I'm working for a large high tech company as a full time seo specialist. We have one main site (pr 6) and other 21 sites which are either small niche sites which are related to the firms main theme and others which are local sites in different languages. All sites are hosted on the same server and that cannot be changed for various reasons. In addition the company has distributors all over the world. There is a request to consolidate all the sites into one Hugh site. My question to you SEO professionals colleagues , in terms of the ramifications on SEO, which option is better? Thank you. _______________________________________________________________ Great Articles Directory site: www.freepremiumarticles.com
This is almost more of a business question - but if it's working fine now, why does anyone care about consolidations? I don't see a lot of benefit in return for the amount of work you'll be doing. Any time there's change, there's every possibility of dropping substantially in rankings, and you're talking radical change. So yes, even if you managed it well Google might still drop you like a rock. At the very least you're looking at some massive 301 redirects. And while I'm no 301 expert, there seems to be plenty of horror stories of 301's gone bad. If you absolutely have to do it, what I'd be tempted to investigate is just moving the 20 or so domains to subdomains of the main domain. Do a complete clone, then redirect the old domains to the new domains. That seems to be the least disturbing method. That being said, about the last thing I would do is consolidate instead of diversifying. Right now you've got 20 seperate chances to rank, pull in traffic,and develop links. Why narrow that down to one chance? Personally I wouldn't be overly worried about all being on the same server. I believe that issue comes in to play if you're link farming. If you're not working the system that hard I don't believe you're heavily penalized for having multiple sites on the same server. I run all on one server a niche hosting site, a discussion forum, a directory, plus a bunch of hosted sites, and they're all reasonably internlinked and all rank very well in their niche.
Thank You for your input. The thing is that with this expensive automatic documents updater we cannot creat sub domains... I do agree that it is better to have small niche sites which are very targeted on one hand and enjoy the links from the PR 6 of the mother site on the other hand.