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IMO it is more about ease of use for the end user and less about SEO. If you have a good help sub-domain, it will automatically redirect users to the product site. Still If I had to make a decision, I would have compared metrics like pages/visit, time on site, bounce rate of help site and main site. If help metrics are better than the main site, adding content to main will add value else it will deplete value. Also if it is only one product, it makes sense to have help within main site bur for multiple products, you should be better off with sub domains (product wise and not docs vs main). Please see and decide what is best for your users first, keeping SEO at second priority. Hope it helps. Nitin

I did it to two client sites and neither lost any rankings. I used the Change Permalink Helper plugin, which made the redirects seamless. The most unfortunate thing about changing URL permalinks is the fact that if you have social sharing buttons on your posts, all the counts get reset to zero. I must add that just because I didn't lose rankings doesn't mean there's not a chance, albeit a small one, that you will.

Hey Sean, We have talked before as we work on one of the spree stores. You need to get content up on all these pages. For example http://spreecommerce.com/extensions/267-spree_product_zoom If it is all user generated content, than you need to make some fields required to help automate this when people add new extensions. Such as title, description. -Sean

Hi Sean, I'd be wary of inferring too much from one week's worth of results. Depending on the site, a 3% variation could just be weekly fluctuations. A few things might help shed some light on the situation: When did you make the changes? It's possible that you can rule out your changes as the cause of the differences by figuring out if the search engines have indexed them yet. I'd take a look at Google Analytics in depth and see if there's any kind of weekly/month variance across at least a year of data. Maybe the first week of the month gets more traffic historically - unfortunately I've found SEOmoz doesn't provide data back far enough to catch this kind of thing. I'd also use GA to compare month-to-month traffic and see if there are any keywords or phrases that are receiving less traffic for each portion of the month. Have you seen any ranking changes? There's a slight difference in URLs receiving entrances compared to last week. These might account for a drop off if a page has stopped ranking for a specific phrase. I'd be surprised if you lost traffic by removing those duplicates you mentioned, as it's less common for duplicate pages to rank twice for the same result, or for them to rank differently for different results. Again, it could easily just be normal variation, but the above things are where I would start.

Yes that certainly explains it.  Thanks for pointing this out.

Hi Sean, There are few things that could be at play here ...first of all, it is not unusual to rank well for terms that are not particularly competitive. (Competition is measured by how many pages are out there that are actually optimized for a term). The other thing to be aware of is that the standard reports you might receive in your email often give you the On-page Grade for keyword terms against your home page. If you have actually optimized a completely different page on your site for that term, you would not expect to get a fantastic grade against the home page. If you look at the list on the left side of your reports it will tell you the URL of the page it is grading against. To check how the grade looks against the actual page where you optimized for the term, open the On-page tool and run the keyword term against the  specific URL. Hope that helps, Sha

Just to clarify, our site provides e-commerce software, we're not an e-commerce site ourselves.  Also, the links don't have keywords in them so that's not so much a concern. Still, it sounds like you're saying there's little value in linking out in this situation.  Thanks for the input.

First off, the biggest concern will be spammers. Use a good captcha system like reCaptcha or OpenCaptcha to control who signs up, although charging money is the best way to keep them out. Second, don't manipulate the anchor text at the bottom of the user generated stores, just use your brand name. Third, I wouldn't be hugely concerned about it being a subdomain. Think about all the spam on blogspot and wordpress.com. You won't enjoy the authority status at the beginning that lends them some buffer against the spam, but if you control it at the beginning you should build up your site enough that you can weather some crap making it's way through.