Domain aliasing and SEO

Question

I've had my photography site at photography.brianbattenfeld.com, but now it's becoming my primary income and I'm doing it pretty much full time so my primary domain should be my photography portfolio.

I'm thinking about having brianbattenfeldphotography.com and/or brianbattenfeld.com be my new domain for photography.

So my questions are:

• If I make brianbattenfeldphotography.com just an alias of photography.brianbattenfeld.com are there significant SEO or analytics issues I should be worried about?
• Will one perform better than the other, or rank higher?
• Does it make a difference which one people visit?
• Do search engines generally acknowledge the alias as 'secondary' somehow, because it's not where the files are actually stored?

A lot of questions I know, but I'm just trying to figure out what impact this may have.

Answer 1

In general, when moving a site or just changing the domain (because that is what you're doing, changing from a subdomain to the primary one), do NOT create duplicate content.

Essentially, if you go to subdomain.domain.com and get the same site as www.domain.com without the URL changing, you have duplicate content.

What I would suggest, is that you create a forward (301) from subdomain.domain.com to domain.com. That way, Google will transfer all your rank from the old URL to the new URL. It can take some time to happen, but it will happen.

So to answer your questions:

• Do not make an Alias (that would make duplicate content)
• They will perform differently, based on number of inbound links. They could also perform poorly, both of them, if Google sees it as duplicate content.
• No difference to the visitors
• It's not "secondary", it is a separate page. On this however, I feel I need to mention Canonical URLs. They should only be used when you have two different sites where some pages contain the same body as another, either on the same or different domain. Using canonical URLs for each page is A) overkill and B) not a great idea. You might as well have a 301 re-direct. You can read more about Canonical URLs here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.se/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Hopefully that answers your question.