the customer then it could be worth a shot - even just as "insurance" against the next update.  However I wouldn't expect massive improvements just from this... definitely not enough to warrant a major change to a partner set-up!

2. Either replace one of them, or find a way to move elegantly between the two.  You really are not going to get both systems working on the same domain in any practical way (unless you use subdomains) very easily.

3. You could iframe the login form.  No huge harm in doing so, but just having the form target the other domain is probably simpler and tidier.

I hope that is some help

[DerekM88]

Wouldn't this boost our Bounce Rates and slash our AAvg Time On Site...by having the majority of traffic going to a login page, then leaving the site within 30 seconds?

I like the idea of routing this traffic through our main site, but would it be more loss than gain considering these aspects?

[matbennett]

Well, the only alternatives you have to that are:

• Don't change it
• Open the whole partner site in a frame
• Rebuild the whole partner site

It's worth mentioning that I personally  don't believe that bounce rate is a metric that any sane engine would use as a ranking factor.  I'm not that sure about time on site either (you could argue cases for both being negative factors as well).

I don't think that a frame is going to fool anyone.  So if you really want to send that signal and believe you need to do the whole thing then I think you are stuck with having the only option being rebuild your partner area.

Unless your partner area is very basic indeed, I can't see that being worthwhile myself.