Two company websites - should 1 be nofollow?
-
We are an automotive dealership that is required to keep a manufacturer appointed website. It's pretty terrible so we are having a new site developed in addition to that. We plan on transferring our current domain name to the new site but I am not sure what to do with the older, less useful site. Should I try to have both sites appear in the search results to capture more traffic? Or is that inefficient? Should I make the new site no follow?
-
Alan is right. I'll only add that you'll really want to look through the links he provided. Local SEO is a related, but very different animal than regular SEO.
Also, unless I missed an important detail, you may want to look into canonicalizing the manufacturer's site to your own site, assuming you don't care whether the manufacturer's site appears in the SERPS.
-
Ah well don't you just love terms and conditions?
I'm going to offer my own opinion here - others may see things differently...
If you are allowed to maintain a 2nd site, then that is what I would definitely recommend doing - focusing all your attention on the new site. Not doing any no-follow or blocking for search engines.
Why? Because as much as you may get traffic to the MFR linked site, and having a link from the MFR IS a good thing, without the ability to present the image, the message or the experience you want to convey, you're at the mercy of their marketing ability. And as you've described, the low volume of traffic you currently get seems to indicate a not-so-savvy ability.
Here's the difficulty though - you're essentially starting from scratch with the new site. So you're going to need to pull out all the stops.
High quality unique content is vital, of course. Local optimization on-site, backed by maximized off-site local SEO, social media and link-building are going to be what make the long-term difference though. If done properly, you should see your preferred site show up consistently in location based search results.
And then if the MFR site happens to show up, so be it. Unfortunate to need to deal with, yet a necessary evil in this case. More important is to push the site you control so you can have as much control over your message as possible.
Here's a few resources for local optimization
-
Hi Alan, thanks for the reply.
The manufacturer appointed website is one that we are required to maintain. We have very minimal control over look, feel, and content but we have enough control to customize it a bit (including access to the of the code).
The existing site will get assigned a new domain name of our choosing. We are not required to use a domain that the manufacturer chooses.
We are not required to use the manufacturer site as our primary site; however, the manufacturer will only link to the site that they provide from their parent site. This will be the sole reason we even care about that site. We literally don't have to do any maintenance whatsoever to the manufacturer site in order to keep it running. Fortunately, we don't get too much traffic from them so all of our marketing channels will direct people to the newer site.
-
I'm not sure what you mean by "a manufacturer appointed website". Does this mean you have no choice but to maintain a site they provide and where you have no control over it's look, feel, or content?
If you are planning on setting up a new domain and transferring your current domain name to that, what domain name would the existing site have? A 2nd newly obtained domain name? Or one available through the MFR?
Are you required by the MFR to use their provided site as your primary forward-facing promotional point of contact on the web?
These are all important points to help determine how you proceed.
If you make the new site nofollow, what would you use the new site for?
Having the need to maintain / promote two separate sites is always more challenging than focusing all your efforts on one site and really should be avoided at all costs if possible.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Question Regarding Website Architecture
Hello All, Our website currently has a general solutions subdirectory, which then links to each specific solution, following the path /solutions/ => /solutions/solution1/. As our solutions can be quite complex, we are adding another subdirectory to target individuals by profession. I would like to link from our profession pages to the varying solutions that help. As both subdirectories will be top level pages in the main menu, would linking from our professions to **solutions **be poor architecture? In this case the path would look like: /professions/ => /professions/profession1/ => /solutions/solution1/. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
Website indexed but not ranking for anything
hello everyone, It seems my website http://www.scribidocampus.com/ is indexed by google but it si not ranking anywhere, even wehn i google scribidocampus. If i search any of the text on my website in " " no results come up. can someone tell me the reason?
Technical SEO | | themesh0 -
SEO for a a static content website
Hi everyone, We would like to ask suggestions on how to improve our SEO for our static content help website. With the release of each new version, our company releases a new "help" page, which is created by an authoring system. This is the latest page: http://kilgray.com/memoq/2015/help-en/ I have a couple of questions: 1- The page has an index with many links that open up new subpages with content for users. It is impossible to add title tags to this subpages, as everything is held together by the mother page. So it is really hard to for users to find these subpage information when they are doing a google search. 2- We have previous "help" pages which usually rank better in google search. They also have the same structure (1 page with big index and many subpages) and no metadata. We obviously want the last version to rank better, however, we are afraid exclude them from bots search because the new version is not easy to find. These are some of the previous pages: http://kilgray.com/memoq/2014R2/help-en/ http://kilgray.com/memoq/62/help-en/ I would really appreciate suggestions! Thanks
Technical SEO | | Kilgray0 -
My website is not avaliable, will i lose ranking?
My website was not available during 12 hours and i think that i will lose ranking by that. What do you think about it? Will i lose rankings? Some URL were lost during the drop of server, what should i do? Create again? Delete on GWT? Thanks so much.
Technical SEO | | pompero990 -
Website Migration Query
We are going to migrate our site but we cannot do this gradually, so before we complete the whole migration, we were thinking of launching the new site on a sub-domain and gradually redirect traffic to the sub-domain, starting with 10%, moving up steadily so that we then migrate to the new site within four/five weeks. The new site will have a new URL structure on the same domain, with a complete re-design and the IP address will be changing as well, even though the server geographical location will remain the same. a) Should we noindex the new sub-domain while the new site is on trial? b) Are there any other issues we should look out for? Thanks in Advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | seoec0 -
Quality link not indexed after two months
Hi! Bit of an odd one, but I thought I's ask. Recently I wrote an article for Smashing Mag. It's was a great success and not really an SEO exercise at all, but after several weeks my author page hasn't been indexed (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/author/sam-wright/?rel=author). I just assumed give the quality of the site that it wouldn't take that long. I know it's just a case of leaving it, by any thoughts on why its not been picked up?
Technical SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Website redesign launch
Hello everyone, I am in the process of having my consulting website redesigned and have a question about how this may impact SEO. I will be using the same URL as I did before, just simply replacing an old website with a new website. Obviously the URL structure will change slightly since I am changing navigation names. Page titles will also change. Do I need to do anything special to ensure that all of the pages from the old website are redirected to the new website? For example, should I do a page level redirect for each page that remains the same? So that the old "services" page is pointed to the new "services" page? Or can I simply do a redirect at the index page level? Thank you in advance for any advice! Best, Linda
Technical SEO | | LindaSchumacher0 -
Two websites with similar products
I have two websites with similar products with different tld.I have a keywords that is comman in both.One site is at top in google with that keyword and one is not.Can we implement 301 redirect from one domain to another domain for that keyword or google will consider it spammy?Please help me out.
Technical SEO | | Alick3000