Single site with widely different page topics

Do all the pages of a site have to be of the same general category?

[drakke]

Suppose you are a dentist and you have a site for your dental practice. You spend time and add pages that are relevant to different aspects of dentistry: braces, crowns, whitening etc. So it is a good dental site that is well ranked and pulls in business for your practise.

Now suppose in your free time you have a hobby growing prize winning orchids. In fact you are pretty good at it.

So you add a few pages to your dental site about your hobby thinking that it will show your patients that you are a more interesting person and a human being with a life.

Because you are a sort of expert in orchids and have had some success other orchid growers link to your orchid pages on your dental site.

Is this wise or should you have created a separate orchid site instead of mixing the two sites together?

I think it is ok an maybe even preferable to mix the sites because it is more 'natural'.

[anallawalla]

For a small business owner, such as a dentist, a separate site for orchids is better. If the dentist is in a small town and searchers are likely to use the placename in their searches, the orchid content will most probably not matter. If the owner wants to rank for non-local, generic terms, mixing topics is not a good idea and domain names are cheap.

For a trusted site such as CNN or the BBC, news articles about dentists can live on the same site as articles about orchids without causing one topic to be devalued because of the other. (Ignore Google News results for this example). Directory sites also do well for many of their topics, despite being unrelated.

Over the years I used to have a business site with an unlinked orphan page covering a hobby. The latter page was the front for a directory and was linked from major software companies, so it ranked #1 for that hobby type. It was not linked from my business pages and my site also ranked #1 for my primary, generic business term. Hence I don't think there is a definitive answer other than saying that it is safer to have separate sites for two topics.

[Shaddows]

Bare minimum, I would put it on
orchid.dentist.tld

[potentialgeek]

Is this wise or should you have created a separate orchid site instead of mixing the two sites together?

Two sites.

I think it is ok an[d] maybe even preferable to mix the sites because it is more 'natural'.

Google wouldn't see it as natural unless other dentists do the same thing. I doubt there's anything in the Google algo that will recognize the mixture of business and pleasure to consider the business site using non-relevant linking. Google has imposed severe penalties for non-relevant links... it's not worth the risk to your business.

I wouldn't use a subdomain. You could 301 the orchid pages/links to a new site.