Moving External TLD To Subfolder of Corporate Domain?

[ChrisMakara]

Our  Challenge:

Our corporate site receives about 20,000 visits per week. Unfortunately, nearly half of those visitors are "looking" for a link we provide in our navigation link found on our homepage that takes them to our “Employee" focused site which resides on a separate TLD.

Because so much of the traffic to our corporate site lands on our homepage only as a stepping stone en route to the "Employee" site, the bounce rate, time on site and Average page views for our corporate site are all negatively impacted. Meanwhile, the "Employee" site gets more than 100,000 visits per month and enjoys enviable metrics- low bounce rate, high average page views and average time on site.

Our Goal:

1. minimize or eliminate the negative impact of so many visitors using our corporate site as a stepping stone to reach the employee site.
2. leverage the traffic volume and positive metrics enjoyed by the employee site to improve the search engine authority of our corporate site.

Our Solution:

• Move the "Employee" site to a subfolder of our corporate site – for example www.oursite.com/employees
• Install Google Analytics on all pages within the subfolder
• Provide a 301 redirect from old "Employee" domain to new employee subfolder

The expected result is an increase in overall corporate site traffic, more page views, higher time on site, and lower overall bounce rate from merging these two website properties.

Our Need:

After comparing the subfolder option to subdomain approach, we feel that the proposed solution is our best course of action and are looking for validation or an alternate recommendation.

[RyanKent]

Hi Chris.

I have a few questions which will help myself and others to better answer your question.

Are your employee pages currently indexed?

Do employees need to login to access the employee site?

Do your employee pages offer anything of value for the internet? Do you have content that others may be interested in finding?

[ChrisMakara]

Hi Ryan,

Great questions!

1. Yes, some of the pages are currently indexed (see more info on #2)
2. Some of the employee pages are indexed, however the large majority of them require users to be logged in to access certain pages. While we understand that many pages are not visible to Google due to this, that is ok with us. Our main concern is to be able to increase the corporate site time on site, number of page views, and reduce the domain bounce rate. By installing Google Analytics across all pages (logged in & logged out) we think over overall site metrics would increase?

As for the "employee" pages offering value or interesting content, I would say no in that these pages are contain some personal information that is not to be shared with others. There are some generic information pages such as how to use the site, etc. which are in front of registration. We are not particularly interested in ranking these "employee" pages/subfolder within search engines, but rather want to increase our overall site metrics for user activity in the eyes of Google Analytics by combining the two domains in question (employee & corporate domains).

By increasing these important metrics of our corporate domain as a whole, we hope to ultimately increase our corporate domain authority and in turn rank our "important" pages a little bit easier.

Please let me know if you have any additional questions. Thanks!

[RyanKent]

The page views and time on site information will be of limited benefit since most of the pages involved wont be viewable to Google since they are behind a login filter.

While many people believe that Google considers the factors you mention in their algorithms, I am not aware of any solid evidence or statements from Google confirming this information. In fact, Matt Cutts has specifically stated that no Google Analytics data is used in rankings at all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBw9tbAQhU

It makes perfect sense to me the factors you mention can be considered as part of the ranking process. I am sure many other SEOs believe they are as well. I would love to see any evidence to this effect. I think most people make this assumption.

With the above understood, if you felt the move was a low level of effort, I would probably go ahead with the change. It sounds like it can be a bit nicer for employees to stay on the same site. If this was considered a big project, I would not make the move without solid evidence you will achieve the benefits you desire.