Domain Name Effect on SEO?

What is the effect on SEO if I integrate a sub-domain into a main domain?

• I have a subdomain that has been separate to the main domain for some time.  What is the best way to integrate it to the sub categories without losing SEO ranking?

• Answer:

  If you have a site with great content on a sub-domain and you're hoping to move all that content to the main domain, well that could be a great thing for your website overall. Reasons Against it: The only reason why you wouldn't want to do this is if the content on the subdomain is low relevance to the main domain. E.g. http://dogs.cats-advice.com - I wouldn't migrate your dog related subdomain to the main site which is about cats. This could negatively impact the overall optimisation for cat related search terms on your main domain. If however it's something that's relevant: http://cat-blog.cats-advice.com - then definitely migrate the subdomain to the main site to http://cats-advice.com/cat-blogs - the halo value from having more related content The effect of the migration: Search engines often treat content on sub-domains as if it's a completely different website. So all the link juice, content and traffic will be attributed to your main domain. This will improve the value of your domain and the overall Domain Authority which again feeds back to how much strength your domain has and ultimately could positively affect your search engine ranking positions. How to migrate the subdomain: The main thing you need to do when migrating the sub-domain to the main domain is that you need to implement 301 redirects at page level from the old URL to its new URL. Depending on the server you're using, you can do this in your .htaccess file. If you need help with coding the redirects, then check out this blog post: http://www.saelboat.com/blog/how-to-guides/2011/htaccess-file-regex-guide-part-1-simple-url-to-url-301-redirects-88 What a 301 redirect does is tell Google that the page is now at a new URL and to pass on all the traffic and link equity to the new page at it's new URL. If you need more help, send me a message, I'll happily help out.