Launching Brand New Subdomain To Outrank & Outperform Main Domain

[MattStott4]

Fellow Mozzers!

I have a tricky problem that may or may not have a viable solution.  It's one that our team are 100% pressing ahead with regardless & I wanted to canvass some opinion on what options I have.

We have the Main Company Site which has been going for +15 years, has a DA of 58 and 63,000 links pointing at it.  It currently ranks on page 1 for a number of our important keywords. However....

We are now launching a Subdomain, which will be something like marketing.maincompanysite.com which we now want to drive a lot more of our traffic to.  In particular for items like new customer acquisition, product discovery etc.  In fact we would actually rather the subdomain outrank our main site for branded queries. However the Main Site is still important for existing customers who login to our product and we don't want to do anything that will destabilize it's rankings too much.

My questions are:

• Are there any strategies I can use to get a subdomain (with no links or history) outranking the main site in position 1 on Google?  Main site should still rank in position 2!

• Any other tips to actively take legacy traffic from a main site onto a subdomain seamlessly.  Should we just be 301 redirecting unnecessary pages on the old site to new and improved pages on the subdomain?

There will still be a 100,000+ pages on the main site, lots of authority and traffic going through it.  It's not becoming redundant.

Thanks so much guys - hopefully I've explained that okay!!

[benesmartin]

Hey Matt,

Your new subdomain is gonna "compete" agains 15+ years website with 63 DA. It's not an easy task to outrank such a site, even when it's your own.

I'd make a list of those pages, which you want to stop ranking for on your main site and 301 redirect them to the new subdomain to avoid duplicates.

You are starting from scratch, since the DA is not transfered to the subdomain.

Have you been successful with your strategy since May?

Cheers, Martin

[silentnightweb]

Hi Matt,

We are in a similar position and I was wondering how your project is going and what effect has it had on your main domain?

Thanks

TJ

[EGOL]

I would improve the main domain.  Building a subdomain will divide your power.

We redirected all of our subdomains into folders a few years ago and the results have been kickass.