Sister Sites or Joint Family?
-
A large News Media Group has a Tv Channel, print newspaper, radio channel (for music primarly) and an online website that includes the newspaper content and other original content in different media. My question is, is it better to have independant websites for these different mediums or have all the content on one big website. Currently the newspaper and blog are online as one whereas the radio channel has its own website and the television has its own. So should we maintain sister sites and cross link to each other or have one big happy family under one house?
Best,
Rishad.
-
Thanks for your response. As an SEO, I would have to agree with your approach but I don't think the decision to merge these different mediums on the online front will rest with the SEO, however, when asked for my two cents, i can give them the option that is most likely to bring maximum benefits.
Cheers!
-
Thanks for such a detailed answer. A very good explaination and you've pointed out important things to think about. As goodnewscowboy said, the answer cannot be solely based on SEO and you've pointed out the different things to take into consideration.
Cheers!
-
The answers above are all good. I don't know if there is a right answer though. I think my approach would be something like what http://www.gap.com did. They have 5 different sites combined into one. Look at the URLs. Looks like they are using subdomains to use the same shopping cart between all sites. But I don't think you would need to do subdomains. I would shoot for long term SEO strategy.
-
Hi Rishad:
My answer to your question is soley based on SEO. The more concentrated your focus on the one site and the incoming links, the higher an authority the site will gain.
But I hadn't thought about the marketing angle until I read Gianluca's response. He makes a strong case for letting your marketing/brand requirements drive the decision.
-
Perfect answer!
-
Not so easy to answer, because definitely we are not talking just about SEO, but essentially of Marketing and Brand Marketing. I will try to give you my opinion, also basing it on my 11 years of experience in Media industry.
The choice, as an SEO, would be to have one site, as all the backlinks, citations and social buzz would pointing to just one domain. Anyway, I would wisely design the different communication areas in order they seems visually (and psichologically) different for the user. In that way you can maintain the essential difference between the three media (Newspaper, Radio, Tv), also because - as you say about the Radio - these media not necessarely have the same main focus.
My main concern as an SEO would be the indexation of such a big website, therefore I would put all my attention on the navigational architecture of a site that would include all the three distinct ones.
BUT, as Marketer and if the branding between the three Medium is very different, I would not put them under the same domain, but I would mantain them separate and croslink them editorially (for instance the newspaper using videos of the tv site). This could also better the construction of your News Media Group enthity.
More over, using three different sites/domains it is possible to strategy web marketing plan which complement themselves, in order to conquer three different range of searches and users.
In this last case, the real problem wouldn't be SEO, but the coordination of the tree SEO/web marketing plans.
-
We recently went through domain consolidation of two high authority corporate websites. Based on my experience, combining all the media sites into one would be a wise decision for brand positioning, usability and seo. Domain authority continues to be one of the top search ranking factors and building the authority of one domain is lot easier than building authorities of multiple domains.
There could be instances where you may want to keep content / software on separate domains i.e. a startup investment, brand new software or an acquisition.
Having separate domains may have advantages in short term but having a one domain in longer time is highly suggested. (think Google)
Hope this helps.
Thanks
Sameer
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
-
Site no indexed after a week loadbalancer, cache-control?
hi All apologies to everybody in advance my level of SEO or technical stuff is quite minimal. we have setup a new site with a top level domain sitting on multiple servers ( https.www.mysite/new/ on one and http.wwww.mysites/old/ on another) different pages,content etc. it's definitely a patchy solution until what is left in the old server will be migrated to the new one. however the new site is still not indexed after around 2 weeks. I have checke on moz and and google console ( fetch and rendering) and nothing seem to block indexing. no issue with robot.txt ( either on https.www.mysite/new/robots.txt or http.wwww.mysites/old/robots.txt) meta-robot. any idea on what could cause the problem? can it be an issue with the cache-control set as : no-store no-cache? Or the loadbalancer that is preventing google to access ? Dario
On-Page Optimization | | Mrlocicero0 -
Is a site map necessary or recommended?
We have a website that has been up for the past 4 years without a site map. Google is indexing it. Do we need a site map? Do you recommend we create one and submit it to goggle and bing? The site is www.logobids.com Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | IsaacH0 -
Why is this site 1st in Google??
Hello The site www.woodensigns.net is 1st in google for the keyword "wooden Signs". All seo indicators are poor except keyword in url; wich, i thought, was not a + for google anymore. Could someone help me to understand here? Thank you Emmanuel
On-Page Optimization | | manu450 -
Which pages on my site should I back link to
The majority of the back links I have been creating link directly to our home page and to the store page. Is this the best approach or should I be trying to spread the links throughout our site to include product categories and subcategories etc?
On-Page Optimization | | Hardley0 -
Google Fonts & Site Speed
Hello, Does the use of one google font slow down a website enough to effect load speed and thus rankings? Here's the ones we're choosing from: www.google.com/webfonts How do we know if the one we choose is too slow? Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
New site not ranking for it's name
Performed on-page SEO for this new site that went live a couple of weeks ago - no link building or anything of that nature yet. http://maven-management.com I'm starting to see the site rank on Bing for some keyword phrases but it doesn't rank for the business name "Maven Management" on any major search engine. SEOMoz gives my on page optimization an A for the business name for the home page. Am I just being impatient? I didn't really put much effort into ranking for the business name because that generally seems to happen without any issue. There are other companies online with the same name. Any insight is appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | DenverKelly0 -
I think I`ve caught some kind of google filter on my site.
What if the PA and the DA on my domain and the entire site is 1. Most of the pages on the site were empty or not unique. Now I`m adding new pages with unique content. I have only one position in the top 10. The remaining 15 positions are above the top. What should I do to increase my PA & DA and to have top 10 positions by other keywords?
On-Page Optimization | | ATCnik0 -
URL structure for a new WordPress site
Hi I'm building a new next big thing website from scratch (for a translation agency) and I encountered an issue with the URL structure. I need to chose the URL for important targeted keyword pages and I have a conflict between two tools I'm using. Please read below the situation: domain: mashtranslation.com target keyword: french translation services which URL you think is better from a SEO point of view (and possibly for users): mashtranslation.com/services/french/ OR mashtranslation.com/french-translation-services/ I'm asking this because one WordPress plugin (Wordpress SEO by Yoast) says the URL structure is not optimised while another tool (Market Samurai) says the URL is optimised.
On-Page Optimization | | flo20