Domain vs Sub Domain and Rankings

[iragless]

Hi All

Wanting some advice.  I have a client which has a number of individual centres that are part of an umbrella organisation.  Each individual centre has its own web site and some of these sites have similar (not duplicate content) products and services.  Currently the individual centres are sub domains of the umbrella organisation.

i.e. Umbrella organisation www.organisation.org.au

Individual centres are sub domains i.e. www.centre1.organisation.org.au, www.centre2.organisation.org.au etc.

I'm feeling that perhaps this setup might be affecting the rankings of the individual sites because they are sub domains.

Would love to hear some thoughts or experience on this and whether its worth going through the process of migrating the individual centre domains.

Thanks

Ian

[atidigital]

Hi Ian,

If the sub domain is active for some time and have gathered links, I recommend not to change it to main domain. It is good to have it as sub folders if you are building it from scratch and the main organization home page can have clear landing instructions to its sub centers. Each individual center can have separate NAP content to attract local traction.

[fa179]

if I were you I would change the site structure and apply following

organisation.org.au/center1
organisation.org.au/center2
organisation.org.au/center3

would redirect old subdomains to sub-folders with 301.

This has been discussed several time, even Rand has a white board friday for this.

Lastly, yes it's worth moving subdomains into sub-folders, you will notice ranking increase by doing so

[iragless]

Thanks Munther

Each centre is individually branded and managed so I don't think sub folders would have really worked in this case.  There are also a number of smaller centres that are already in subfolders of the main site.  My concern is that the amount of similar content in sub folders and sub domains and wanting to rank for similar keywords for those sub domains or pages might be diluting the rankings overall.  Also it appears in some cases the main domain might be taking precedent over the individual centres for rankings.

Ian

[iragless]

Thanks Fahad

See my response to Munther above.  Do you think that changing to centre1.org.au, centre2.org.au might be an improvement over subfolders?

Ian

[kwoolf]

Without being able to view stats on the domains in question, it is impossible to give you the best advice. Generally speaking, subfolders get better results than subdomains, but there are many other factors to consider.

If you can't move to a subfolder structure, then skip this issue and start down the list of other technical optimization best practices. With time and traffic, I'm sure you'll gain in your organic rankings for selected keywords. In my experience, a domain name is but a small factor of the overall picture. The issues you'll have with these subdomains are more of a marketing cost than an SEO cost.