New Global Company website launch question

[SeoSheikh]

Hi Community, a quick question and just some reassurance for me - We have been building a new website for a large company in the UK. Their previous website was badly made and they had franchisee websites all leading off from the main .com website all under separate sub domains on Wordpress multi site.

cityname1.companyname.com
cityname2.companyname.com
cityname3.companyname.com

and so on...

My question is this - A few of their franchisee microsites on sub domains are currently ranking very well for their chosen search terms. The new companybrand.com website has a dedicated page for each franchisee city/areas and i'm concerned that there may be a loss in rankings if the subdomain of their old 'microsites' gets pointed to their new page (which has better quality content). ie;

city-location.companyname.com to be pointed to www.companyname.com/city-location

Can anyone see any potential hazards in this?

Thanks for any help

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

There is always some drop in rankings when you redirect anything. Usually this drop is temporary and, if these new pages you are talking about really have better quality content, rankings go up. What I'd look at is backlinks. If those subdomains have somewhat valuable backlink profile - here is where you would suffer the most. Even if you use 301 redirect, backlinks are still gonna be pointing to old subdomain, not new page. In perfect world you'd have to reach out to all linking webmasters and get links changed in their original placements.

[DirkC]

Several elements here:

1. Migrating from subdomain to main domain - Moz "official" line is that this should be beneficial (check Rand's WBF on this https://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday)

2. If you change your url's - 301's are still your best option. It's possible that it's not transferring all link equity - but it's still the best option you get. Watch out for redirect chains however. You might find this post interesting - also check the comments below: https://moz.com/blog/accidental-seo-tests-how-301-redirects-are-likely-impacting-your-brand. From personal experience - I have migrated several big sites to new platforms - completely changing the url structure and in most case you couldn't even notice the smallest glitch in Google Analytics. So it's not a given thing that your rankings/traffic will drop after redirects.

3. You mention that you also are doing a re-design - improving both design and content. This is the big unknown. Question is always if your carefully designed new pages are going to please your visitors. In the migrations cases where we had a drop of traffic this was very often related to the redesign - lower pageviews/visit, higher bounce rate - lower time on site. Few days after migration - traffic dropped (and it took indeed a few months to regain the original traffic/rankings)

4. Incoming links. I agree with Dmitrii: in an ideal world you should reach out to all the webmasters and they would kindly update the old links to the new ones. Realty is that some of them heard some SEO stories that outgoing links to other sites could get you punished by Google - and that it's always better to put non follow links or remove all the links to commercial parties. I fear that the risk of losing links here is bigger that gain.

Hope this helps.

Dirk

[MattRoney]

Hi SeoSheikh, did Dirk's or Dmitrii's responses help? If so, please mark one or both as a "Good Answer."