1 Site vs 2 Sites/Multiple

An age old argument for many of us here is whether or not to have more than one site for anything.

Arguments for one site are fairly important, i.e. concentrate all your effort on one site, spend time on that one and build the importance of it etc.. however i wanted to lay down an argument for a second/more sites..

Im going to list some reasons why i think its an idea, but please feel free to either add to the list, agree with me or disagree with me or any points for any reason.

IMHO, i think 2 or multiple sites mean..

1) You are not putting all your eggs in one basket e. i.e. if one got penalised/lost many rankings.

2) You can see if a loss in visitors is down to your site or trend in the market, providing they are on different servers and not detectable as one entity.

3) You can keep one as your main and experiment with the other i.e. paid links or riskier SEO strategy in general etc..

4) You can be more targeted in your advertising and hopefully gain a higher click through rate

5) Less internal pages 'can' mean more weight put on internal pages

6) See how conversions on one site compare to the other/s.

7) Possibly higher rankings for targeted key terms on each site due to factors such as incoming links using your preferred keyword/domain in the anchor text.

8) The more of your web pages rank in one search, the less competitors there are to compete with you on that page.

9) One site might rank well in one search engine and others in another.

10) lower bounce rate as site is more targeted to key terms user is using.

Thoughts?

Definitely multiple sites.

Furthermore, if one site does better than others, that site can be used to promote the runners-up.

From my perspective, multiple sites is the way to go. As specified above. If one of your sites looses some of its ranking the other should be able to hedge and reduce some of the risk associated with this and reduction in online business and revenue

it's the difference between knowing what you are doing, and feeling around in the dark. Concentrating efforts on 1 site is the only way to go if you are no longer guessing on cause and effect.

If you are clueless, pawning yourself off as an SEO expert with 2 sites it probably won't make a difference if you have 1 site or 2, in a competitive market you will fail either way.

I guess I never really know what I am doing.

Plus - I have multiple interests. Each site is dedicated to one of them.

Having two sites can definitely decrease your risk. If the rankings of one site falls dramatically, you still have the other to count on.

However, you need to take into account how much time and money you can devote on each site.

Having too many sites and projects going on at the same time can be ineffective since you can spread yourself too thin, unless you have other people working on them, and you are just managing the projects.

Is ranking for something that easy?will you manage to rank well with both of your sites?

IMO it depends on the niche of the site's'.

We have used more then one site for some clients and stuck with just the one site with other clients as it really does depend on what keywords we are working for and how much time the client is willing to pay for.

As said above though you do need to know what your doing before you use the tactics of using multiple sites to rank your site or it will just be a waist of time and could end with you failing to rank at all.

It depends on niche and also the amount of time you need to maintain multiple sites.

Personally, we dont tend to do much maintenance on our site, yet it grows in visitors year by year.

I would assume, maybe wrongly, that at least having a site out there which has been given a good initial promotion is probably better than nothing

In general multiple sites are a bad idea unless you have the resources to make sure each and every one is a top notch resource for it's niche. For instance if you have interests in hockey, football, music. It would probably be wise to set those up as different sites if you really think you could attend to them properly and provide a valuable experience. If not best to just focus your efforts on one.

On a side note here is an interesting article from Vanessa Fox about microsites

http://www.ninebyblue.com/blog/microsites-a-bad-idea-most-of-the-time/

which I know isn't exactly the same discussion here, but there are some great points in it that would definitely carry over to the discussion at hand.

Hi guys,

Newbie to this site, but hope you guys can help.

I'm involved in a network of websites related to tourism and travel in various cities across the world. We're only just starting to branch out into other cities. For the past 3/4 years we've established ourselves as pretty much number 1 in our home city. However, the domain name for that city's site is specific to the city. Now that we're expanding, we're debating on whether it is better to start a new site that groups all the destinations together or have seperate destination domains for each of them. We'll be offering more or less the same services at each location. The problem is we dont want to start from scratch with building a main global site and then all the value and traffic from our original site going to waste.

At the moment we're leaning towards having seperate domains for each destination and then turning the global site into a more corporate style site which we can use to direct potential investors and big companies who want to work with us across multiple locations.

Hope that all makes sense. I'd really appreciate your thoughts.

Cheers

Macca

So here are some questions which largely go unanswered. Please if you do not have extensive knowledge and experience in this particular element.. Do not try to post.

1.) How well can google track source of each site or in other words can google keep companies from owning the first page?

2.) If I'm buying a domain from a company that once had the domain on a permanent or temporary redirect, can it hurt me as google may think that's it's still the same company?

3.) what can I do to ensure that search engines think that I'm an entirely different entity?

First off anyone can give their opinion. You have no say in that. Second, Google is pretty smart, all link networks have failed or will fail imo... unless you're owned by Amazon or similar.

Yes anyone can reply if they MUST. That did not address any one question that I had. I said nothing about link networks.
So here are the questions again which largely go unanswered. I'd love to hear your response if you know what you're talking about and you clearly understand what is being asked.

1.) Can google keep companies from getting several spots on the first page?

2.) If I'm buying a domain from a company that once had the domain on a permanent or temporary redirect, can it hurt me as google may think that's it's still the same company?

3.) what can I do to ensure that search engines think that each of my sites are entirely different entities?