5 websites, 1 root domain name: good or bad?

[Jacky_C]

Hi guys, I'm new here, so this might be a basic question to the experts here!

So here is my situation: I have 1 "umbrella" website (root domain name) that contains 4 different websites, for a total of 5 different websites. They are related, but we needed to brand each website differently to fit each strategy.

Q: I have 23 domain names.. this means I have 23 sub-domain names?
Q: Is this practice good or bad for my SEO?
Q: should I analyze each domain name/SD?

Here are my 5 websites
RD: furisgreen.com
SD1: furcouncil.com
SD2: furfashions.com
SD3: naffem.com
SD4: beautifullycanadian.com

Thank you for your help!!

[NewGlobalVentures.comSEOTexas]

Hi there Jacky_C, I'm a bit confused on your question here.

Would you please clarify if your 23 domain names are active/live and whether they are 301'd from the original root domain or are these 5 domains leading into the 23 domain names?

Also the 4 subdomains are individual sites, correct? If not, then your 4 subdomains should be "furcouncil.furisgreen.com", "furfrashions.furisgreen.com", etc.

I'll touch base later and good luck!

[Jacky_C]

Hi, thanks for helping me out here!

So for example, for my website www.furcouncil.com, I also have the domain name www.furcouncil.ca, www.canadafur.com, www.fourrurecanada.com.. they are all redirected to to the same page, or sometimes to the french version of the website. (I don't know if that counts as 301'd)?

My 4 visually look like different websites, but are really under the the root domain name furisgreen.com. I take care of updating the websites with a CMS, that's why I am starting to learn about SEO...

Hope this helps... I'm making a lot of research on the subject!
Thanks! ;))

[Sebes]

Hey MarieAnne,

ok, so you got 5 different designs for your page and more domainnames that you want to point to one of your designs. This is perfectly ok, you should only watch a few things.

I made a quick check on canadafur.com. It does not redirect with a 301 statuscode, but with a 302 (temp redirect), you should change that to 301 here is more on statuscodes: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/http-status-codes

I also noticed, that furcouncil.com does not have a rel canonical. This is optional, but in a scenario you are describing it realy gives you security not make a mistak. What you should do is: rel="canonical" href="http: yourdomainhere.tld/page" /> in the header of each of your pages. This will tell the searchengines that yourdomainhere.tld/page is the version you want to display and what they should index and rank. 
Why to do this? If you screw up one of the redirects it could happen that the exactly same page is one time crawled and indexed on yourdomain and one time on anotherdomain, thus creating duplicate content.

More on that topic:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization and  http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content

If this helped and answered your question I would be very thankful if you flag this answer as helpful If you have more questions just ask or PM

Thanks

Sebastian

[Jacky_C]

Hi Sebastian,

Thank you SO MUCH!!
I will fix the temp redirect and take care of the rest!

Have a great week-end!! ;))

Jacky (I don't know why the name switched to Marie-Anne!)