Hello all, Thanks for participating in this forum.. great content! I’ve got a question about how best to structure web content for SEs. Suppose you have a website for family related issues. There is currently one website with a section for relationship advice and a section for parenting. Now you want to expand these two areas to much more content. Is it: a) Better to keep this extended content all in one website/domain as it has gained some authority/reputation already? or b) Branch out the extended content into two external websites and make sure they are connected properly (links to all other sites)? From an SEO point of view, which one is better, a network of linked sites (i.e. larger footprint) or all content on one site (be THE authority)? Thanks a lot for your help. I appreciate all comments. Zepppo
A while back I would have said to create many niche sites with exact match domains, however it seems like Google is moving more in the direction of looking at domain strength and brand signals (though exact match domains do still work). There's also some risk in interlinking many sites as it can look manipulative. I would say that it is better to have one site that is authoritative on many things.
Backlinks are still the most important thing for search engines. That's why some Search engines don't approve(in their tos) buying-selling links, link exchange, etc. Because any link to your site has a big impact on SERP and on your website's page rank. No one will ever link to you just because he find your site "interesting". I can't imagine someone editing his website to add a link to my site just because he found what he looked for on my site. Doing this..in one month his site would become a link farm and his website would have to suffer. A blogger with 100 blogs of pr 2,3,4 is a SEO "guru" He place a link to you on all his blogs, bring your site is first page, takes your money and than removes the links. You can imagine the rest... That's why I would never hire a "SEO" company. If you build a network with all the websites linking to a single one of them, there's a bigger chance to make it an "Authority" website, than having all the content on that website with no backlinks. Even everybody say search engines love "original" content, from my experience they are not. Backlinks means popularity!