One Site vs. Many
-
This is a question that I am not sure has a "right" answer. I am just wondering what everyone's thoughts are on this. I can see benefit of both sides of the coin.
In your opinion, is it better to have one large e-commerce site with all of your content on the same domain or is it better to have multiple more targeted domains with your content broken up into smaller chunks?
The reason I ask is, I feel like while multiple more targeted sites certainly have the benefit of focus, aren't you taking all your traffic and content, splitting it up and leaving you with several sites that most likely are getting less traffic than one large site would.
All opinions welcome.
-
Sure, you can absolutely create brand pages and from there branch to product pages. A bigger site is more effective and easier to maintain and promote and analyze than multiple small sites.
-
Ok, we are a vitamin and supplement company.. so all of our products fit within that scope. We have a couple of additional sites for more in depth weight loss programs (our best selling products) that we sell the supporting supplements for on our main site. These additional sites are branded for those programs and have lots of supporting content blogs, recipes, etc.
I suppose we could create some heavily branded areas in our main site specific to those products and build all of that out further. We are in a highly competitive market so any ground we can gain is helpful. Also, we are a smaller company in comparison to many of our competitors, so my fear is that splitting all of our content into these different sites could put us at a disadvantage.
Thanks for the advice so far, still not sure what route to take... but appreciate you taking the time to respond.
-
One site if all somewhat related, several sites if completely different. You don't want shoes, car parts and landscaping on one site. You do want car parts, van parts and motorcycle parts on one site. The single site will be stronger than several smaller stand alone sites.
-
One Site To Rule Them All
*sorry, I had too, lol
-
That makes sense. In that case, I would analyze the competition level for your "money" keywords and topics and see if it makes sense to split them up. You would also need to think about if there is enough content to write about, and constantly feed for the highly localized kind of site.
It has been my experience that an entire site whose content is wholly focused on one topic will rank better generally speaking than a larger site with a broader base of topics (for that keyword and topic). This is good and bad because you will only be able to use the 1 site for about 1 topic.
The competition level will play a large factor in the decision IMO. That would be the next thing I would look at.
-
Thanks for the response.
Well, from an administration perspective, we have multiple sites already... so I certainly know the challenges and amount of time that can take. I personally am leaning toward having only one site, but am looking for some reasons why one strategy may be better than the other. I was wondering more from an SEO perspective since the administrative complexity would only be simplified with one site.
I also agree, any answers I get will probably be sweeping generalizations without knowing all the specifics of our business, and analytics.. so I am taking that into account.
-
IMO, one site is enough to manage all by itself.
Having multiple sites, just from an administration perspective is very challenging in particular when you go over a certain amount. You would have to have full time admins just to manage the sites, let alone the content of each site.
You would have to add up how much expense you have per unit of site versus how much net revenue (profit) you have directly from that site. I think in a lot of cases the expenses per site are going to exceed the profits, but before making a sweeping generalization, do a study and make your best guesses before investing in the infrastructure, IT and employees.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Mirror from my site
hi to all i find 2 site they do mirror my site and send back link to all my pages. do you thing its bad for my seo ?? my site is https://android-apk.org mirror sites | Who links the most | fryeboysent.com | 1,342,613 |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moztabliq1
| ficyexp.cl | 934,654 | |0 -
301ing one site's links to another
Hi, I have one site with a well-established link profile, but no actual reason to exist (site A). I have another site that could use a better link profile (site B). In your experience, would 301 forwarding all of site A's pages to site B do anything positive for the link profile/organic search of the site B? Site A is about boating at a specific lake. Site B is about travel destinations across the U.S. Thanks! Best... Michael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
How are these sites ranking!?!
One of our clients is in the insurance industry and over the last 12 months we have seen an increasing number of low quality, newly registered, spammy sites achieving top 5 rankings for major keywords, which in turn is having an adverse effect on the rankings for our client. Does anyone have any idea how the following sites have managed to do this: http://www.multiquotetaxi.co.uk/ - 2nd for taxi insurance http://www.motortradefast.co.uk/ - 1st for motor trade insurance http://www.traders-insurance.com/ - 3rd for motor trade insurance http://www.multiquotefleet.co.uk/ - 1st for fleet insurance We have tried reporting the above sites, tried holding out to see if they get penalised and tried figuring out what they have done ourselves but cannot see how they have managed it. Any ideas at all?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | instinctive0 -
Reindexing a site with www.
We have a site that has a mirror - i.e. www.domain.com and domain.com - there is not redirect both url's work and show pages so basically a site with 2 sets of URLs for each page. We have changed it so the domain.com and all assorted pages 301 redirect to the right URL with www. i.e. domain.com/about 301's to www.domain.com/about In the search engines the domain.com is the site indexed and the only www. page indexed is the homepage. I checked in the robots.txt file and nothing blocking the search engines from indexing both the www. and non www. versions of the site which makes me wonder why did only one version get indexed and how did the clients avoid a duplicate content issue? Secondly is it best to get the search engines to unidex domain.com and resubmit www.domain.com for the full site? We are definately staying with the www.domain.com NOT domain.com so need to find the best way to get the site indexed with www. and remove the non www. Hope that makes sense and look forward to everyone's input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Subdirectory vs. Subdomain
I work for a large franchise organization that is weighing the pros and cons of using subdomains versus subdirectories for our franchisee locations. What are the pros and cons of each approach?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Glassdoctordfw0 -
It appears that Googlebot Mobile will look for mobile redirects from the desktop site, but still use the SEO from the desktop site.
Is the above statement correct? I've read that its better to have different SEO titles & descriptions for mobile sites as users search differently on mobile devices. I've also read it's good to link build, keep text content on mobile sites etc to get the mobile site to rank. If I choose to not have titles & descriptions on my mobile site will Google just rank our desktop version & then redirect a user on a mobile device to our mobile site or should I be adding in titles & descriptions into the mobile site? Thanks so much for any help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Is this site legit?
http://www.gglpls.com/ is this site legit? Submit website to google + directory?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
So What On My Site Is Breaking The Google Guidelines?
I have a site that I'm trying to rank for the Keyword "Jigsaw Puzzles" I was originally ranked around #60 or something around there and then all of a sudden my site stopped ranking for that keyword. (My other keyword rankings stayed) Contacted Google via the site reconsideration and got the general response... So I went through and deleted as many links as I could find that I thought Google may not have liked... heck, I even removed links that I don't think I should have JUST so I could have this fixed. I responded with a list of all links I removed and also any links that I've tried to remove, but couldn't for whatever reasons. They are STILL saying my website is breaking the Google guidelines... mainly around links. Can anyone take a peek at my site and see if there's anything on the site that may be breaking the guidelines? (because I can't) Website in question: http://www.yourjigsawpuzzles.co.uk UPDATE: Just to let everyone know that after multiple reconsideration requests, this penalty has been removed. They stated it was a manual penalty. I tried removing numerous different types of links but they kept saying no, it's still breaking rules. It wasn't until I removed some website directory links that they removed this manual penalty. Thought it would be interesting for some of you guys.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichardTaylor0