Giving each page of a site it's own domain

is this good or bad?

[thechad]

I've been reading these forums for a while now, but this is my first post, so go easy on me if I say something stupid.

I've heard that Google and other search engines tend to give index pages a boost, so what if I were to create a site like the following: The real home page and product pages would all be under one domain (fruit-widgets.com) and each of the category pages were on different servers and each had their own keyword-rich domain (apple-widgets.com, banana-widgets.com)? The site would be linked normally, as if all the pages were on the same server with the same domain, and the user would only be able to tell something different was going on by looking at the urls.

It seems that by having each important page in the site be an index page with its own domain, they would all get a boost. I have not heard anything about this type of setup before and tend to think something must be wrong with it, but I wanted to get some input because I'm just not sure.

Thanks in advance for your responses.

[SirFroggZ]

I'm pretty sure you can't do that. You cannot crosslink your pages. I got in trouble with Google for that same thing. You might want to creat a generic site with ll of your products on it. Then you might want to creat sub sites that are very product specific. Just don't link them together.

SirFroggZ

[pleeker]

Yes, you're right to suspect there's something wrong with it. You'd be at risk of clogging up the SERPs with multiple listings from what is essentially the same site, which is essentially spam and, thus, frowned upon.

Remember the rule: would you do it if there were no such things as search engines?

[thechad]

Thanks, this is pretty much what I expected.

However, I still don't understand what exactly is wrong with cross-linking. If two sites decide to partner with each other and each one links to the other site from every page, why is this considered spam? Do SEs just not like reciprocal linking because it's been abused to gain rank?

[trillianjedi]

Do SEs just not like reciprocal linking because it's been abused to gain rank?

Why else would you do it?

TJ

[thechad]

>>Why else would you do it?

To gain traffic from similar sites. This would especially be true of informational sites. If I have an info. site on widgets and I know of another widgets site, I would want to exchange links to give my visitors more info and to get visitors from the other site as well. Granted, for a commerce site, such intentions are not usually so pure.

[pleeker]

If I have an info. site on widgets and I know of another widgets site, I would want to exchange links to give my visitors more info and to get visitors from the other site as well.

Fair enough, but that's not what you described in your original post. You were talking about taking the content from a single site, then creating multiple sites with unique domains and spreading that content out over the "new" sites for the purpose of increasing link popularity. As I said before, that's spam.

[martinibuster]

>>I've heard that Google and other search engines tend to give index pages a boost

No, not at all. It is a common practice to link to the main page of a website, so that's why the home page may accumulate PR. Two things that will handicap you with doing this:

1. Crawlers will feed voraciously on your main page to the detriment of deeper pages

2. Because deep pages are ignored by the internet community, you will have less opportunities to be deep crawled, less opportunity to expose those inner pages to the web at large via the search engines.

Please see this related post [webmasterworld.com].

[thechad]

Points taken. Thank you.