One Main Brand Domain - One EMD which Ranks Better

[CarlaAction]

Hello SEO MOZers!

We have one one main ecommerce site and I have just discovered we have an EMD sitting on a .co.uk, for one of our premium product ranges, and it actually outranks our main website. It appears on page one.

My question is how do I handle the EMD? I don't want to start building authority to this site, as we are currently developing the main brand site, however I can't ignore that it is ranking.

There is relatively little content. There are links on the page (it's only one page) that go through to the product section on the main site. But should I 301 redirect it?

What would be your advise? I want to capitalise on any traffic we could benefit from, and ultimately I want the main site to rank better for this product's keywords.

Any help would much appreciated.

[RobCairns]

Hi Carla,

A couple of questions to consider:

1. Is the main site also operating in the UK?

If not you probably don't want to link them as there is lost relevancy unless your e-commerce service area includes the UK and wherever your main domain is targeting.

If they are both in the UK, you are good on this.

2. Are the sites both hosted on the same DNS?

If so, you are risking a red flag from Google. 1 or 2 links this way won't hurt, but over time you are leaving footprints which run against Google's best practices and you are risking penalization.

3. Do the main site have a page that would be a viable 301 redirect target from the UK site?

If so, you are in pretty good shape and I would consider the redirect. You will be losing some link juice in the process, but traffic will be coming to the site you prefer.

4. Just how serious do you want to get about your technical SEO?

EMD's are not the be-all and end-all of SEO. In fact, if I were you, I might be looking at a way to improve the content on the .co.uk site before conducting the 301 redirect in order to boost its rankability as much as possible to give my main site as much of a boost as possible. It's all about how much you have to dedicate to it in terms of resources.

Hope these questions and answers have helped to give you some perspective into how to handle your situation. Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help!

Cheers,

Rob

[CarlaAction]

Hi Robert,

Thank you very much for the detailed reply. The main website is also based in the UK but I'm not sure about the DNS which I will check. If they are on the same DNS, are you saying that redirecting the EMD to the main brand website would contravene Google best practice and we shouldn't do it?

We have a full section for this product range on the main site so it means that there is a viable target for the 301. I just feel like we should be building up this section on the main site and making that better, rather than focusing on the other one, but unfortunately because it ranks so well (I thought Google stopped ranking websites just for the EMD), I need to do something with it!

Thank you for your advise so far. I'm really grateful to you.

Carla