Which do you think is better…having one large site with everything, or five individual niche sites?
A recent case study from search marketer Carrie Hill at Search Engine Watch illustrates it’s okay to have several niche sites as long as you follow certain tricks and techniques.
Her client was a gentleman who had 1 flagship site and about 6 niche sites – he was frustrated with his poor rankings for the niche sites in Google.
After some research, Carrie first concluded his sites contained a large amount of duplicate content. Also, they link together contextually, all sites are hosted on the same server and niche sites send you to the flagship site for more information and vice versa in some instances.
All of this spells disaster for obtaining high Google rankings for the niche sites. Even more problematic for this guy, they ALL ranked pretty well in Yahoo! so throwing them out and waiting for Google would be painful.
So what did Carrie do?
First, she evaluated the content on all the sites and found much of it to be duplicated. There’s a tool called CopyScape that checks for duplicate content on different sites. Content duplication across domains is a big issue with Google, which would explain why the niche sites didn’t rank well. Carrie recommended content be changed on the flagship site to be very different from the niche sites.
Next, if there are two niche sites covering the same subject narrow it to one and have great content there.
Besides content, web hosting is another factor that can affect niche sites and rankings. If you’re using shared hosting and linking your sites together, you need to move each site to dedicated hosting. Shared hosting is traceable and Google will know you own all of those sites.
So having multiple sites isn’t a bad thing as long as they’re set up properly. Read more about niche sites and SEO in this Search Engine Watch article.