Linking multiple sites?

Can you have multiple interlinked sites without getting banned from Google

[attard]

Our main web site has reasonably good placement in the search engines. We have a lot of content and have the site divided into what bigger sites would probably call "channels." Each of these channels has its own main page, with links to the content that pertains to that channel.

We have reasonably good placement in Google, with a PR7 for our home page and PR6 for most of the main "channel" pages.

Our problem, though, is that we have too much content to manage easily on a single web site, and more importantly, we feel vistors can no longer find what they want easily on the site. Some of our "channel" pages now scroll for ever (well, way too much) and then have links to subdirectories with even more content on the subject.

There are a number of things we are considering to solve the problem, but one of them is to set up separate sites for at least some of our "channels" and link to those sites from our main site. We would also link back to the main site and put in links between a couple of the channel sites, because of the natural overlap of subject areas.

Could developing separate sites in this way for our main "channels" cause us to lose search engine ranking or look like we were spamming search engines?

[jackofalltrades]

Welcome to Webmaster World attard! :)

Personally (and i know others will disagree with this) I dont like the use of subdomains, or seperate URLs. Im a firm beleiver in well organised content - there is no reason it has to be split over many URLs.

Take the BBCs site for example - all BBC TV programmes can be found at www.bbc.co.uk/prog. OK they use a subdomain for their news, but those are both huge sites, and could be considered to be seperate brands.

Also from an inbound linking point of view, there are more sites likely to link to a large, content rich site.

If you split into niches, then you will be spliting your incoming links and PR.

In terms of interlinking, you have to be careful about how much you do it (youll get penalised for linking every page to every page!).

But if you have a central site (a hub) linking out to your channels, and a page on each channel site (other_channels.htm), then you should be OK.

Hope that helps.

JOAT :)

[hutcheson]

>Our problem, though, is that we have too much content to manage easily on a single web site, and more importantly, we feel vistors can no longer find what they want easily on the site.

The second problem is one of site design, and has nothing whatsoever to do with where the content is.

The first problem is also one of site design. I don't imagine that the site has more than, say, half a million web pages, or the equivalent of 20,000 printed pages (with very small print) -- just to compare it with two highly-dynamic, cooperatively-developed websites I've helped on.

Changing some of the site URLs to use a different subdomain, or even a different domain -- will do nothing to help your problems, it will break zillions of your links, of which you'll find and fix around 95%. That'll make it easier for your users to find content! [sarcasm alert] And it'll give a page rank boost to all those no-longer-available pages, at the expense of the newly-renamed pages. That'll help with SEO!

I can't imagine what was taking the place of the thought process in the genesis of what, considered as an idea, redefines the concept of "bad".

[attard]

Thanks for the comments..

>The first problem is also one of site design.
Actually, we've won an award for our design - not for the graphics, but for the ease of use and navigation.

>> just to compare it with two highly-dynamic, cooperatively-developed websites I've helped on<<

Switching to a dynamically driven site (database) is one thing we've considered, but I'm afraid that's going to limit search engine exposure to new content we put online.