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Hi Kris, a complete site restructure is on the cards and, while your offer is very kind, this rebuild could easily take up a year of all your developers' time (over 100k pages) and a monster CMS system, think just a little smaller size than the BBC. The nub of the question is can we use external providers of web functionality while still building link equity for our main sites?
Hi all,
Our business has aquired a new domain name because there are several organisations closely related to ours that use similar domain names to target a niche group of users. We would like to use this new domain name to link to an existing website with content targeted at this user group as we feel that they will be more comfortable getting to the content via this new URL.
After a useful search in these forums the majority of SEOMOZ gurus suggest that the new URL should be redirected to our current site using a 301 and we are happy to do this. However do we have to link the URL to our homepage or is it acceptable to link to a subfolder within the domain and then targeting content on this page to the user niche?
Thanks for any input.
Kind regards.
Edit 11:38
The old url is oldcommunity.charity.com (we know having a subdomain is bad) this is where we manage all community engagement.
The new url is www.newparticularcommunity.com and we would redirect this to oldcommunity.charity.com. The reason we have bought www.oldparticularcommunity.com is because the url is used by other charities for community engagement and is recognised by the community we are targeting. We are redirecting to our old site because we do not want to engage with them on this new url as our old site oldcommunity.charity.com already does this and can cater for the new community and perhaps they haven't realised that we can.
We are a large charitable organisation which has not paid too much attention to SEO guidelines in the past and as such have a number of websites that have been built by external development agencies.
The question that we would like to ask is how this is affecting our SEO. The sites that have been built previously have been created on subdomains and we know that this is an issue. Subdomains are considered separate sites by the Search Engines and not all equity is passed from the subdomains to our main sites, especially as our internal link structure is poorly constructed. However if we had put the sites under our main website URL in subfolders would we still be reducing our page rank and link equity as the pages are hosted by the companies that built them often in a different programming language (Open Source rather than Enterprise) and sometimes in a different country.
One company that we asked to build pages for us recently said that it was no problem with SEO because they would put the content in an iFrame to one of our main domain URL in a subfolder but I know that iFrames pass all link equity to the company where the site is actually located/hosted.
What are the brilliant SEOMOZs communities thoughts on this?
Thanks very much.
EDIT - 1100hrs.
Thanks to all the responses so far, but we've not quite got to the root of the issue - sorry it's probably the way I've phrased the question. Essentially we host our own website but our internal team does not have the resource to build all the functionality required by the business. So if we need a platform that manages our events or a platform that manages our community it has to be built externally then integrated into our existing structure as it would cost too much / take too long / potentially don' t have the expertise to do internally. External companies tend to have the best functionality but then we are directing our visitors to their sites. So we are asking them to integrate their sites into ours for an extra fee but what we are trying to find out is whether or not this is worth it in terms of search equity for our site if we only lose visitors once they have arrived at our site and are then directed off...?