redirect or individual websites

[cowest]

I am in the process of developing several informational websites relating to a particular area of real estate. I am developing onlinewidgets.com with intention of redirecting the local domains to the site, ie: californiawidgets.com, newyorkwidgets.com. My traffic flow is increasing monthly (based on click thru on sedo) for the localwidgets.com so I know the interest is there. Question is- would I be better off developing the local sites individually with similar but distinct content or should I redirect the 30-40 domains to a central site.

[goodroi]

you can be successful either way. if you have multiple sites with distinct content (and different hosting) you can take multiple spots in the serps and artifically inflate the link popularity. however most people that go this route make a mistake and end up getting all the domains penalized or banned.

if you redirect them into one site you consolidate your link popularity into one site making it a monster site. it will also help branding and simplify other aspects.

[cowest]

thanks for the response, question is if the remaining domains are page rank zero with good traffic, will i be penalized because they link to my core site or are redirects not in the equation with google. thanks.

[jtara]

I have a slightly different idea on this.

I current have example.com and example.net. I think I will also add example.org, as it is available.

I plan on writing some software for helping people with examples. I'd also like to start an online forum, as well as an online subscription service for those who would rather rent than own the software.

Is this too confusing?

example.com "Tools for managing examples"

example.net "Online services for managing examples"

example.org "Discussion and information about managing examples"

Of course, each site would have prominent front-page links to the other sites.

BTW, the "domains" and/or SEO forums are probaby better places to discuss this. I'd been meaning to post a question soliciting opinion on my idea on the domains forum, but, heck, I'll just piggy-back on this one. ;)

[goodroi]

cowest - if you are redirecting your users into your main site you should have no problem. pagerank is not really a factor.

if you have massive redirects into one domain you may trigger a flag at google hq as doing something suspicious. some people buy expired domains and then redirect their link popularity into one site. google is still trying to get control of that situation.

[goodroi]

hey jtara,

search engines are pretty good at identifying networks and devaluing the links between sites in the same network. if you wanted to develop the .com, .org and .net variations into 3 sites and interlinking them i doubt you would have the best seo benefit.

personally i would not develop the .com, .net and .org into 3 sites. i think it would cause problems with branding and type-in traffic. i would prefer to register widgetscompany.com, widgetsforums.com and widgetsdownloads.com. if i wanted to hide the fact they were really one network i would use different whois, different hosting companies and be careful with the linking pattern.

cheers

[jtara]

Well, well, well... here's a timely example of the same company using .com, .org for different purposes:

[google.org...]

[news.com.com...]

Wonder if they are worrying about the SEO implications? ;)