Forum Moderators: phranque
The site is for people in the widgets industry. In addition to other content on the site, I plan to offer several email newsletters.
One newsletter will address new widget products, one will focus on widget regulatory issues, one will assist people in the widgets industry who are seeking professional designations, etc.
I have domain names reserved so that I could put a subscription form and online content for each newsletter on a separate website.
However, I'm considering just incorporating all the newsletters into the one large site which means I wouldn't put the other domain names to use.
What are the advantages/disadvantages of having everything on one site vs. spread out over smaller sites?
FarmBoy
If you already have an existing site who's performing good, and in the same niche, I would do it like this (this is the way i did it and worked fine).
make subdirectorys like this :
www.existing.com/new-site1/
www.existing.com/new-site2/
www.existing.com/new-site3/
...
this way your 'new' directorys will be much faster/easyer be spidered by SE's.
At the same moment let the new domain names be redirected by your registrar to these subdirectory's
AND already use www.new-site1.com as links to your (future) new sites.
Later when the subdir's perform good in the SE do the transfer with a 301 permanent redirect to :
(I would wait at least 6 month's to one year)
www.new-site1.com
www.new-site2.com
www.new-site3.com
...
These domeins and their pages will stay in the SE's index and will keep mostly their PageRank.
This (second) way worked fine already for several sites. Of course they are all in same niche. As example : if you have site about the USA and you want to ad info about specific city's go first for www.usa.com/newyork and later redirect to www.newyork.com
I have one site that could very easily be two, but the topics have a huge crossover interest. For example, over 90% of the people who post in the forum post in both topic areas (the forum's a fairly new addition, so that could change). I try to be a "one-stop shop" instead of sending them somewhere else.
OTOH, a few years ago I tried adding an area to that site that I thought would have crossover appeal and it ended up having none. It now has its own site. Makes it much easier to direct people there through links, etc., without them being confused by the other topics. And, of course, it has its own domain name.
I suppose that part of the lesson there is that the first thing you try might not be the best. In adding that third topic, I overestimated the general computer/internet interest of the audience.
