How do I move the printed text to the top?

What are the SEO implications when you move a portion of an authoritative website to its own domain?

• My organization will be relaunching a 3,000-page news site and changing hosts from its home on a major non-profit domain that has been around since 1994 and enjoys a fairly good reputation. The internal debate: Start clean with a new domain (because if you use all of the proper mapping and migration practices the page rank and all the rest will follow) --- versus --- Put the relaunched magazine site on a sub-domain of the established dot-org domain (because a sliver of a site can't retain its parent's reputation) ------------------------- Update (2/11/2013 at 4 a.m. Eastern): Thanks so much everybody. This is really helping, and as a nonprofit with little budget for consultants it's especially appreciated. I'd like to try to resolve one difference of opinion among the three experts answering so far because it may be the point that decides this -- the question of whether a subdomain is treated as a separate site or not. On Grant's questions: New brand? Old print brand; the magazine has been around for 90 years. It's had a minimal online presence for about six years and full text of each monthly issue for only two years. Why the move? Any restructure? Mainly a CMS decision. We have not been satisfied with Sharepoint and are moving to a hosted solution better suited to an external news site. Archives will be ported over but there will be quite a lot of restructuring. Exists where now? The magazine site lives in a subdirectory. We have a subdomain that serves as nothing more than a short URL pointing to the subdir, but the subdomain has been printed in the footer of every page of the print magazine for two years. Own traffic or leeching? We're not satisfied with our magazine site's traffic but it has been improving, and it does well on its own, given the nature of news. The subsite is updated nearly every day while most of its parent nonprofit site remains static. Thanks again, answerers and Quora! I've peeked in here but never before now have I had a question to ask that is so consequential.

• Answer:

  The SEO implications are that if you start with a new domain on a new host, you will lose the value of the direct association that's been around since 1994 (older sites have much higher ranking value). Further, all search engines will have to begin an entire new indexing of your new site, which means you will be re-establishing your ranking and your authority. That's going to affect your ranking over time as the search engines do this on their own schedules. If you do re-directs from your old URLs to your new ones, you will mitigate some of the loss and speed up the process - and be sure to link back to the non-profit domain from your pages to maintain the authority of that association. If you can preserve links between your new site and the non-profit organization, that would be better. Note that there are plenty of major news sites that operate off of sub-domain URLs: Newsweek off of http://TheDailyBeast.com and Fortune off of http://money.cnn.com just a couple. You might look to their examples to see how they might apply to your case. Good luck with it.