A second product: same domain, subdomain, or a new site?

The default for a small company is the folder. You have one team, one brand and a finite number of hours, and a folder is the only option that does not double the work.

Google has said repeatedly that subdomains and subdirectories both work and that the choice is yours. It does not publish a transfer rate, and there is no setting that shares authority between two hosts.

• A folder is unambiguously part of the site: the same host, the same crawl, the same internal links.
• A subdomain is treated as part of the site in most cases, but it can be seen as separate, and you cannot make that call for Google.
• A separate domain is a separate site by every measure, and every signal has to be earned again.
• Nothing you put in a file changes any of this. The structure is the decision.

The detail of the subdomain question has its own guide. What matters here is the second product's audience, not the hostname.

There are real cases. They are fewer than founders think, and they are about the business, not about ranking.

• The audiences share nothing: a developer tool and a consumer app confuse each other's visitors in one navigation.
• You intend to sell one of them, and a clean separation is part of the deal.
• The brands must not be associated, for a legal or a market reason.
• The second product is an experiment you expect to kill, and you do not want the wreckage on the main domain.
• A regulator or a partner requires a separate entity and site.

One home page, two product hubs, and everything under the hub it belongs to. The hubs are real pages, not menus.

/                      the company: what both products are, who they are for
/product-a/            the hub: what it does, for whom, its pricing link
/product-a/pricing
/product-a/guides/...
/product-b/            the same, for the second product
/product-b/pricing
/product-b/guides/...
/about  /blog  /changelog     shared, and they say which product each entry is about

• Each product hub carries its own title, its own description and its own Product or SoftwareApplication markup.
• Guides live under the product they serve. A guide that serves both is a company-level page, linked from both hubs.
• Breadcrumbs say which product a page belongs to, so a visitor landing from search knows where they are.
• The pricing pages are separate URLs. One pricing page for two products ranks for neither.

The home page is the hard part. It has to name both products in the first screen without becoming a list, and it will rank for the company name, not for either category.

The failure mode is a second product buried three clicks down, linked only from the footer, crawled rarely and ranking for nothing.

1. 1

   Put both hubs in the main navigation

   As real anchors with href attributes. A menu built from buttons and script is not a link to a crawler.

2. 2

   Link the hub from the home page body, not only the menu

   A sentence with a descriptive anchor is worth more than a nav item, and it tells the reader what the product is.

3. 3

   Link down from each hub to its own pages

   The hub is the page that distributes crawling and ranking to the product's guides and pricing.

4. 4

   Link across only where it helps a reader

   A guide in product A links to product B when the same person needs both. Cross-linking everything to everything helps nobody.

5. 5

   Keep click depth at three or less

   Home to hub to page. Pages deeper than that are crawled and recrawled less often.

Two products under one company means three names, and search treats each as a separate entity.

• Decide the canonical spelling of each product name and use it everywhere: the site, the app, the docs, the listings, the social profiles.
• Decide whether the product is "Product A by Company" or a standalone name, and keep it consistent. Searchers will type what they saw.
• The company page carries Organization markup; each product hub carries its own product markup. One entity for the company, one per product.
• Expect the second product's brand searches to start at nothing. Launches, listings and mentions build them, not the site.

Merging two sites into one is a site move with all the usual care: a one-to-one redirect map, one hop each, both properties verified, the old sitemap kept listed for a while, and internal links updated to the final URLs.

Do it when the second site has enough pages to be worth moving and few enough links to make the map manageable. Do it once, and change nothing else that month, so a drop has one suspect.

Say yourproduct.com sells an invoicing tool and adds a time tracker. The audiences overlap: freelancers who bill clients. That settles it, one domain.

The structure becomes /invoicing/ and /time-tracking/, each with its own hub, pricing page and guides. The home page says the company makes two tools for freelancers who bill by the hour, and links both hubs in the first screen. A guide about hourly rates sits at the company level and links to both. Six months later the two hubs rank for their own categories, and the company name brings people who then choose.