: Move subdir to subdomain for separate SERP listings? I market a conference and we have two very distinct customers. Attendees and Exhibitors/Sponsors. Each customer has a different sales funnel.

@Jamie184

There are two things to consider here: 301 redirects do not pass juice and sub-domains are their own sites. You will be fine in short order.

Regarding 301 redirects. A redirect does not pass juice, but it also generally does not mess it up either.

Regarding sub-domains. A sub-domain is it's own site. This means that is must be spidered and ranked as a new site. Having said that, the parent domain metrics do still apply but not page metrics.

Regarding both. Redirecting was the right thing to do. Search engines will drop your existing pages and spider your new pages. This will happen faster for each page that is redirected. If you use a blanket redirect to the effective new site depending upon how you do it, could allow the search engine to find your pages faster. You will have to allow the flushing out of the changes in the index and that can take a while. I expect that in about 30 days you should see improvement, but it may take another 30 days to shake it all out. By then search engines should have a idea of how to present your site in the SERPs.

Changes are never taken as immediate. When you make a significant change like this, plan on 60 days before really knowing the impact. It is possible that more settling out is needed and some SEO tuning and content changes need to be made. I generally avoid looking at the stats except to know if I made any errors for at least two months. Then I get serious. It may also help to use a sitemap for the sub-domain to help search engines. Google is very good at rediscovering sites of significance using a sitemap.

You should be fine if you only moved the content without too many significant changes. Otherwise, any additional changes need to be discovered, understood, indexed, and ranked.

It may be that you did a really good thing SEO wise.

Good Luck!

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