Effect on SEO for e-commerce on a different domain?

[bethkmac]

We are engaging a vendor to host our LMS and the process for purchasing access to the LMS (product pages/checkout). The vendor can only accomplish this by domain masking (redirecting portal.ourdomain.com to a subdomain on their domain).

Our concern is the SEO implication. Obviously we would prefer the content hosted in a subfolder on our domain for the best SEO outcome, but this isn't an option.

The vendor's domain authority is considerably lower than our own, but they recommend moving our product pages, which are currently hosted on our primary domain, to their subdomain so the checkout process is fully integrated using their product. Several of our product pages rank in the top 10 on Google and we don't want to lose that.

Does anyone have any experience with domain masking and maintaining page rank? My inclination is that moving these high-ranking pages will 1) Hurt our primary domain, and 2) Negatively effect the rank of our product pages.

Thanks in advance,

Beth

[OlegKorneitchouk]

If your products are ranking well for their target keywords, I would try and avoid changing their URLs (especially to a different domain). Keeping on your own domain also helps improve your product rankings when you grow your main website.

Not sure how the masking will be set up, but in some cases there is no "internal links" since they are all masked by the root masking domain. This would definitely prevent you from building more links (and further improving your rankings).