Valid Domain strategy?

Using multiple domains

[jRyck]

I'm starting work with a company which provides corporate training & consulting services. They get most of their business from the net and last year they broke up their single site into multiple "focus areas", each with it's own domain name and IP address.

For example, in place of XYZ_Comp.com with everything under that domain/IP they now still use that "main" page, but their web content related to other areas are using completely different domain names/IP addresses.

There are numerous links between all these domains pointing to one another and the overall content in general is related.

The thinking behind this was that their search rankings would be higher this way, as opposed to having everything under the one domain/IP.

Is their reasoning correct?

[aaronpaul]

I've done this in the past with some success. And, sometimes it just makes sense from an organizational standpoint to seperate content in this manner. Just remember that if you create a link "island" it probably won't help rankings in the long run. Meaning, each site will still need additional incoming links from outside sources.

[jRyck]

>Just remember that if you create a link "island" it probably won't help rankings in the long run. Meaning, each site will still need additional incoming links from outside sources

Good point. Now that this basic structure is in place, they do need to make a concerted effort to establish incoming links.

Thanks for the input!

[Blackie]

Won't help much on ranking in the future and will be less and less effective. As long as whois data is the same :-)