Several Domains vs. one large site

domain name, large site, search engine

[JayDev]

Hello Everyone,

We have a large amount of articles that we write since we are publishers for home related topics.

I need to work on creating a clean online strategy search engine friendly.

each topic is different. Example of topics: gardening, interior decorating, furniture, lighting designs.....

I have 3 choices and wanted to get your feedback regarding my possibilities. Our goal is to achieve good rankings for each topic.

Possibilies:

1/ One large site with directory folders
example: ********.com/interior-design
********.com/landscaping etc.....

2/ Individual domain name per topic.

3/ One main domain with each topic directing to a subdomain.

I would appreciate your feedback.

[claus]

IMHO, FWIW, AFAIK, etc.

At the moment the winds seem to blow in favour of doing one large site, ie. option (1).

Of course you can still get results from (2) or (3) but if you're starting from scratch you'll probably not find extra domains worth the extra hassle. Here's a thread about what many/most members face with new domains: [webmasterworld.com...]

- it's up to you if you want to increase the "pleasure" by having extra domains to worry about ;)

[Marcia]

One site, hands down.

[JayDev]

Thank you for your feedback.

[JayDev]

what structure makes sense then for a large site?

*********.com/directorypertopic

or all pages as close as possible to the root?

or is something else better?

Thanks

[claus]

Here's a very good article on the topic : [searchengineworld.com...]

[JayDev]

It is indeed a great post. Thank you for the link.

One question about this post:

For level 3 linking, it says to link off the home page. It this a good idea. Does this mean that I should link these pages from index.html/homepage to all of these pages? I am not I got this part of the post.

[claus]

>> Does this mean that I should link these pages from index.html/homepage to all of these pages?

No not all of them. The number depends on how many level three pages pages you've got (ie subjects below subject 2). Of course you should link to all of them from the level 2 page just above it, but you don't have to link to all of them from the home page, just a selection of them, eg. the 3-5 most important ones.

[beuten]

I have a similar question, but we have multiple domains due to the locality. mydomain.us, mydomain.co.uk, mydomain.ie are all English and mydomain.de, mydomain.at and mydomain.ch are all German, then there are the .dk, .es, .fr... sites as well. Basically they all have the same content, but are specific to the local countries (currency, spelling/language...).

After reading several posts, I am starting to wonder if we are getting hurt from the links between the sites as they are obviously related/affiliates and have duplicate content although for totally different markets. At the moment most of them have PR5, but are not being well ranked.

I am starting to think the only reason to keep promoting the local sites is because several European search engines only list domains for that particular country as default.

comments?