Multiple websites vs. single large website, For SEO purposes, is it better to have more? Options

[cash]

Hi all,

I’m new to this community. I stumbled across this website while researching SEO and am pleasantly surprised by the depth of knowledge in this forum.

Recently I came across a discussion in another forum: where the author claims to make 81k in less than two months.

His strategy is to find a niche and dominate it with many websites. The idea is to create as many websites as possible with various angles to the niche. As a result, when someone dose a search for that niche, most of his websites will show up on the resulting page. The sites are not duplicates. They are just many variations of the niche. For example, if the niche is about mortgage loans, then he would create many websites presenting the various types, reviews, recommendations about mortgage loans. In some cases, he would hire writers to create the contents for him.

According to him, another added benefit of having multiple websites is that whenever he launches a new website, the cross-linking from his hundreds of existing sites would boost the ranking of the newly created site. Well, I think that’s what I gathered from reading his threads.

I’m not looking for a quick get-rich scheme and I do not believe everything the author claims. However, for SEO purposes, his strategy seems to make sense to me. Nonetheless, I would like to hear from the good people here their opinions on the matter.

Thanks

[SEOEgghead]

Nobody answered, so I'll take a stab at this:

This answer assumes you're actually creating real sites and not spam sites --

What he says, to a certain degree may be true, but only if the content is original and high quality. They must also gain links over time. This happens naturally over time with good content. If you're doing that, and you want to divide up high-quality content into several sites that have somewhat different themes, it works. If the topics are sensitive to time, however, it won't.

(That said, what he's probably doing is spamming. Typically these guys will set up a bunch of crap sites on various hosting company's servers and register the domain names under various aliases or private registration. This way they can be confident they won't be found out.)

From a whitehat's perspective (mine), there are major timing considerations. In my industry (legal), stuff changes very quickly. For that reason, one monolitihic web site with many topics will acquire rankings for a new keyword quicker than a new site since it's a trusted site already. Another alternative is using subdomains -- though this doesn't always work so well. So even though the topics are all legal, new domains pose a major problem, as you must respond quickly. For long-term legal topics (car accidents, etc.) it may make sense to create a new site on a new domain. For timing-sensitive stuff, it would never work.

Either way, though. It all depends. I know, I hate that answer too ....

This post has been edited by SEOEgghead: Jul 6 2006, 10:27 AM

[bragadocchio]

Welcome to the forums, Cash and SEOEgghead,

I like the phrase "various angles to the niche" in your post, Cash. One way to do that might be to focus on different market segments with some of those sites.

I'd be wary of too much interlinking between sites. That might send some warning flags to the search engines.

Some excellent points, SEOEgghead. I've seen what you describe in the legal industry.

[increseo]

The reason that Jon (the person that posted his CJ stats in SitePoint) creates hundreds (if not thousands) of similar niche websites is to make sure that his visitors won't go off to other competitors' site. This is basically dominates the whole niche market with his own sites, but not for SEO purposes (even if there might lies some advantages).

In his own words, as below:

With one you're trying to focus as much attention on that one site, and when a user is just not interested, he/she will leave and look for something else. When you have a lot of sites targetting different aspects of the mother niche, you're able to leverage the traffic and interest of your users. If your site is about blue widgets, and you have a link on your site to another one of your sites that's about red widgets, and the user to the blue widgets site wants to see red ones, he/she will clickthrough and still get to find the information they were originally seeking, but on another channel of your network. Now if you only had one focus on your site, that would result in a user that would probably never end up coming back. Utilizing volume, you've just created your own competition, but also scored what could be an important lead, sale, or click for your revenue.

This post has been edited by increseo: Jul 7 2006, 02:24 AM

[cash]

Thank you all for answering my questions. They are all good points. I now understand it much clearer.

[bsaric]

I'd be wary of too much interlinking between sites. That might send some warning flags to the search engines.

True, but in most cases nothing will happen, i do have example of croatian comapany owning more then 15 domains, all about yacht charter in Croatia, they all rank pretty good for lots of keywords for many years now and they are all cross linked.