SEO Question

[HarryPot]

I'm building a website right now, and the following scenario has presented itself and I'm unsure if it affects SEO or not.

The website needs to be divided in two sections. It is one single company with one area that gives consulting services and the other area develops software, related with he consulting services they give.

But they want to keep them separate like this:

DOMAIN: http://www.domain.com. From here there are two links:

- One to http://www.domain.com/consulting/
- Another to http://www.domain.com/software/

They want to be able to change from the Consulting side to the Software side, but not to be able to return to the root (http://www.domain.com).

How will this affect the SEO of the website? (not having links back to the root)

I've seen that http://www.flexerasoftware.com does something similar, but they are an established company already which might not be that affected from this.

Thanks for any help.

 

[HoustonN]

It's best if you navigate to the home page from every sub page.

One way to do it is have the logo link back to the home page. Or you can have breadcrumbs. Google checks for usability, so if the user has to keep hitting back button, it's not very usable.

 

[jamesanderson11]

I think it will not affect seo.

 

[iUserz]

It will actually help you target the two terms by having them in the URL. So for example if somebody looks for "company name + consulting" or "company service + consulting" you'll be more likely to show up. Descriptive URLs are a good SEO practice.

You will have more pages to build links towards though (both consulting and software) and it might take a bit of time for the new pages to move up the results.

You might also lose ranking on the homepage, assuming you remove content and people stop linking to it.

 

[HarryPot]

It will actually help you target the two terms by having them in the URL. So for example if somebody looks for "company name + consulting" or "company service + consulting" you'll be more likely to show up. Descriptive URLs are a good SEO practice.

You will have more pages to build links towards though (both consulting and software) and it might take a bit of time for the new pages to move up the results.

You might also lose ranking on the homepage, assuming you remove content and people stop linking to it.

It's been working decently so far.

I guess I need more time to really judge the results. Some of the other pages I've kept up with the ongoing process of promoting them took around 1 year to reach the first page in Google.

As for the homepage, yes, nowhere to be seen in Google, but the other two sub-pages have been doing well.

 

[Moshu]

From the SEO point of view, it would be better for the overall website to have links which point back to the root from both "areas". Breadcrumbs + data mark-up from data-vocabulary.org should be implemented on every page.

Also from the SEO point of view and considering your customer requests, I would personally separate the two areas by using sub-domains, thus signaling the search engines that it's about separate areas:
http://consulting.domain.com
http://software.domain.com

I could keep going on, but I don't know the specific of your customer requests and why he wants them separated etc.

Feel free to PM me if you have more specific questions.