What to do with a secondary site

[Hissingsid]

I have a secondary site. It does OK and has a few top 10 rankings but it is hard to get folks in our market to link to it because they know of the main site. It has a PR of just 2.

I'm seriously thinking of closing down this site but should I just let it die or redirect its traffic to the main site. If I do a redirect should I do a 301 of the whole domain to the root of the main domain or should I target specific pages to specific pages?

I would appreciate any advice on this one.

Thanks

Sid

[tedster]

I'd say 301 redirect - and page to page (as much as makes practical sense) seems to get the best results.

[wheelie34]

Sid

I may be wrong but I think you have adsense, there's a thread about someone saying they got a bad email while 301'ing could be related to "a bad user experience" they arrive somewhere else and the adsense team don't think thats right.

Maybe a good idea to pull the ads for a few weeks

[Hissingsid]

Hi,

Thanks for the advice Tedster.

Wheelie, no I do Adwords on the main site but don't have Adsense anywhere. Thanks for the pointer though. It may be useful to someone else reading the thread.

Cheers

Sid

[HuskyPup]

I have a secondary site.

As a matter of interest how old is this site?

I have noticed that many of my secondary sites (I call them satellite sites), even though they have unique content although about the same basic subject matter but more in-depth and more country-centric, took much longer to rise through the SERPs, some of them up to 18-24 months.

This has been especially so in Google.com for my .cn and .in sites whereas my .eu sites ranked fairly quickly.

How are they in Yahoo! and Live since I found that these sites ranked much faster in their SERPs?

[Hissingsid]

Hi Husky,

The site is 7 years old. It used to be similar to how you describe your satellite sites until about 8 months ago when I redesigned it and moved the content closer to my main site. I've been wondering if this was a mistake and have been considering my options, one of which is to redirect it to the main site.

It ranks OK on Google.co.uk currently #18 for our top 2 word term, and #10 for our top 3 word term. It does not rank in the top 50 on MSN or Yahoo although it is in their index.

The other, possibly safer, option would be to move the content broader and reduce the linking back to our main site and see what happens. The Nominet .co.uk records do not link the two sites due to an admin error when the domain was registered through a reseller. I've only just noticed when I just did a check.

I'm paranoid about doing anything that may affect the main site adversely so may go with the safe option of changing the content.

Cheers

Sid

[HuskyPup]

until about 8 months ago when I redesigned it and moved the content closer to my main site.

One of my core sites and quite a few of my satellites were hit with the 950 penalty and it was not until I removed some similar pages (definitely not duplicates), or heavily modified others with extra information etc, that they came out of the penalty.

I use a duplicate page checker to analyse my possible similar pages more often these days since I do have identical products emanating from alternative factories in completely different countries.

Can you imagine trying to optimise for the same black widget products from six different factories over six different TLDs? Then multiply that by however many of these colourful widgets I have.

Google may think they're the same, my customers say differently!

Google may think that my customers should deal with the brochure .com site however my customers want to deal direct with the country specific .cn/com.br/de/es/in/it.

And that is just for one product, imagine multiplying that across a global supply industry and not getting similar pages.