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SEO implications of moving fra a sub-folder to a root domain
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I am considering a restructure of my site, and was hoping for some input on SEO implications which I am having some issues getting clarity in.
(I will be using sample domains/urls because of language reasons, not an english site),
Thinking about moving a site (all content) from example.com/parenting -> parenting.com. This is to have a site fully devoted to this theme, and more easily monitor and improve SEO performance on this content alone. Today all stats on external links, DA etc is related to the root domain, and not just this sub-department. Plus it would be a better brand-experience of the content and site.
Other info/issues:
-The domain parenting.com (used as example) is currently redirected to example.com/parenting. So I would have to reverse that redirect, and would also redirect all articles to the new site.
- The current domain example.com has a high DA (67), but the new domain parenting.com has a much lower DA (24).
Question:
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Would the parenting.com domain improve it's DA when not redirected and the sub-folder on the high-DA domain is redirected here instead?
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Would it severly hurt SEO traffic to make this change, and if so is there a strategy to make the move with as little loss in traffic as possible?
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How much value is in having a stand-alone domain, which also is one of the most important keywords for this theme?
My doubt comes mostly from moving from a domain with high DA to a domain with much lower DA, and I am not sure about how removing the redirect would change that, or if placing a new redirect from the subfolder on the current site would help improve it. Would some DA flow over with a 301 redirect?
Thanks for any advice or hints to other documentation that might be of interest for this scenario

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Hi,
Thanks for your response.
I was actually thinking I would 301 redirect every pience of content. When doing this the canonical of the old articles wouldn't matter.
Or were you thinking about canonical link on the articles on the new domain, which I would give a canonical url from the new domain.
/Magne
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Hey. The best thing you can do here is canonicalize everything to poitn to the new domain. It's inedbitable to lose some juice since it's actually a different domain name. If it were blog.example.com and example.com - there would have been no losses.
Cheers
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