Which is better for SEO. 1 big site or a number of smaller sites.

[voitenkos]

Hello , I am about to create a website with product reviews for a certain niche.

What i want to know: Is it better for me to have a site with all reviews , like nicheproductsreviews.com and then have

nicheproductsreviews.com/product-one-review.html

and

nicheproductsreviews.com/product-two-review.html

or

buy multiple domains to have product name in the domain name, like  product-one-review.com and product-two-review.com

As far as I understand, first approach consolidates all pages on the same site , consolidating all the link juice to it. However, second approach lets me have the product name in the main domain URL.

Which way is better for SEO and why?

[Gyi]

Well, in terms of keywords in the domain, historically, in my experience, that has been a great benefit. However, there has been talk that this will be dialed down soon.

Is it your intention to inter-link the sites?

There doesn't seem to me to be any additional benefit of spreading the reviews across multiple domains. At least not based on the example as given.

[voitenkos]

You are completely right. Keywords in domains is the only reason i was thinking of spreading them out. And again , I as well heard of the dialing down the "keyword in domain" importance. The niche I am trying to go into is not that competitive, so i would assume that i can have the same advantage by making 10-20 .edu and .gov links.

Am i mistaken somewhere, but now I think to go with the "all-in-one" structure

[CPU]

It may be that when someone searches for product one that the site product-one-review.com is better than the product one page on the .com site all other things (links etc) being equal.

However what happens if the visitor wants to buy product one and product two at the same visit and in the same transaction, would they have to jump between two different sites? Would there be duplicate content on the product one site about product two that was also on the product two site.

There are non-SEO considerations to take account of.

I would go for the .com site with pages devoted to and fully optimised for each product and then try and link build for those product pages.

Hope this helps!