Two company websites - should 1 be nofollow?

[kylesuss]

We are an automotive dealership that is required to keep a manufacturer appointed website. It's pretty terrible so we are having a new site developed in addition to that. We plan on transferring our current domain name to the new site but I am not sure what to do with the older, less useful site. Should I try to have both sites appear in the search results to capture more traffic? Or is that inefficient? Should I make the new site no follow?

[AlanBleiweiss]

I'm not sure what you mean by "a manufacturer appointed website". Does this mean you have no choice but to maintain a site they provide and where you have no control over it's look, feel, or content?

If you are planning on setting up a new domain and transferring your current domain name to that, what domain name would the existing site have?  A 2nd newly obtained domain name? Or one available through the MFR?

Are you required by the MFR to use their provided site as your primary forward-facing promotional point of contact on the web?

These are all important points to help determine how you proceed.

If you make the new site nofollow, what would you use the new site for?

Having the need to maintain / promote two separate sites is always more challenging than focusing all your efforts on one site and really should be avoided at all costs if possible.

[kylesuss]

Hi Alan, thanks for the reply.

The manufacturer appointed website is one that we are required to maintain. We have very minimal control over look, feel, and content but we have enough control to customize it a bit (including access to the of the code).

The existing site will get assigned a new domain name of our choosing. We are not required to use a domain that the manufacturer chooses.

We are not required to use the manufacturer site as our primary site; however, the manufacturer will only link to the site that they provide from their parent site. This will be the sole reason we even care about that site. We literally don't have to do any maintenance whatsoever to the manufacturer site in order to keep it running. Fortunately, we don't get too much traffic from them so all of our marketing channels will direct people to the newer site.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Ah well don't you just love terms and conditions?

I'm going to offer my own opinion here - others may see things differently...

If you are allowed to maintain a 2nd site, then that is what I would definitely recommend doing - focusing all your attention on the new site. Not doing any no-follow or blocking for search engines.

Why? Because as much as you may get traffic to the MFR linked site, and having a link from the MFR IS a good thing, without the ability to present the image, the message or the experience you want to convey, you're at the mercy of their marketing ability.  And as you've described, the low volume of traffic you currently get seems to indicate a not-so-savvy ability.

Here's the difficulty though - you're essentially starting from scratch with the new site.  So you're going to need to pull out all the stops.

High quality unique content is vital, of course. Local optimization on-site, backed by maximized off-site local SEO, social media and link-building are going to be what make the long-term difference though. If done properly, you should see your preferred site show up consistently in location based search results.

And then if the MFR site happens to show up, so be it.  Unfortunate to need to deal with, yet a necessary evil in this case.  More important is to push the site you control so you can have as much control over your message as possible.

Here's a few resources for local optimization

Google Places Guide

Pimp your Google Places Page for better rankings

Local Citation Finder

[dvansant]

Alan is right. I'll only add that you'll really want to look through the links he provided. Local SEO is a related, but very different animal than regular SEO.

Also, unless I missed an important detail, you may want to look into canonicalizing the manufacturer's site to your own site, assuming you don't care whether the manufacturer's site appears in the SERPS.