I am trying to determine the best way to separate a site into two to keep the best ranking and SEO for each site. The site is sellhousesfaster.com which is a combined site for buying and selling houses. The domain riversouthhomes.com is forwarded to sellhousesfaster.com. The problem is that visitors are either wanting to sell a home or buy a home, not both. The idea is to create two sites for marketing purposes (not to distract and confuse visitors) and to be able to narrow the SEO for each topic. The localized search for each topic is now pretty good so I don't want to go back to square one on either one. My plan is to take sellhousesfaster.com to a new site with similar content on the buying side and then for riversouthhomes.com keep pretty much the same site with most of the former content, layout, etc from the old site (removing the non-pertinent links and info). There would be links to each site. Is there a better way? Any thoughts/ideas are appreciated.
You can go with 2 sites and do SEO for both the sites. Since both the sites are have same concept (real estate) , doing SEO will be easy.
I've taken a look at your websites. I've noticed that http://www.riversouthhomes.com/ doesn't actually redirect at all - it's just one massive frame containing http://www.sellhousesfaster.com/ Thus http://www.riversouthhomes.com/ wasn't passing any link equity to sellhousesfaster.com anyway. Developing riversouthhomes.com into it's own site would not effect the rankings of sellhousesfaster.com As for your plan: I recommend you keep sellhousesfaster.com pretty much the same and instead develop riversouthhomes.com as the new website. This is because sellhousesfaster.com has 4 links to it where as riversouthhomes.com has 2 links to it. sellhousesfaster.com is probably the one that ranks the best right now, so changing the content on this site too much risks your rank changing. As for when you develop riversouthhomes.com (assumining you take my advice). You need to make sure that none of the wording is the same as on sellhousesfaster.com, otherwise you will risk setting off a duplicate filter (in which case one or both of your websites could be removed from the index)
Splitting both sites will trigger the duplicate filter. The links between the two sites will also trigger the "Sub-Net Cross Linking Filter". In this market, it is hard to matain one site let alone two sites. I would stay with just one site and spend my time building it. Suggestion: Look closer at your navigation and on the home page split the paths into the Buy / Sell markets. In the end, you will have a stronger website, less work, less maintenance and a greater ROI.