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XinRu657

: Two Companies, One Site, Big Problems I am working with a company that has two company identities, however they have used 1 root domain. In addition, the content for both sites are almost

@XinRu657

Posted in: #MultipleDomains #Subdomain

I am working with a company that has two company identities, however they have used 1 root domain. In addition, the content for both sites are almost identical (working on separating and fixing this).

So example:
example.com - this is the main company.
lovely-company.example.com - this is a different company that needs to have a different identity to the end users and search engines.

The lovely-company.example.com example is performing now better than example.com due to more back links, traffic, each time the example.com is improved, the lovely-company.example.com is as well so example.com's ranking has depleted and lovely-company.example.com is thriving.

The plan is to separate the identities with two separate urls. So there will be a lovely-company.example.com and example.com. However, because the lovely-company.example.com has such as great ranking for eample.com and I can't keep the domain (as the backlinks to the lovely-company.example.com and audience expectations are related to the lovely-company.example.com company) what should I do with the subdomain?

I'm fearful if I point the subdomain that the SERPs will still deliver and the issue won't be resolved. However, if I do a 301, i'm not sure i'll have any better luck. But for sake of UX, we have to do one or the other.

My last thought was maybe on the example.com doing a robot.txt for all of the lovely-company.example.com pages (lots).

Any help would be appreciated. It's a mess!
Thanks for reading.

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@Turnbaugh106

Not only will you need 301 redirects for about a year, you will also probably need a very simplistic static page with the link after you quit the automatically forwarding for about a year too. Just one sentence with the link to the new url.

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@Si4351233

In this sort of situation there is no real best solution, only least problematic. In this instance the least problematic solution that I can see would be to keep the lovely-company.example.com domain for a period of 6-12 months but forwarding all pages using 301 redirects to lovely-company.example.com. This will give a chance for the organic links to rebuild to the new domain. Once that happens you can close down the lovely-company.example.com domain. While the ranking for example.com has gone down based on your question eliminating lovely-company.example.com shouldn't further affect example.com as Google considers the two as separate domains, if anything you may see overall organic linking to example.com improve from the reduction in confusion.

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