I tried this question in another part of the forums and didn't get much luck, so I thought I'd try here instead and see if any technically minded people will be able to give me some advice... I have a website that is trusted by google and ranking well. I want to start a closely related spin-off website, and give it the best starting position possible by leveraging the (link) popularity of my current domain, but at the same time keep it fairly separate for marketing purposes. Is the following a good idea... 1. create a subdomain for the spinoff on the current website, like this: spinoff.website.com 2. i get the domain spinoff.com 3. i do a 301 permanent redirect from spinoff.website.com to spinoff.com 4. i link from a few places in website.com to spinoff.website.com will this give some of the link popularity and trust from the original domain website.com to the new site spinoff.com, via the subdomain and permanent redirect? will it cause any problems with the search engines? any better suggestions? thanks
hola baires, I'm not an expert, but people say that a subdomain is seen by SEs (Google at least) as a different domain, so it wouldn't get any "credit" from the original domain. it would be different if you put the redirect on a subdirectory (website.com/spinoff). But perhaps you should put a related page on that subdir (instead of the redirect) for a while until it "inherits" some PR from your homepage. Then do the redirect. un saludo //
muchisimas gracias cientificoloco! i was not aware that people say the subdomain is seen as entirely different by the search engines... will look into that more. the suggestion about putting a related subdirectory page up for a while and later doing a redirect is also a good one. saludos!
To BuenosAires I would advice against the use of redirections, and specially those made using HTML meta tags. If you have to use a redirection, use a htaccess directive instead. Having said this, I must point that a redirection is not what you really want to do. A redirection is used when something pre-existent has been moved. In this case, you are creating something new, so a redirection is not of any use. Of course you will have to link from your current site to the new one. The question is if the new site will be a sub-directory, a sub-domain, or a completely new domain. I would recommend the last option.