What’s Better: One Site or Several Niche Sites?
By Anna Johnson on July 13th, 2009Carrie Hill recently posted an illuminating article in Search Engine Watch that addresses the issue of whether, from a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective, it’s better to use one ‘flagship’ website covering several related niches or several niche sites.
An example of this might be someone running an online furniture website and considering whether to have one site with different sections for different kinds of furniture, or having different sites, each of which addresses one kind of furniture. You might have, for example, one site for dining tables, one site for beds, one site for office furniture, and so on.
Having different, highly focused sites with different domain names may deliver a number of SEO advantages. For one thing, you might be able to be more specific in terms of the keywords you integrate into your domain name and webpages.
Rather than using, say, ‘bigfurniturestore.com/office-furniture/desks/glass-desks.htm’ you might be able to have ‘officefurniture.com/desks/glass-desks.htm.
Not only is this more keyword-specific for SEO purposes, but it’s also less cumbersome for such purposes as including landing page links in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
And that’s not to mention your ability to be much more keyword-focused – and therefore optimized – in the copy and other text on each page of your website.
On the other hand, when generating results to search queries, search engines deliver links to webpages, not websites, and it’s entirely possible to structure one, big website in such a way that each page is still highly optimized for certain keywords.
Moreover, from a branding, website management and workload point of view, it may just be more practical for you to have one website.
Here’s what’s interesting, though… In her article, Carrie explains the risks of ‘getting it wrong’ when using multiple websites such that it is not only NOT more advantageous than having a single site, but it’s actually LESS advantageous than having a single site.
The problems she notes mainly concern using similar content on each site, having each site linking (excessively) to the others, and having them all hosted on the one server.
The upshot of this is that the search engines, notably Google, consider this kind of set-up to be practically the same as having one site. So there is no particular SEO advantage in having multiple sites… yet there are still all the hassles of maintaining different websites!
So… if you do perceive advantages in having different websites, and want to take advantage of the SEO benefits of having different websites, you’re well advised to literally make them different:
- use different content;
- host them on different servers; and
- don’t have too much inter-linking between websites.
Source: Carrie Hill, “Are 5 Sites Better than One?” Search Engine Watch, July 8, 2009
