37 replies to this topic

[mopacfan]

I was hired by my current employer with a mandate of redesigning the firm's web site with a heavy emphasis on SEO and organic results. The current site is Plastic Products Group. The new site which is under development won't be live for another month or so.

To highly target our key word/phrases in conjunction with the new site re-design, I have registered keyword specific urls and I am developing several "mini" web sites. Each site will have at least two pages with all of the data regarding the targeted product and will have very little graphics. Each site will have links to the main web site. The main web site will not have any links to the mini-sites. The mini site will not have any redirection and will be full of text and content specific to the targeted kw/p such as "foam grips". The mini-sites will also be split up among several class c domains.

I am aware that single highly targeted pages are generally be considered "spam" since these usually are doorway pages with redirects to the main site. I would like to get everyone's opinion regarding my "mini" site concept and the pro's and con's regarding this technique.

Thanks

[Jill]

Hi Michael,

I wouldn't do it that way at all. You'll do much, much, much better in the search engines and with your customers if you have one great content-rich sites. Large sites tend to do better in the rankings if they're optimized well, and it makes more sense to have everything on one domain.

Mini sites will also split your link popularity, which is not a good idea.

Why are you registering the domains on different servers? The only reason to do that is if you're planning on trying to trick the search engines and don't want them to know that your sites are all related. Another really bad idea.

There's nothing wrong with using multiple sites instead of one site, and certainly there's no reason to hide the fact that that's what you're doing, if you do choose to go that route.

But again, I wouldn't recommend it. Keyword-rich domain names are highly overrated and you can get the same benefit by naming each subdirectory the same way.

Hope this helps.

Jill

[Jill]

Moved off-topic posts to here.

Jill

[compar]

Very easy to do, Bob. Just link to a forum thread as you would link to any page: save the URL to the clipboard, begin your post, click the http:// button in the toolbar and follow the prompts.

For example, if you follow this link, you'll find that I posted a link to another thread at the end of that thread.

Great. Thanks. I should have figured that out myself.

Now we simply need to find the most apprriate thread to help mopacfan's with his question. Here is a thread that is related to his question Doorway Domains

I'll try and find some others that may help.

[mopacfan]

a>I wouldn't do it that way at all. You'll do much, much, much better in the search engines and with your customers if you have one great content-rich sites. Large sites tend to do better in the rankings if they're optimized well, and it makes more sense to have everything on one domain.

b>Mini sites will also split your link popularity, which is not a good idea.

Jill,

a: We have one 'major' site, the mini-sites are simply highly optimized offshoots for targeted relevance.

b: Can you be more specific about this? If I have ten or so external sites all pointing to the main site, how does this split the link popularity?


Michael

[Scottie]

Hi Micheal-

Welcome to the forum!

You are splitting your link popularity because in order for each mini-site to rank well, it will need it's own incoming links. So, instead of trying to achieve quality links to a single site, you are now faced with the prospect of finding quality links for 10 or so sites... that is a lot of work!

Why wouldn't you just include the highly targeted pages within your site? Keyword domains are not very effective for rankings; people may guess at them, but other than that, they don't do much. Actually at SES someone mentioned that multiple keyword domains were likely to be flagged for review.

So, not only could your plan backfire from a lack of links, it could actually be tagged as spam, looking at the keyword-filled domain name and the linking network.

The correct way works just as well- add those pages to your site, take your shiny new keyword domains and using 301 redirects point them at your main site and you should have the same or better results than trying to be sneaky and host them in multiple places.

[mopacfan]

scotiecl,

I must not have been very clear. These pages do exist in the new site, just without all of the navigation and site layout graphcis which force the content further down the html.

I do see where you are coming from though, and it makes good sense. I had not not thought about the link popularity for the minisites as I was focused on the content.

I've been out of the seo biz for several years. Over the last few months I have been doing a great deal of research to get up to speed with the new rules of the game, including reading these and other forums, and talking with 'seo experts'. Many of the seo firms and consultants I've contacted while searching out a subcontractor for our site to do the majority of the optimization for us have suggested similar strategies to those I've outlined. This is why I've posed the question to see how well received it is in this forum.

Thank you for your (and everyone's) comments.

[Scottie]

I am confused... they are part of the existing site? Or are they separate domains?

We've also been debating the "cost" of HTML code in spidering... I am of the opinion that as long as your page isn't over the max size (101K) that additional code doesn't have much effect.

Removing all your navigation sounds like a usability issue... the pages still need to allow the visitor to find the other content on the site.

Just some things to think about

[schecky]

Removing navigation is the easy answer you can move copy above navigation just as easily like this:

<table
<tr>
<td width="20%">empty cell</td>
<td width="80%" rowspan="2">copy</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="20%">left hand navigation</td>
</tr>
</table>

There's always more then one way to do it!

[Jill]

IMO, there's no reason to move your content above your navigation code.

It's very standard for navigation code to come before content, and it's not a problem for any search engine.

As to this:

Many of the seo firms and consultants I've contacted while searching out a subcontractor for our site to do the majority of the optimization for us have suggested similar strategies to those I've outlined.

Run from them fast! They're still living in the past when it was somewhat acceptable to try to trick the search engines. Don't fall for it. Do the right thing!



Jill

[dimok]

Jill, i do not think that

You'll do much, much, much better in the search engines and with your customers if you have one great content-rich sites.

Mini sites will also split your link popularity, which is not a good idea.

I think that mini sites can help each other growing link popularity. They grow separetely and have some PR. They can give a portion of PR to other mini sites or just to main big site. PR of main site will grow, link popularity too.

There is a "rule": "4 small sites if better than 2 big sites". I fully agree with that.

[Jill]

Can't agree with you there, dimok.

The engines are getting better at spotting isolated "islands" of sites. These sites generally only link to each other, so their link pop is suspicious. Most directories and other high-quality sites have no interest in linking to a mini-site, so they have to rely on each other for link pop.

These sites are getting downgraded all the time with Google, and I believe they will continue to do so, until they are just a distant, bad, memory.

Jill

[dimok]

So, you think directories prefer big sites "about everything"? Why not to deal with small sites that describes just the concrete topic like "seo in Albany, NY" that have an articles on topic, community forum, local news and the same. I don't understand you point
Could you give some examples, please?

These sites are getting downgraded all the time with Google

AAA. I can't believe in that!?
Could you again give me any example of that?

[qwerty]

I think that if these "mini-sites" grow up to become sites of their own, they're ok -- as long as they don't exist just to funnel traffic to the main site. However, I don't see any advantage to them. Whatever is in them can just as easily be part of the main site. On top of that, directories (the ODP in particular) will most likely refuse to list them. If it's all part of the same company, they're not interested in giving the company an extra listing just because it has an extra domain.

[compar]

To highly target our key word/phrases in conjunction with the new site re-design, I have registered keyword specific urls and I am developing several "mini" web sites.

I think there is still a lot of confusion about exactly what you are proposing to do. From the info above it appear to me that you are registering new domains for each of your mini sites. If so then they are not all part of the same site as you seem to have suggested in some of your messages.

Each site will have at least two pages with all of the data regarding the targeted product and will have very little graphics.  Each site will have links to the main web site.  The main web site will not have any links to the mini-sites.  The mini site will not have any redirection and will be full of text and content specific to the targeted kw/p such as "foam grips".

The problem with this plan as I see it is that the mini sites will have a real problem getting well ranked in the SE's index. While they maybe optimized for their specific content and keywords without backlinks and by virtue of the mini size it is doubtful that anyone will ever find them in a SE.

The other self defeating thing about this plan is because of the lack of backlinks and popularity of these mini sites they will never earn any substantiial PR value. As such the links from these mini site to your main web site will be of minimal value if any.

The mini-sites will also be split up among several class c domains.

Even if you persist with this scheme there would be no need to host the sites on different servers or to assign them IP addresses from different class C domains. If crosslinks and backlinks are coming from different URLs then I don't think the SEs have any concern about the IP addresses of these different URLs.