New Content, expand or build new?

If you had a fruit site that looked something like this:
www.fruit.com (PR5)
www.fruit.com/apples (PR4)
www.fruit.com/oranges (PR 5)
www.fruit.com/peaches (PR 3)

And you just finished writing some great new content for Pears. I have always thought it best to create www..fruit.com/pears, but recently I’m reading that some of the heavy hitters are recommending creating a brand new single page domain that cross links to the other pages. I guess on the theory that the new single page domain will benefit more from the pr pass through. The question that keeps haunting me is that the onsite page will not get sandboxed and the new domain will.

Can anybody shed some light on the pros and cons?

 

Well, you'll get the same PR passing through, from my understanding of PR. Really, the only benifit is that they'll be able to go to pears.com instead of fruit.com/pears which is longer to type.

I think it's better to establish one site than several, as that's the site that the people will start turning to for their fruit needs if they see that it has all of these things under one roof. And it's a lot easier to remember one domain name than several.

 

Microsites is an old tactic, but possibly a little towards the higher risk end of the spectrum.

Google has really been pushing on site "authority" for the past 12-18 months, so I'd personally suggest that new content on a successful established domain is far more likely to rank than the same content on an entirely new domain.

 

It really depends how well the new content fits in with the current domain and how big the current domain is. How many pages are indexed in the fruit.com domain?

 

Personally, I would keep them all under one main domain. Some search engines are starting to impose cross-linking penalties for webmasters that interlink multiple sites in an attempt to boost PR. If it makes sense, you could use sub-domains instead... like "apples.fruit.com". But even that approach can lead to penalties if you are abusing sub-domain usage just to plug keywords in the URL.

Just my 3 cents, but I would recommend building your empire under one roof if it all fits together and compliments each other well. If the content is unrelated, then go for a new domain, new site.

Good luck.

 

If this would be the first attempt, try both! see what happens in a few weeks and then keep the best.

and remember that Google only shows max 2 results per hostname, with a new one (pears.domain.com) you can have 3 listings on one page