New site on established domain, or start all anew

[carltherunner]

I have a (mostly) free guitar lesson website which is well established. However, I plan on focusing my efforts on a new site with pay only lessons.

I could restructure my established domain to fit in to my new plan, but then I would end up with lots of 404s. Or, I could set up the new site on a whole new domain, and then link to it heavily from my current domain.

My question is, what would be a better approach? My current domain is monetized mostly with Adsense, whereas the new domain would be predominantly monetized by selling products.

[Chris]

Option C.

Keep current site, keep current domain, build new pay area as section of existing site.


You don't want to restructure your current site because you'll lose all your existing traffic, link weight, etc.

You could make a second domain and cross link heavily, but cross linking two sites heavily can send up red flags and any benefit you think you'll get is going to be severly hampered.

However, if you build the new site in a subdirectory of the current site and link it that way, you get full benefit of any existing link weight, you get the most traffic, you'll end up with the best search engine listings.

[carltherunner]

Ahh, thanks Chris! That makes sense.

So, for example

www.mysite.com/ has the current stuff
www.mysite.com/premium/ has the new stuff

I'll have to make sure navigation on the current site is then structured well so it is easy to find the new section.

I sure don't want to break any existing incoming links, so this is a great suggestion.

Many thanks!

[carltherunner]

Chris, I've thought about this again, and I'm wondering what your thoughts are on this.

What if I leave all the pages and links in place, but I scrap the current interface? Instead of having "home | link1 | link2", etc, I leave those existing pages where they are, but the new navigation says "home | buythis | buythat" etc.

All the new stuff could go into the same root directory, but I wouldn't overwrite any of the existing pages. Would that be better than the subdirectory option?

I know there would be no way to navigate to the "old" stuff, but all links from search engines and referring sites would still work. This way, my new site would be right there for anyone coming to my home page.

I could on my old template have a big fat link to my new home page.