Does doubling up on domains increase my ranking?

[Travis-W]

I own two websites. One is older and contains the bulk of my content. The other is a web-based tool that has less written content, but is equally important to my business. For the sake of examples we'll call the older website "oldsite.com" and new website "newsite.com". Would it benefit my old site to direct traffic to the web-based tool using a domain like "newsite.oldsite.com"? What's the best way to integrate the two sites so I am not splitting my traffic?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I just want to add a word of caution for you here Zora.

Google doesn't like it if you use one site to pull traffic, only to try and push it elsewhere. Each site needs to sit on its own merits.

However, if you want to take content from newsite.com so it is more usable as a tool for visitors to oldsite.com, then either a subdomain or oldsite.com/newsite will both work. I would probably favour the latter myself so you are not seen to be taking traffic from one place to try and move it to another.

Just remember to 301 pages from newsite.com to oldsite.com/newsite or newsite.oldsite.com so there is no duplicate content left anywhere.

I think I have that right

Andy

[Travis-W]

Right, Andy. Because the content is relevant to my older site, I want to link the two sites and hopefully improve the old site's rankings in the process. When 301-redirecting my new site's domain to the old site's domain which is the best way to do it: subdomain or subdirectory? Thanks!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I would stay clear of sub-domains if you can Zora. As far as I am aware, Google still views these as a separate entity, so keep everything under the same umbrella which is oldsite.com

Andy