Will this pose as duplicate or blackhat seo

[seofish]

I have client that asking me this questions which i need opinion from some of the expert here.

Currently, he have company that sell women accessories and since this will have so many categories such as jewelry, wallet, gifts, earrings and so on..

The questions come to:

He want to make all this product have its standalone domain
example

Main domain: ABC.COm
Jewelry: ABCJEWELRY.COM
Handbags: ABCHandbags.com
Earrings: ABCEarrings.com
and so on..

All of those domain will have same design and only those domain cater to those products only.
This is the strategy: From MAIN DOMAIN --> link to those ACCESSORIES DOMAIN with NOFOLLOW same as from ACCESSORIES DOMAIN link back to home page will have NOFOLLOW too

Example:
abc.com --> nofollow --> abcearrings.com
abcearrings.com --> nofollow --> abc.com

Will this pose as duplicate content or link farm or any kind of bad technique for SEO?

** The link between main page and accessories page is for the navigation stuff like home, contact us and so on.. basically instead subpages or subdomain, it will link to individual domain itself.

I have not seen this been done before and this owner come out with this crazy idea.

Please all your advise is greatly appreciated

[tedster]

I've seen people try this - it didn't work out very well for any of them. Something about domain authority as a big factor in the ranking algorithm gets undermined, I think.

If the idea behind it is to get all kinds of keyword domains ranking because keyworddomain.com seems to get a boost right now, Matt Cutts recently commented that we should not expect that situation to continue much longer.

[OMZen]

can it pass a human review for suspected ranking manipulation?

do you have the resources to develop and promote UNIQUE content for multiple sites like you propose?


Think long term buddy - @tedster is spot on

[goodroi]

from personal experience - it almost always requires too much work for the benefit it delivers. there are many pitfalls that can cause terrible problems. tedster mentioned domain authority, and it is important. based on my experience it is rarely the best choice.

i will say a scaled down approach of launching mini sites for the top 5 keywords/categories probably has a better chance to deliver enough benefit to justify the work. it depends on your industry and keywords.

[Planet13]

Just from a business point of view (and maybe LESS of an SEO point of view):

It might be better to tell the boss to focus on niche areas of accessories instead of trying to rank well for generic terms (like woman's jewelry). I think that resources needed for MARKETING in that area are huge.

I would suggest that they are going to have to look really hard at a specific area that is growing but doesn't have much competition yet.

That is the big challenge I think for all of us merchants: We have to do much more research on what is growing as a trend before there is too much competition, jump on it, and use that popularity to spread our name and get a foothold in the hearts of customers before that trend falls out of favor.

Unfortunately, now a days, so many companies with money are "creating" the trend, it is hard to catch on to one that grows organically.

[rros]

If done correctly, the main domain can rank for ABCJEWELRY, ABCHandbags, ABCEarrings, etc. on directories or subdomains alone. If the purpose is to catch type-ins while at the same time eliminating cybersquatting, then 301 those domains to the proper directory/subdomain on main.

The nofollow strategy is vague at best. If something passes along (say anchor value) it may still be seen as a smart manipulator in disguise. Your subdomains can also gain independent links and be hosted on different IPs if another reason for the split is to keep some sites up in case of attacks/downtime.