Advice Needed - New Website or Same Site

[anand84]

I have one tech related website where I cover one particular aspect of daily news stories. This particular aspect interests my readers and they come to my site for that; though nearly 90% of traffic is from the SERPS

Now, I am looking to cover another aspect of the news story. This aspect is totally different from what I have been doing though it is in the same domain (tech related). Now, I have two options to do this:

1. Install a new blog under my parent domain (example.com is my original website, and this shall be example.com/newsite ) where these kind of stories go.

2. Since this is a different aspect, I could throw it in a new site example2.com and just direct traffic from example.com

I don't want to have it in a subdomain.

Now, I would like to know which of the two options to choose. Before that, here are some details:

example.com is now 2 years old and has a pagerank 4 and good traffic. The other example2.com is close to 3 years old, has a Pagerank of 2; has always had some static content and never had great traffic. I just happened to hold the domain for so long with some text on it.

I just think having it in a folder under example.com would give the whole site more weight and so will look more valuable in Google's eyes, rather than splitting my efforts in two different websites.

Kindly let me know your thoughts.

P.S.: I realize Pagerank is not really a valuable factor. But just want to factor in to tell that these sites also have a proportional number of inbound links, google juice, etc.

[JS_Harris]

I'd opt for placing the new content in a new folder under the old domain since they are both tech related.

Plan your internal link structure carefully if you decide to mix the new type of content with the old. Double the content means pages get pushed into oblivion more quickly. (Oblivion would be like an article here on WW whos only link is 189 pages deep in a directory).

Have you considered going with three categories to cover your two planned subjects?

Folder #1 - Old content type
Folder #2 - New content type
Folder #3 - General news related to either type but with little search importance (aka fluff).

If you take this route you can keep search happy in the first two and visitors happy in the third. You can also design internal links from all three categories to only point to pages in the first two, thus reducing internal value lost on fluff.

Just some ideas.

[anand84]

Thanks JS_Harris.

I am little confused about your last suggestion about three categories. Wouldn't that mean Folder 3 will have duplicate content on folder 1 and 2, and I would get penalized for that?

Regarding the internal link structure, what I intend to do have a single header for both example.com and example.com/folder1. This will contain links to both the folder1 as well as the parent site. Would this suffice for indexing as Google will now index the new folder with just one extra click from the homepage (or for that matter any of the several hundred pages on my old site)?

[maximillianos]

I think JK is concerned about the new content pushing your old content too deep within your site. So JK is suggesting a folder structure that keeps everything on the same level with an exta folder for stuff that may be a bit off topic.

No matter how good your internal linking is, you will still be dividing up PR over more content. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. In my opinion more content often equates to more chances to bring in organic traffic.

[anand84]

Thank you maximillianos.

So, finally what I have done is created another wordpress folder under my original wordpress site, and I have linked to it from header. After I add moderately sufficient content, I shall also link it from under every article; something like 'For info regarding XYZ, visit ____'. I guess that should be sufficiently visible to Google.