Best way to give away rank?

[hoosteeno]

We have a set of branded and unbranded keywords that we want our product site to rank very high for. Right now, our support site owns the first page of rankings for most of the keywords we care about. What is the most efficient way to give the rank currently enjoyed by our support site to our product site? Both have very high domain authority and tons of backlinks. Here are some factors that might apply:

• Support site has lots of copy including these keywords, while product site doesn't (yet)
• Support site doesn't currently include a lot of links to the product site (and vice versa)
• They're on the same domain -- support is at support.domain.com, product is on www.domain.com
• Support site has many more pages and their URLs are more semantically related to keywords

I know there are lots of structural improvements implied by the above -- on the product site, increase the amount of copy (and landing pages) focused on keywords and significantly improve internal links, etc. But I'm wondering if the fact we control both sites gives us any options we wouldn't have in a competitive situation?

[Avid-Panda]

Hello

I am fairly new to the community but I thought I could offer some useful information. I have had similar issues and success with a number of techniques (though probably on a smaller scale). I was about to list them when I remembered there was a great whiteboard Friday on this topic.

https://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranks-for-keywords-whiteboard-friday

Degrading a page might not be worth it if your competitors are hot on your heels. Especially if you have yet to do everything you can to improve the rank for www.domain.com. I have never tried such things across domains so I would be interested to know how you get on.

I appreciate you want to give power to your product domain and not simply shine a light on one over the other. You might consider a redirect. I believe 301s now pass all of the link juice. If there is another way to transfer power other than internal link sculpting I would love to know also.

Alex