Sub domain versus separate domains, which is better for Search engine purposes?

[Bill-Duff]

We are pitching to a hotel client to build two new websites, a summer website and a winter website, two completely different looking websites.

The client wants to automatically switch their domain name to point to one or the other, depending on the time of year. The customer does not want to use a landing page where you would choose which site to visit; they want the domain name to go directly to the relevant website.

Our options:

Set up two new domain names and optimise each website based on the holiday season and facilities offered at that time of year. Then change the exisiting domain name to point at the website that is in season.

Or

Use the existing domain name and setup two sub domains, switching the home page as necessary.

We have been chewing this one over for a couple of days, the concern that we have with both options is loss of search visibility. The current website performs well in search engines, it has a home page rank of 4 and sub-pages ranking 2 and 3’s, when we point the domain at the summer site (the client only has a winter website at present) then we will lose all of the search engine benefits already gained. The new summer content will be significantly different to the winter content. We then work hard for six months optimising the summer site and switch back to the Winter site, the content will be wrong.

Maybe because it's Friday afternoon we cannot see the light for the smoke of the cars leaving the car park for the weekend, or maybe there is no right or wrong approach.

Is there another option? Are we not seeing the wood for the trees?

Your comments highly welcome.

Martin

[CPU]

What happens if its summer and I want to book my winter break or winter and I want to book my summer break. I would make sure that they are definitely sure they want two versions of the site before I started but if they are then there is a possible 3rd option to consider - subfolders - www.example.com/summer and www.example.com/winter

For 6 months you redirect anyone coming to the www.example.com site to the required seasonal version. Any links in will to an extent benefit the whole site rather than the one subdomain of the site.

One problem you are going to face is that if you build up links to the summer domain or folder then switch to the winter site some people may remove their link to you as it no longer points to the page that it did when they set up the link.

My preferred option would be a home page giving the option to get to navigate to both sets of content which is held in subfolders with the focus of the home page (in terms of content and design) switching when the seasons change.There would be no need for redirects, less SEO issues, better for a user who is planning ahead and means that any links achieved by either section of the site benefit the domain as a whole.

If wanted to minimise the footprint of the link to the other seasons site then like some sites that have small country selectors at the top of the screen there could be a small season selector that a user only uses when they want to view the off season site.

[Bill-Duff]

Thank you for your response. Links is a big concern of ours, the option to display both sites on an entry page is a definite non starter, the client doesn't like that idea. I like the option of using sub folders. We would link between the two sites to allow a user to book rooms in either season.

I suppose these types of projects are the ones that challenge us all to think outside the box.

Thank you again, food for thought.

Martin