Increasing rank by moving an entire site into a directory of another site

[cstavaru]

Hi,

I have two web sites, very related to one another: one is a site for a single piece of software I have built (pretty popular), and the other is a software downloads directory.

I have been filtered by Google for 4 months now on the software downloads directory, my traffic dropping by 85% on that site. I have eliminated most duplicate pages (I had a problem with these) but to no avail.

I am thinking of redirecting (relocating) the single-software site to a subdirectory of the software downloads site. I have many backlinks to the single-software site, about 20.000 (its way older than the software downloads site).

Do you think this move will help me gain rank and traffic on the software downloads site ?

[tedster]

Your question surprised me, because I thought you would consider going the other way - relocate the directory content to the product domain that is already doing well. What are the factors that make you want to move the domain that is doing well? Changing the domain, and therefore all the urls, for a site that is ranking well sounds like a bad idea to me.

The main issue hangs on how Google is treating your directory website. No doubt that many directories have been nailed in recent times by Google, and I don't know that it's purely algorithmic at all. What kind of "filtering" are you seeing?

[cstavaru]

Hi,

The single-software website is not doing well in that it doesn't have too many visitors (altough it ranks in the first 4-5 sites for its niche), but it does have quality backlinks and a PR of 4-5 over time. So it does not bring me alot of money.

On the other hand, the software directory had 4000-5000 uniques/day, bringing me a decent amount of money, but starting December 26, 2007 it dropped to 300-400 per day. My PR abruply got from 5 to 3 and most of my pages lost their PR (from 5 ro 0). I think most of my SERPS got down from 1-5 to about 130. What intrigues me is that I have competing sites that started at the same time as me, with alot of ideas from me and those sites are doing well (colleagues of mine).

I recently acquired a new domain and will try to start fresh with another directory but this time watching quality more closely. But I still feel that I sould do something to revive my current domain, possibly to remove the cause of the traffic drop. But I can't seem to grasp the cause OR, Google just manually decided that I am not worthy whatever I do.

So do you think I should try to revive my current domain (including "helping" it with relocating my respected domain into a sub-directory) or just start over with a new domain ?

Also, I have an older (more than 2 years) software-related domain that would sound nice for a directory. Should I use that instead of a new domain ?

I am a programmer and only recently (1 year) got into web-related stuff. And having someone deciding something for my site and not for other very similar site(s) (with less backlinks) is just driving me crazy...

[edited by: tedster at 7:18 pm (utc) on May 18, 2008]