What do you think of this idea . . .

Probably an old one, but . . it just hit me.

[rocknbil]

This has probably been discussed ad nauseum but it just occurred to me, sometimes I get so focussed on the task at hand I overlook the obvious.

Say a site sells a variety of products in a range of specific sub-topics. An example would be clothes: shirts, pants, shoes, hats.

You have a site that sells these and it's doing OK. But as we know, targeting and keywords are the thing, so your general site is "clothes."

What if you could get the domain names shirts.com, pants.com, shoes.com, hats.com. You set up four specific domains and optimize minimal pages around those four topics, then at checkout you go to your main site - branding is of course across all pages so no one feels like they are being redirected.

Each of the four sites would, of course, have to be nursed so that the pages do not supply duplicate content against the main site. Additionally you could optimize these specific pages for the targeted items better than you could on the larger site, providing larger images and more relevant content (things tend to get "crowded" and diluted.)

Doesn't it stand to reason, because the keyword is in the domain name, that this would cause your overall visits and sales to increase exponentially? (given that, the all things are working well and the product is worthy.) Of course links to the main site could only help the main site's page rank, correct? Example, from hats.com, "shop for all clothing products on clothes.com, / shop for shirts on shirts.com".

This is probably so painfully obvious that it may not be worth a thread, but is there something I'm missing here? Right now I'm kicking myself for not having looked at this before . . . doh! Too many projects and too close to it, I guess.

[g1smd]

Managing lots of sites is more difficult than managing one.

Keyword in domain name is not a magic bullet. Other things are way more important.

Google warns people away from creating multiple inter-linking sites.

You can get away with this if the size, age, trust, of your business warrants it: IBM, Dell, Adobe, Ford, etc.

[Quadrille]

Never forget Quadrille's Oft-Quoted Seventh Law

Divide your site and be conquered.

There's a rumor going around that starting multiple sites on one topic is somehow a good SEO 'trick'. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you have one topic, much better to have one site, removing all risk, halving your marketing / seo effort, and concentrating your ranking strength.

And there is zero doubt that duplicating your own pages increases marketing effort, reduces ranking, and often confuses customers. There really is no good reason for dividing your efforts.

And G1 is right on the nail about the risks of setting up your own private link network; Very 2004!

Domain / file / folder names are just three of more than 200 factors that matter - and on a scale of 0 -10, they probably count for 1-ish, while quality links and quality content count for 10-ish.

I suspect G1 is close to Quadrille's Oft-Quoted Tenth Law -

There are no magic bullets in SEO

If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain! ~ John M. Capozzi quoting Charlotte Housden quoting Dolly Parton quoting ...

[iamlost]

As mentioned by Quadrille your idea is an oldie currently being repackaged under the SEO label. Forget Google and SEO fads - done properly it can still be a viable business model.

To take your example: I would not split clothes in that fashion :) for the practical reason that that it complicates cross- and up-selling. What I would consider - actual action depending upon business plan analysis - is:
* creating separate domains for men, women, teens, children.
* creating complimentary content sites, i.e. clothing history, material creation and care, current and future fashion trends, how to co-ordinate and mix-match, etc. to act as in-house advertising/affiliate/marketing vehicles. That should actually make a tidy profit of their own.

And yes, I am a very pre-2004 kind of a guy. The most interesting thing about business on the web is that it is still business as usual. The basics have not changed - only the delivery. It is best not to confuse the two.

[rocknbil]

<Listens to all> thank you, perhaps you misunderstand my intentions.

The links back to main were just an afterthought. Here is the issue:

On a multiple product site, you have a fine balance between providing the visitor with clean, easy to navigate content and food for search engines. On, say, a shirts page, shoppers don't like to read - product name, an image, and link to details is what has worked best for us. As soon as you start populating the shirts page with textual content about shirts, the pages get long, customers get bored, comments about the page lean towards "too wordy."

So my thought, really, was to create a site about shirts. Not spam-ish really, but focussed solely on the shirts. One with larger pictures, valuable content, but clears out all the data about hats, pants, other clothing.

This site will probably knock the main site down in searches for shirts, but the shirts site should do well for searches on shirts. The only thing really common between all sites would be the secure checkout.

I knew this had to have been addressed before, but haven't had time to look into it, really.