Separate each department into a separate domain?

[mikemcs]

on our site we have a top page that links to 3 separate department pages that really do not have anything to do with each other (our company is really diversified)

mysite.com
has links to:
mysite.com/ccs
mysite.com/cim
mysite.com/prc


My questions are this?

www.mysite.com/ccs is the most important of the three. Should I move the other two on to their own separate domains to not dilute what the ccs department is seo-ing for?

Is it better to leave them all together?

Is there another way to separate them seo wise instead of using different domain names?

[Planet13]

What is best for your visitors? What makes most sense for them?

As someone pointed out to me recently, googlbot never bought anything on anybody's web site. So maybe designing the site primarily for googlebot is not always the best advice.

Now, I will admit that I was in a similar situation and had one web site that two definitely distinct market segments. It was an ecommerce site with very little crossover - those who bought products in market segment A did not buy products in market segment B, and vice versa.

I ended up getting a new site / new domain for market segment B, splitting off the content with proper 301 redirects, and it has really grown. When I look at the COMBINED traffic of Site A and Site B, it is at least twice what it was before when it was all on one site.

Is there another way to separate them seo wise instead of using different domain names?

You could put them on subdomains, which would separate them out more, but again, it is probably best to do what is right by your visitors / customers.

Some big chemical companies make both women's make up AND rat poison. They usually try to keep things like that separated, for obvious reason.

[mikemcs]

I guess this is what I am weighing in my mind. I am worried that people wanting prc type in mysite.com and it no longer links to prc division they will be stuck . but on the other hand prc division has nothing to do with ccs division which is where I want most of my seo time/money spent. I wantgoogle to know exactly what ccs division is.

[Planet13]

I wantgoogle to know exactly what ccs division is.

Well, then personally, I would make the ccs division its own site and own domain name.

[mikemcs]

I know Google says to write the site for people not Google bot however, I feel like I am trying to server two gods here and I know that is never possible.

On the one hand I want people to know the name of my company and get to the site by using myname.com but I also want Google to know that the ccs department sales specialized widgets that are different then the other 2 departments even though they all rest on mysite.com domain.