Passing SEO value from a subdomain

[notnem]

Hi Everybody,

I have built a website (http://rugby.europcar.ie) which has gone viral and getting huge amounts of traffic world wide. The problem is, all the Facebook shares, tweets and other social traffic is all referencing the subdomain, and now www.europcar.ie where I want to build rankings.

What are my best options for referring this ranking power to my main domain?

Thanks in advance

Ronan

[AdiRste]

Get rid of the Sub-Domain and create europcar.ie/rugby instead.

301 rugby.europcar.ie to the new europcar.ie/rugby.

[notnem]

Would facebook / twitter etc take account for the 301 redirect, or would my share count etc go back to zero?

Thanks for the quick response btw

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hello Ronan,

Unfortunately your share counts will go back to zero and you have to start over again. This is caused because none of the social networks follow/ read the redirects of your "old" urls. The guys at HubSpot wrote last August also about this which could be read here.

A couple of months ago we 301'ed on of our own blogs to a new domain name and also lost hundreds of share counts on Twitter and Facebook for our posts. You'll have to take the pain, but if you want to build rankings on your main domain this is probably the best way.

Hopefully this answers your question.

[eonicWeb]

I don't think your share, tweet count would get passed on or redirected.

Why don't you leave the subdomain and the main site just the way it is and offer a call to action to the main website from the rugby site?

I don't think it is going to pass that much link juice through redirection..

[AdiRste]

Martijn is 100% correct so please listen to him.

Thumbs up.