Splitting domains - good or bad idea?

[mazaru]

So, at the moment I work with a content site which includes 5 editions, each aimed at a different audience and carrying unique content. The structure is:
www.example.com - main site, some universal content
www.example.com/audience1
www.example.com/audience2
www.example.com/audience3
www.example.com/audience4
- these all carry regularly updated content aimed at different trade and consumer audiences.

I'm trying to research the benefits and drawbacks of splitting the editions onto separate domains, so the new structure would be:
www.example.com
www.audience1.com
www.audience2.com
www.audience3.com
www.audience4.com

To me, this looks like a good solution to problems we've been having with getting our domain listed well in Google News, ranking well for niche search terms, and making it possible for each edition to sink or swim on its own merits. I know we could run 301 redirects on all our pages to split them out to the right editions. But what's the potential down side? Are there reasons why this would be a totally daft idea, or benefits to keeping the content all on one domain like this? And is 301 redirect the right way to go about redirecting the pages involved?

[numnum]

Your situation is similar to mine. Though my four site areas are related in genre, each is discrete in terms of the interests of the site's visitors -- and so there's little crossover traffic between the four site areas. I'm an Adsense publisher, and so, not surprisingly, visitors see many (irrelevant) ads relating to other site areas.

I've considered subdomains to replace my simple folder (directory) structure, which is like yours. But I don't know if the GA would treat each subdomain as a distinct, more narrowly focused site. If so, that would help me in the SERPs and would enhance the relevance of the ads. The downside is that I'd probably lose link juice when splitting the site up -- or would I? (Each of the four site areas has about the same amount of organic link juice.)

We were muling this over in a previous thread [webmasterworld.com ], in the context of Panda recovery.

[goodroi]

You can come up with many pros and cons for either way. My personal opinion is if you have the time, money and resources available to manage multiple sites, build out multiple sites. Most people do not have the proper means to do it right and it ends up being a bad headache.

[mazaru]

Thanks, that's a really useful thread. I'm worried about losing domain authority too - is that likely to cause much of an impact?