Question about building separate site for video

Factual Questions
1

I am in charge of a website called, say, www.myurl.com. Upper management decided they wanted to have a separate site for video at www.myurl.tv. Upper management is pretty ignorant when it comes to SEO, and to be fair, so am I. What I’m wondering is, if we host all our videos at www.myurl.tv, how does that affect www.myurl.com? Is there any way we can link the two sites together in Google’s eyes? Upper management is now considering having the videos on both sites – on www.myurl.com, the videos are distributed throughout the site, and on www.myurl.tv, the videos would be in a single location, organized under various headings. Is this better or worse than just moving all the videos over to the new site?

Any feedback on this would be much appreciated!

2

Google will see them as wholly different sites.

3

Ok, in that case should we have all our videos on both sites, or move everything over to the .tv site? Which would help our SEO more? (Or hurt it less?)

4

It seems like it would hurt you, because that means incoming links will be split in two. For example: myurl.com might have 400 incoming links, myurl.tv another 300. If your competitor had 500 links, he’d outrank either of those two even though the two of them combined would’ve been more.

At least that’s a simplistic view of PageRank. It’s gotten a lot more nuanced and secretive over the years.

5

IANASEO

If you are worried aboout leeching traffic from the primary domain, why not do something like create a subdomain like video.mydomain.com with all the content. Go ahead and order www.mydomain.tv but have it point directly to video.mydomain.com so they land on the video content side of things rather than having to find it on the main mydomain page.

6

@drachillix: Is it possible to create a subdomain if you’re using a different platform? The main domain uses a proprietary CMS, while the tv domain uses Wordpress.

7

Yeah domains have nothing to do with programming. What drachillix suggested would work for anything.

8

You can use Google Webmaster Tools to indicate to Google that both sites are owned by the same person.

I don’t know how that affects the search engine. My Wild Assed Guess is that it doesn’t, and each site will be indexed based on its own merits.

9

I think you’re right - because I have two the same domain name in two different top level domains, but they are pointed at exactly the same content.

Google indexes and ranks them as if they are two different entities - the .com version is the one most people visit, share and link to (even though it’s exactly the same content as the .co.uk). And if you do a Google search for, say, Drink Can Tinwork, you get the .com presentation of the page as the first result, whereas the .co.uk presentation is way, way down.

I guess that means in terms of ranking, it might be better to put all your eggs in one basket, but in practice, that’ll probably happen anyway, because the highest-ranking version of the content will be the one that people are more likely to find, and their finding it (and subsequent linking, sharing, etc) is the thing that will make it rank higher - so it’s a feedback loop.

10

I am just a computer tech, ZipperJJ is IIRC a web designer, she is far better equipped to answer details like this.