Buy a subdomain for popular website sub section?

condra

Hi guys

Quick analogy:
You have a website which reviews kitchen appliances. Most of the pages are reviews, but you also have a top ten product page, which gets 40% of your traffic.

The website is called appliancereviews.blah and the popular page is at /kitchentopten


Would it be worth your while buying the kitchentopten.blah domain name, and setting it to forward on to the popular page?

Would the subdomain be listed in google on its own merit, despite being a forwarding page?

If not, would you possibly get more traffic from people searching for keyowrds in the subdomain name, e.g "kitchen top ten".

Thanks for any thoughts on this!
_____

PS - incidentally, kitchentopten.com is available. haha. no you know for sure I was using an analogy!

MOH

condra wrote: »

Hi guys

Quick analogy:
You have a website which reviews kitchen appliances. Most of the pages are reviews, but you also have a top ten product page, which gets 40% of your traffic.

The website is called appliancereviews.blah and the popular page is at /kitchentopten


Would it be worth your while buying the kitchentopten.blah domain name, and setting it to forward on to the popular page?

Would the subdomain be listed in google on its own merit, despite being a forwarding page?

If not, would you possibly get more traffic from people searching for keyowrds in the subdomain name, e.g "kitchen top ten".

Thanks for any thoughts on this!
_____

PS - incidentally, kitchentopten.com is available. haha. no you know for sure I was using an analogy!

So you're saying you have appliancereviews.blah/kitchentopten, and you're wondering if setting up kitchentopten.blah and redirecting it to this page will boost it's rankings?

Not really. Unless kitchentopten.blah already exists and ranks well for your target keywords, and you're talking about buying it and 301 redirecting it, then it'll pass on the benefit from existing links.

But if you mean setting it up from scratch and immediately redirecting it, then no, you're not going to get much out of it. And any effort you spend building it up first (adding content, getting links, etc) would probably be better spent on the original page.

(Since you're talking about buying a new subdomain, I'm assuming you don't own the .blah domain, that it's something like a blogger account or something).

condra

Hey . Thanks for your reply.

I do indeed own the domain name for the main site, but this one section gets a lot of traffic and return visits.

I guess people these days use google, and bookmarks, so the "memorable" factor isn't that important, and "example.com/section" isn't exactly that hard to remember anyway.

Likewise, if someone searches for the name of this section, they get my site anyway.

market myself online

it all depends on what you want to achieve.

Buying a new domain is unlikely to have instant Search Engine placement, and moving all your content to a new location (particularly if it is on the same server as your previous site) is likely to mean that it will not be indexed any where near as high as your old site.

Remember the domain carries a weighting in google based on its age and overall ranking factors from the pages.

However if you are printing leaflets it is a common practice to buy a unique domain just for a particular offline marketing effort, then you can just use a 301 redirect and point the domain at a location on your current website, this has two effects:

1. people have an easy to remember url to reach the information they want
2. you can track a particular offline marketing effort by seeing how many people access your website by using that particular domain (i.e. no. visitors typing in the domain = no. visitors who saw that marketing effort).


Having said all that, if one particular aspect of your site is recieving alot of traffic then consider identifying that as a niche market and creating new websites based around just that niche. Then you will be able to blanket the entire search engine results with your web properties and dominate your way to market leader in that market niche.

L