Links from a website or a subdomain, which would generate more benefits in terms of SEO?

[marciofelias]

I have a customer who just bought a domain (and the full website) of a competitor and decided that they will no longer update the website purchased. The website of my client has a Domain Authority = 50 and DA of the website purchased is 45. Each of them was registered by different companies and are on different servers too.
The reason for my message is that by being registered by different companies and are in differrent servers I can use the site purchased as a way to make link building to the main website (one way link buiding only from the website purchased to the main website), but I can put the website purchased as a subdomain of the main website and agregate content to the main website.
In your opinion which would generate more benefits in terms of SEO to the main website? Links from the website purchased or put this website as a subdomain to the main website?

[Mike.Goracke]

I would probably do 301 redirects instead of linking.

The reason behind my thought is that if one of your competitor's visitors were to visit your newly purchased site, why would they click on a link to your website? Wouldn't you rather that they be redirected to your website to the applicable page?

But if you are just trying to up your DA by link building, I suppose you could link from the purchased domain to the new.

Putting the website as a subdomain of your own would make sense if the purchased site has good content that pertains to you; however, if you are not going to update the content or change it to be more focused to your business, I don't know how much sense that makes to users.

The bottom line should be what is going to provide the best visitor experience.

Hope this helps.

Mike

[marciofelias]

Hi Mike,

Thank you for your opinion. The website purchased has a good content and is related (they publish about the same niche) to the main website, they are complementary. The main point is that my customer don't want to migrate the content (republish all content) from the website purchased to the main website (so this way I could only do a 301 redirect), the decided to consider both as a differente websites. The reason for that is that both websites are from IT niche and in this market the content need to be always fresh, and the purchased website have a lot of legacy content that we both don't know how to integrate with their new content.

So I suggested the two situations that I mentioned before.

For me the best user experience will be put the website as a subdomain and make a 301 redirect to the subdomain. But I don't know if it will help in terms of SEO as I know that a link to complemetary content do in this case.

Anyway, thank you again.

[Mike.Goracke]

Rock and roll. Thanks for the explanation.

In terms of SEO, links from completely external sources (domain1.com linking to domain2.com) are better than subdomains linking back to the root (sub.domain1.com to domain1.com).

The reason for this, is that it is assumed you can easily manipulate linking to your root from a subdomain.

Hope this helps.

Mike

[marciofelias]

Great, I really appreciate your help.

Marcio Elias