I managed to wipe out one theme of my website (1 of 3) from the Google index with the help of their URL removal tool (http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=246386). That being the case, I have to move those pages to get them back into Google. This has lead me to consider the overall stucture of my website. To give you some background: My website is 9 months old, with a PageRank of 4 and 60 pages of unique content. My website pages are now divided into 5 directories on 3 related themes. All 5 directories have their own inbound links. Visitors to one area of my website generally only visit the pages related to that theme. Crossover traffic is about 20%. The traffic is basically split 60-20-20 between the 3 themes. The content is roughly evenly divided between the 3 themes. Over time, I expect the website to grow to at least 2 or 3 times its current size. From a SEO perpective, am I better off with one larger website with a more general theme or three inter-linked websites each with a more tightly defined theme? My new hosting package allows for multiple domain names on the same IP address. I could buy two new domain names and transfer the related pages to those sites. Add 301 redirects to all the new pages. Continue with the current linking structure so that traffic can easily flow from one theme to another. What do you think?
If your 3 themes are related and tie into the overall site I don't see why you should split them up to separate sites. It's much easier to focus your efforts on the one site. All link building can be concentrated to the one site. The overall weight of the site gets passed around to all your pages and all your pages add weight to the overall site. Those pages you lost using the URL removal tool should come back as Google will find links to those pages and see something when it Crawls through them.
As axemedia said If your 3 themes are related, keep them on one site. You indicated about 20% of traffic go from one theme to the other. While 20% is not a lot, with 3 different sites, you will likely lose most of that 20% as people are more likely to click on a link within the same website.
although if you have the resources available you can come closer to dominating your market with 3 sites on page 1.
All pages submitted via the automatic URL removal system will be removed from the Google index temporarily for six months.
Yes, not good news. My theory is, if I move the pages to a new directory, I can get them back into the index. I may not benefit from my old links, but at least I would have a presence and could benefit from any new links. In the long run, I think this will turn out to be a good thing. I have been hamstrung by a hosting company that wouldn't let me update .htaccess to install 301 redirects. That is how I ended up in trouble with the Google URL removal tool, old copies of pages that wouldn't go away. Now, I am working on moving my site to a hosting company that offers more flexibility. That will allow me to make some changes to my site that I have been wanting to do for a long time. I am in for some work and I will be struggling for a time, but in the long run I think I will put me way ahead of where I started. I really appreciate everyone's input on this issue. I was convinced it would be a landslide the other way. I had even started looking for new domain names. You have saved me from a lot of fruitless effort. Many thanks!!
Yes, you could rename a directory folder to get back in instantly. That should work. You could also use 301 redirects for all the old URL paths and point them to the new ones in teh renamed directory. This should take care of the backlinks you've obtained in the past. They can still pass their weight to the relevant pages.
For old pages that won't go away, if you just remove all links to them from your site, google will eventually de-index them?
I pretty much tried everything. I removed the links to the pages. I added noindex, nofollow to the pages. I added the pages to robots.txt. Months and month later, these pages were still hanging around. I was also having a problem getting the new pages indexed. It was all very frustrating. Of course, if my old hosting provider allowed me to add 301 redirects to .htaccess, I could have avoided a lot of problems...
This really is a bear of a question. I don't believe that there is one right answer. I spent some time splitting some of my successful web sites into multiple smaller sites. The results were not good. The smaller sites never developed the "authority" that the main site had. Eventually, I collapsed all of the smaller sites back into the big sites. Conversely, if I had a profitable site that owned the top SERPS for a good number of its keywords it would then make sense for me to create more web sites so that I could own all of page one for the SERPS that I care about. I would follow that second strategy more if I could force myself to write multiple pages on the same topic. I can't seem to do that, personally, because it just doesn't seem like a lot of fun. But hey, this is business, right? You won't get a lot of benefit from interlinking just three sites. A real link farm would require dozens or hundreds of sites. Of course, interlinking three sites probably woudn't get you banned by Google. Are you thinking of using seperate domains or sub-domains?
I was thinking three separate domains each more tightly focused on its particular theme. I was hoping with three separate domains the search engines could better understand the theme of each site. I was concerned the my authority on one topic was being diluted by the other topics. It just occurred to me that I might be shooting myself in the foot by inter-linking all the themes. I have included links for 5 to 10 popular pages from other directories on each page. I have started to get away from that since the links are rarely clicked.