Better to have seperate domains or 1?

I want to make a network of a few sites and I was wondering if it was better to get seperate domains for each site or to just put them into a subdomain.

 

If I were you I would buy separate domains.

 

What type of sites do you want to start?

I made the common mistake of buying too many domains and trying to develop them all... The problem with that is you don't focus enough on any of them...

I'd recommend starting one site, and promote the hell out of it, design it the exact way you want.. tweak it a lot, and put real quality effort and content onto it... later you can develop a network...

just my opinion

 

Thats what I was going to do. Take it slowly

 

yes start couple of sites with seperate domains but promote it well.

 

I would use mutiple domain names. Work on one then start new one when first site is doing well.

 

I have over 1000 sites that I run simulateously, its no walk in the park but with a well developed backend system it runs like a dream.

May I suggest that you register your domains, so that nobody else gets them.

Create 2/3 pages for each site so that google can crawl them and start to get them out of the so called sandbox.

By the time you get around to working on them they will be easier to rank with in google.

Put them on sepertate c class ip addresses and give them different whois data if you want to link them to each other.

Try 3 way linking them for the best seo benefit.

Hope that helps.

 

But wouldnt it be easier to promote if all of the sites are on one domain? Yahoo puts all of their seperate sites on seprate subdomains like games.yahoo.com and videogames.yahoo.com.The sites that I will make will have very different topics

 

It is easier but it could also backfire on you. It just takes one misstep on your part and you've lost all your hard work for a PR penalty. Whereas if you put your eggs in more than one basket then one site's penalty isn't such a big deal. But you do need to find the right balance not to get yourself overextended with your plans. I've fallen into that trap in the past (I buy domain names like eating potato chips on occasion) and am now working my way through a 12-step program.

 

Do what make sense for the user

Don't go overboard on interlinking

 

I think it's a good idea to start with a few domains first and stabilize the traffic and earnings first before moving on to a massive level.

Unless you found a really good "domain name" which you want to use it for SEO purpose or to sell in future...then it might be a good idea to invest first.

 

Its hard to get 10 domains up in serp than getting 1 domain dominate the SERP for the same keyword.

 

its possible to get a keyword rich name to rank fast for less competitive keywords

 

i think using different domains is a better option for web site networks

 

Say I have a webmaster site. Should i get a seprate domain If i want to make a web tools site, a script directory and a webhosting directory

 

It all depends on your strategy. For instance, it is much easier to promote one domain than five but having five diversifies your risk - if one gets banned, you are doomed. I also have a feeling that search engines put a limit on how fast a domain can grow in the index.

 

What's interesting is I was about to ask the exact same question!

What we have is a pretty big free web hosting site that also has it's own support forum. To this I was going to add a blog and tools. (so forums.t35.com, blog.t35.com, and tools.t35.com). We have always had forums part of the domain, the blog and tools was going to be something new. After doing tons of research and talking to many SEO proffesionals i came to the conclusion that separate domains/sites would be better.

In my mind, I would love to have everything consolidated into one site and make it nice and simple. But even with the forum -- having it be it's own entity will mean it will get its own traffic from google as a "webmaster forum". That way I can build all the resources (tools, blog, forum) into their own sites which will then help to bring each other traffic.

So in the end, i went with separate domains, freewebmaster.net (tools), helpingwebmasters.com (forum), and webhostingmind.com (blog). It still kind of bothers me that everything is so scattered and most other webhosts i have seen that have these tools have it on the same domain (blog.anywebhost.com, etc..). But from a SEO/web-development perspective, having separate domains/sites is more valuable. Not to mention that more often then not, if you were to sell the 4 separate domains/sites you would get more money then if everything was consolidated and you sold it under 1 domain.

 

And not to steal the thread, but can someone go into a little more on inter-linking? I have all the sites interlinked pretty well.. especially since they are all very related. I have "our network" footer on every site with the links to all the 4 sites, and other links here and there. For example check out helpingwebmasters.com. Our network is on the top and the board named "free webmaster tools" automatically goes to the tools website. Is this too much of inter linking? Would i get penalized by google for this?

 

Ok sounds good. Im gonna get seperate domains and show updated content from each one on the main domain