Forum Moderators: phranque
From reading here, the consensus seems to advise splitting
each subject area off into a separate site, rather than have
each subject area within it's own directory of a single site
(linked to from the home page).
For example lets say we're talking about 6 subject areas,
each with 200 quality inbound links.
Wouldn't having all six subject areas organized under a
single domain -- rather than six separate domains --
provide a page rank advantage? Not only from the total
number of links pointing to a single site, but from being
able to pass page rank around from cross linking relevant
information from one subject area to another (and with each
page linking to the home page, of course).
I'm thinking cross linking between subject areas of a
single site would be appropriate -- if for navigational
reasons only even if the subject matter were unrelated --
while linking separate site to separate site might appear
to be some sort of mini link farm, as the relevance of links
between sites may be more in the eye of the beholder. Thus
links between subject matter areas wouldn't likely trigger
any SE penalties within a single site, whereas links
between separate sites might get all your sites a PR0.
Is the above thinking correct? Even if it's correct, are
there other factors you've found favoring splitting the
subject areas up into separate sites from your real world
(for profit) experience?
However, looking at from a ranking perspective, you could be shooting yourself in the foot for keyword relevance.
If you had one site about two completly different subjects, like cars and flowers, then the car data would prevent the flower data from ranking well on flower terms. AND, the flower data would be preventing the car data from ranking well on car terms.
Thanks for answering on this topic. I posted it because I want to understand more fully why folks believe it's better to split different topics off into stand alone domains rather than have them under separate directories of one site. It's not that I'm disagreeing, but just that I want to better understand the specific reasons making up the "why".
With your example of a site that had one section about flowers and one section about cars, wouldn't the individual sections -- and each page within each section -- rank however they did based on their own merit without regard to the other sections except for any added pagerank boost one section might pass to the other section via navigational structure?
Am I correct in inferring from your reply that the mere existence of a car section on a site that wasn't "on theme" with the flowers section would result in a search engine like google rating the flowers section lower than it would if there were no car section? And that there would either be no page rank passed along via the navigational structure or the passed along page rank would be less than the diminished ranking due to the presence of "off theme" sections?
Even if:
1) the content of combined.com/flowers was the same as standaloneflowers.com and;
2) the number and type of links to each page -- be they in the combined.com/flowers section of a combined site or to the standaloneflowers.com site were the same?
Just to be clear I'm talking about the following two ways of organizing the exact same content:
A) Single combined site:
combinedsite.com/topic1
combinedsite.com/topic2
combinedsite.com/topic3
combinedsite.com/topic4
combinedsite.com/topic5
combinedsite.com/topic6
vs.
B) Six separate sites:
standalonetopic1.com
standalonetopic2.com
standalonetopic3.com
standalonetopic4.com
standalonetopic5.com
standalonetopic6.com
A big thanks to all who can help me understand this better!
Take care,
Louis
Two quick comments:
If you can get domains with the subject as the domain name, do that. Relevant domain names "count" in the SERPs.
Design your site(s) naturally - whatever makes sense from a user's perspective is good - and future-proof.
Jim
