Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Let's presume you have a site about a certain type of widgets, the site sells a variety of widgets of the same type, made by various widget manufacturers.
Now let's presume you want to branch out into a market that deals with anoter type of widgets, many of which are also manufactured by the same manufacturers as the widgets the first site is focused on.
For the purpose of this discussion, let's refer to the widgets which site one is focused on as bridgets and to the widgets that site two focuses on as gridgets.
What this inevitably boils down to is the existance of two sites which both sell a particular type of widgets, which are loosely related by type and somewhat more tightly related due to the fact that both types of widgets are being produced by the same manufacturers.
Let's presume that John's Widgets, Widget World, SupraWidget and Ultra Widget are the leading manufacturers of both bridgets and gridgets and therefore both sites will often refer to these manufacturers, albeit to different product types.
This would in turn translate into one site having many gridget pages for any of those manufacturers, and the other having many bridget pages for any of those manufacturers.
While this is absolutely a natural situation, and it would be logical from both the merchant and user perspective to sepparate the two widget stores into two websites, since the two widget types are only loosely related and would both be of interest to only a certain percentage of users, but not all of them, the question remains how would google react to those two sites, keeping the following factors in mind:
- Common manufacturers on both stores, even if widget types are different; searching for manufacturer name is likely to pull pages from both stores into the result set (if/when both sites have sufficent authority to rank well), since the search term is somewhat broad.
- Both stores are clearly owned by the same company and hosted on the same servers.
- Since the product types are loosely related, and would be of interest to a certain percentage of people that visit any of the stores, to enhance the user experience the two sites do link to each other in moderation.
Common sense would suggest that the scenario outlined above would not cause any issues, but common sense does not always translate into actual outcomes when it comes to machine wisdom.
Any thoughts, opionions and educated guesses are welcome.
Thanks!
Common sense would suggest that the scenario outlined above would not cause any issues, but common sense does not always translate into actual outcomes when it comes to machine wisdom.
...the only other factor that should crop up is the health of the rest of the backlink profile for the two sites.
The dilemma with this scenario, in my experience, is that the backlink profiles of such sites often end up being very similar. This can cause Google to see the arrangement as contrived, and one or the other of the sites can get hurt. I would take pains to make sure that a substantial percentage of the inbound links to these sites are in fact from independent sources before I'd cross-link them.
I'd also be careful to keep content, including page titles, very different on the two sites.
Tedster, I would be inclined to think so as well, but as Robert pointed out, in such a situation, depending on how competitive / developed the market is, one may have unforseen problems with a substantional portion of natural links coming from the same sources since the topics are somewhat related.
This in turn creates a paradox since you have to either actively avoid certain links which would have popped up naturally, or pursue specific link relationships for each site to dilute the simillarities in the link structure. The more you look at the issue from different perspectives, the more it looks like a potential slippery slope, regardles of the absolute lack of any bad intentions whatsoever.
Tedster and Robert, what are your thoughts on the same scenario, but with absence of any links between the two sites? How much (if any) difference could it make in your opinion?
