SEO Puzzle

Good morning and happy Friday!

I'm new to this forum and have only been practicing SEO for less than a year; there is much I need to learn, and I look forward to any advice or suggestions from experienced veterans!

Here's my dilemma: my company just launched a new website, but bosses instructed the programmers/developers to incorporate it into our 11 year old site. (this gets confusing but I'll try to be clear) The URL for the new site is mawnews.com but can also be accessed using ourams.com/about. The company's 11 year old site is ourams.com. When you're on the mawnews site, the URL never changes from page to page, except the "supplies" page which takes you to another site entirely.

The site(s) are in Joomla, btw.

Why would you combine two different sites like that, and how is that going to affect the SEO? Will the bots see that as one convoluted site, or two separate sites? I'm also worried about user experience, as it could be confusing. The site map is going to be a mess and I can't wait to see what happens when I resubmit that to the engines.

There is also no evidence of mawnews on ourams.com. No links, nada.

Should I recommend the sites be separated or just leave them be and perform SEO on the new site?

 

Is the site using some sort of script, so when you click a link new content is loaded, but the URL does not change?

If so, this is a bad idea. This will confuse search engines and prevent them from indexing your content. Overall, this means less traffic to your site because search engines won't know what the heck is going on.

That sort of "scripting" should be reserved for web-applications that need to do stuff, calculate stuff, and provide it back to the user without reloading a new page. (This is the type of content you don't want indexed in a search engine anyways)

 

Thanks for your response, Deceth, I'm looking into that right now.

 

Here is the response I received from the programming dept.


"We did a domain forwarding/redirecting to point MAWnews.com to ourams.com/mawdaily. So when you use MAWnews.com to get to the site that domain/url will masked all other urls."

 

When forwarding/redirecting if you are moving from an old domain to a new domain and the change is permanent make sure you use a 301 redirect. A 301 redirect will let Google know that any links which pointed to the old domain in the past should now give PageRank to the new domain.

 

Thank you, CybercoN! The forwarding/redirecting was not from an old domain to new one, but a new one was added onto an old one and the two are not related. I'm concerned about the SEO repercussions for both sites.

 

As long as it is 301 redirect, no need to worry, it was done to get benefit of one site to other site..

It may be that your old site is penalized thats why you are redirecting to new site, as old site would have some regular visitors which would come to your new site, you would get some SEO benefits too.