Trying to avoid splitting Search Engine juice, need advice

[CubicleFugitive]

We currently have a political issue with one microsite we're trying to promote. The group that created the website, created it without the consent of the rest of the company and now, although it's allowed to live, we've been given a few restrictions. They main restriction is that when the microsite is linked from the main corporate website it needs to be referenced as a subdomain so http://microsite.company.com. We've been promoting the site as http://www.microsite.com (I'd include the actual websites but don't want to air their dirty laundry). The problem is that a lot of the listings in google are starting to show up using the http://microsite.company.com url instead of the actual url we're about to start promoting and I'm sure that's going to split rankings. Is there a way to appease both sides here. Keep the subdomain from the main site but transfer the juice from that main link to the microsite url?

To be clear, I can't just use a 301 redirect because that will change the url from the subdomain to the microsite url (unless i'm wrong) and corporate doesn't want that.

Does any of this make sense? Any help would be greatly appreciated

[ChrisMacNaughton]

What you may want to consider is doing a 301 of microsite.com to microsite. company. com if that's permissible. I'm assuming that you can't just 301 the link from company.com to microsite. company. com but you may be able to do it the other way around?

[CubicleFugitive]

Unfortunately that won't solve it because the sub group that developed the site want to promote their own url. It's all a political issue where I have to keep both types of URLs visible but get all the rankings to flow to the microsite url.

[ChrisMacNaughton]

Well you could always use rel=canonical to declare that the canonical version of the page is microsite.com even when you link to it from microsite. company. com.

It would help Google understand that the proper version of the site is the microsite address while leaving links from the main company site pointing and rendering at microsite .company. com.

[Guest]

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[CubicleFugitive]

Unfortunately the subfolder won't work either because they are on two separate platforms.

Chris: I've leaning towards Canonical option as well but wanted to pick the brains of a few experts (like yourself) to see if that was my only option or not. Thanks.

[ChrisMacNaughton]

I think his problem is that the department that created the microsite.com site wants to keep it seperate and brand it independantly while the whole company wants to bring it under their umbrella so doing a sub folder wouldn't actually really work at all, I suppose you could use URL redirection to get the microsite domain to pull up for the subdirectory.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Kalvin, can you share with us how things are going and what you decided? Are there any nuggets you can share that might help out the next person in a similar situation, and/or do you have more questions you'd like to throw out to the group? Don't forget that you can use private Q&A with just staff members as well.

[SeoSheikh]

Hi, I know this is an old thread but I have a similar issue. The company I'm currently working with used to have 30+ subdomains all going to different versions of the same website, many with duplicate content. This was creating 30+ different google analytics accounts to look through and all sharing the same ink juice.

Now I have come on board, I have rebuilt the website so that it is one main website with franchisee pages like www.mainsite.com/uk/franchisee-location

Now what should be the best option for the 30+ subdomains that are left? At the moment they are all pointing to their respective page on the new website but I have a developer in the team that is adamant that Google is going to penalise us for having the 30+ subdomains pointing back to urls on the main.com website. I'm not convinced as I think this is a much cleaner way and a better user experience.

My question really is, what is the best action to take with the franchisee subdomains that are out there still in the Google index? Should I keep redirecting them to their new url (www.mainsite.com/uk/frachisee-location) or should they stay as franchiseelocation.mainsite.com and will Google penalise the domain for this?

Many thanks for any advice.