Questions about creating and crosslinking similar, but unique sites

3-4 sites, 1 common theme, all unique content. The good, bad, and ugly?

[synergy]

I am considering creating 3-4 sites, all dealing with the same theme, "Printing". Each site will focus on different print products such as business cards, the other on postcards, etc. I would like to have the same css layout but use different colors on each site. I plan to create unique content for each site, about the only thing that will be cookie cutter is the css layout.

My questions are, would doing this be a good idea, or should I combine all of them into one site? Would using the same layouts for the different sites affect Google ranking in lew of them being too similar? What about crosslinking them? Good idea/bad idea? The sites will have different unique URLs. As of right now these sites would be hosted on the same ip address, however I can purchase a block of ip addresses to use for them if suggested.

Let me know your thoughts and advice on this topic.

Thanks and best wishes.

[leoo24]

there's no problem with using the same layout as the content is what is important, and cross-linking them to say form a little network of sites is a good idea, i'm sure you've seen this mnay times. :)

[synergy]

What about them being hosted on the same ip address?

I've researched crosslinking, but have not came across much. What did find seemed to be negative. I guess the negative would be crosslinking sites that have nothing to do with each other for the sake of raising PR.

I just want to make sure I'm doing the right thing before proceeding as I'm pretty new to the SEO aspect of things.

Any other ideas or opinions?

Thanks.

[Marcia]

Be very careful with this one, it's treading on dangerous ground. Do a site search on cross-linking and PR0, take your time and weigh the options before going ahead.

>>I guess the negative would be crosslinking sites that have nothing to do with each other for the sake of raising PR.

The issue comes down to excessive cross-linking of any sites. And identical site templates aren't that hard to spot. Common ownership or hosting mean they do have something to do with each other, and so can analyzing linking patterns between or among sites indicate that they're related in some way.

You could end up with a heavily cross-linked little cookie-cutter domain farm - all on the same IP, which is not generally a critical factor under normal circumstances, but certainly could add fuel to the fire in this case.

[synergy]

Good points. I just found a bit more information on it and it seems like a thin ice topic.

Again, i just thought it would be nice to have multiple sites dealing only with a certain product rather than trying to cram it all into one site, while providing links to each site at the bottom of the index pages of each site. I don't want to take any chances though.

It sucks that a few people ruin things for the rest of us that build legitimate sites for the good of our audience.

[JonR28]

Our network had about 600 cookie cutter sites... most of them had original content, anyway they were all PR0, then we crosslinked all 600 and the PR went to PR1.. and then a few made it into open directory and they got up to 3 or 4. From my experience, cross-linking amoung relavent sites, even in large numbers seems to be no problem.

[Vec_One]

As far as PR goes, though, can too much cross-linking be counter-productive? Say there are three sites with about 100 pages each. Should the number of cross links be low in relation to internal links?

[Kirby]

Yes. The safest way to do this is to treat the sites like they are owned independently. If you operate the one about business cards and I had the one about postcards, what type of links would you expect to see? In most cases just one link from one site to the other. If you start linking from each page, you have taken it out of the realm of what could otherwise be considered natural linking.

[mcavic]

Again, i just thought it would be nice to have multiple sites dealing only with a certain product rather

In general, I think it's nicer from a user standpoint to have a single site for a single company. You can still separate the site into different product categories, and then you can tell people to "come to us for all of your printing needs".

[chiyo]

to me, and maybe to the virtual artificial mind of a search engines, a cross link to the other sites on EACH page or the great majority suggests to me that they "naturally" all belong in one site or domain.

However we also have a few sites like the thread starters. Though the design is very different on each and very limited code in common, they are related (think (though this is not our real area but is analogous) "advertising news" for one site and "advertising research portal" for another and "how to build a brand guide" (all information/mag/columnists type sites) for another, and our corporate site which sells services in the certain areas of "advertising" but certainly not relevant to the broad area of a whole as the coporate site in geograhically and specialist limited).

We have links to and from, sometimes home page and at other times from specific hyperlinks within the text of content and context of another site, but not in any way in any common header, footer, or menu.

They each have different external incoming links though some are in common, as they are all quite niche sites and appeal to different functions and users. Perhaps about 5% of pages on each (2,500 page, 600 pages, 100 page sites plus our 30 page corporate site) link to one of the other three, and sometimes but very rarely, all three)

We dont think there is a problem, but is always a concern. We haven't seen any problems in 6 years, though a few years back when PR became "big" and googleguy started mentioning cross-linking as a possible "problem" we did remove some cross links that were in menus, rather than within natural body text content.

[ogletree]

I have seen too many sites that crosslink and are doing well to say that it is punished. The only problem you will have is that the PR will be evenly distributed between the sites.