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Over the last couple weeks I've been reading about themes here and elsewhere and how important they are to a good ranking if I understand correctly. One article I read said something like Sears makes more laWebmasterWorlders in the US than any other company but you can't hardly find that keyword in the engines because the engines get "confused" about whether the site is about bras, laWebmasterWorlders, or dishes.
But Amazon is in the top 10 for "desktop accessories", "books", and "wedding registry" and none of those 3 have anything to do with the other as far as a theme goes.
So my questions:
1. If you have a broad based site will you not fare well in the engines versus having many tightly themed sites?
2. If the answer to #1 is you won't do well is there any reason to start a broad site?
3. Are there other factors that will compensate for not having a themed site if it's a problem?
Thanks in advance.
Is that a forbidden word or something?
why not start with your broad site and then step by step cut the parts that are getting broader itself and build one or more new sites with this content? It depends on how broad is broad in your case. If your topic / site allready covers many specialized sub topics that are "broad" enough to make new sites of it ...
I run several specialized directories. The topics are second level topics (two levels deep in dmoz). The categories of each site could be split into different new sites - however, they work great and receive a lot of google referers. Why split them? The deeper the pages are, the more on theme optimization you can do. You can cover many sub topics that all have their parent topic. Your visitors will like it - to jump around and find related topics and content!
More sites (not pages) means more work on updates and promotion. Do you use a brand name? I keep a brand above all my directories. The three directories (three different topics) are running under a third level domain (canonicals [google.com] - p.e. handmade.widgetsbrand.com, custom.widgetsbrand.com) named after the topic. The main site www.widgetsbrand.com is about the general topic (widgets) above the three sub topics. The canonicals have 36 categories each and many sub categories. You wouldn't believe how well this works. To me, themes [searchengineworld.com] is all.
How broad is your site - what's the level at the odp directory that best maches your main topic and how many sub topics does the category have there?
Thanks for the response. My main topic has 4 broad subtopics that make up the whole. I have no clue as to the ODP categories but will look into that.
So what you're saying is I can have MyDomain with the 4 broad topics and then topic1.MyDomain, topic2.MyDomain, etc. and have many (as many subdomains as I have) themed sites all one one domain name?
Does Google treat such a setup as separate domains for ranking purposes?
If that's what you're saying that is great! I was fretting because I don't have the money to buy a bunch of domain names before the main site even opens.
Thanks.
So what you're saying is I can have MyDomain with the 4 broad topics and then topic1.MyDomain, topic2.MyDomain, etc. and have many (as many subdomains as I have) themed sites all one one domain name?
Yes, I'd avoid multiple domain names. Personally, I'd do www.mydomain.com/topic1, etc.
As long as each topic has some pages that only deal with that topic, those pages should rank.
That's really funny. law*n*mo*wer*s being bleeped out.
Maybe one of those in the know will drop by and let you know, but my guess it's something to do with Brett doing automatic replaces on the abbreviation WebmasterWorld as it's already a reg trademark (I think I remember reading).
Cy
