Posts Tagged ‘Multiple Sites’

Multiple Sites – Is it Worth It?

Friday, May 9th, 2008

If your site contains more than one major subject – like baby diapers and garage

door openers, you should strongly consider splitting your site into multiple sites, one

site per subject. This case is largely a no-brainer.

However, if you have a site that has several related, but distinct groups of products

or services, the case is not so clear-cut. The jury is still out, but you are perhaps

better off spending your time and effort expanding the size of your main site and

perhaps organizing it better.

Should you decide to create more than one site for your business, keep the following

points in mind:

Don’t copy your main site onto a separate domain and duplicate pages in

order to increase number of links or traffic. Google can detect this and your

site may get penalized (or even dropped from their index).

Use different hosting companies for each site. The reason being is that

Google may consider multiple similar sites on the same server that are cross-

linked together as potential duplicate sites. The important consideration here

is to have each site hosted on a different Class C block.

A Class C block is that number shown in the third position of an IP address.

For example, for 255.137.xxx.255, xxx represents the Class C block. This

number needs to be different for all your websites and the easiest way to

guarantee this is to use separate Web hosting companies for each site you

own.

It is not advised that you create multiple “mini” sites to help increase your

traffic or number of incoming links. This was a popular technique a couple of years

ago but has largely fallen out of favor due to abuse. There are people reportedly that

do well at these but I am skeptical of the ethics involved. Many mini-sites are junk

one-page sites with little content (or with duplicate content) in the hopes of creating

lots of links to boost PageRank. Google will catch on and you will be sorry you did

this.

In summary, create multiple sites only if there is a strong, compelling reason to do

so.