Our company website: focuses on dog and human health news. On another thread we started, we were advised to separate the human health content from the dog related content, (making a new site for human health) as by diversifying, we would see better results from our seo relating to dog keywords. Any thoughts on this? Jon.
It depends a lot upon the domain name. You can operate a site with a totally different theme if you use a subdirectory, but you would be better served just to have a separate domain for each topic
the domain is dog related, and we are beginning to rank fairly well for big dog related keywords. we do post a lot of human health information, could this be effecting our dog seo effort?
Personally I dont think it will hurt you, but I think that it may not help either. Remember that Google and other SEs look at your individual pages for SERPs and not necessarily the site as a whole. However, you will no doubt have links on your home page pointing to the human health content and that may slow (I hesitate in saying hurt) you down some in the SERPs. Domain names are relatively cheap. if I were in your position I would put the human health topics on a different site.
If you decide to go ahead and start up a new site for the human health articles you could publish the same ones that are on your current site and then use permanent redirects to send traffic aimed at those articles to their location on the new site.
I don't know why you even have a second thought on this. It is true that having one site is easier to manage, but why not put all the efforts in one niche as well. If you plan to grow as big as about.com, then its a different matter. As kentuckyslone says, domain names are very cheap, and you can use the same host. How will it help in SEO.. There are several reasons. One simple reason is, when you submit your site to a directory that doesn't accept deep links how are you going to submit it? In the dog category or Human category? And since u have 'dog' in the domain name, adding it in human category will raise eyebrows and flags. Hope I am understood. I told you this in another thread also.
Very good advice - I think you should now be convinced about which direction you should take with your site.
We in fact have decided to split the site into 2: my question is: until we develop an appropriate domain, we have taken steps to remove the human health content from our site. Will we be penalized for redirecting the many new 401 pages to another url on our site? for example, we will be redirecting our human health url to our main home page. Thanks. Jon