Question about breaking out content from one site onto many

[accessintel]

We have a website and domain -- which is well-established (since 1998) -- that we are considering breaking apart for business reasons. This is a content site that hosts articles from a few of our brands in portal fashion. These brands are represented in print with their own magazines so it's important to keep their presence separate.

All of the content on the site is related to a general industry, with each brand covering a unique segment in the industry. For example, think of a toy industry site that hosts content from it's brands covering stuffed animals, electronics and board games.

The current thinking is to break out the content from a couple brands to their own sites and domains. The business case for this branding purposes. I'm of the opinion that this is a bad idea as we would likely see a noticeable decline in search traffic across the board, which we rely on for impressions for our advertisers.

If we take the appropriate steps to carefully redirect pages to the new domains what kind of hit should we expect to take from this transition? Would it make much difference if we were transition from 1 to 2 sites vs 1 to 4? Should this move be avoided all together? Any advise would be appreciated.

[EGOL]

I am willing to bet good money that breaking up this site will result in an enormous traffic loss.

Why?  You are going to take a large authoritative domain that is probably a nice brand and break it up into a bunch of hotdog stands.

Google likes big brands.  Google likes authority.   Visitors like to be impressed.   I would not do this.

[accessintel]

I agree with you and I'm hoping that I can talk them out of it. Hearing words like "enormous traffic loss" is enough for me to fight this.

[EGOL]

In your example you say....

.... think of a toy industry site that hosts content from it's brands covering stuffed animals, electronics and board games.

If that is your website, do you think that a shopper will be pleased that she can do gift shopping there and add a stuffed animal and a board game to the shopping cart.   If you split these sites all of that cross shopping will be gone.  How many of your current shopping carts mix items from the different parts of your website.  All of that is gone.  And, if people are like me, they don't like go buy one item here, another item there, another item at still another site and then wait for all of these packages to arrive and be interrupted or stay home because you have a package scheduled to arrive.

I have retail sites.  How many of my customers add products to their shopping cart from multiple product categories?   I'll tell you how many.... enough that if that was taken away that my business might not make a profit.   You don't make much money selling one item at a time.  You make the real money when people fill the cart.

If you publish magazines, don't you think that a visitor will see that you publish Magazine A and Magazine B and Magazine C.... they will think... Wow!  This company publishes all of these magazines, they must know what they are doing.  And if someone likes Magazine A  a lot, don't you think they might be on your site and see that you also publish Magazine C and decide to take a look at it.  Lots of people subscribe to many magazines.

The people who want to break up this site are not thinkin'.

[accessintel]

Our site hosts b2b content and while I agree with your scenario in general, we do have some niche content that some users would have no interest in.

A better example instead of a toy industry site might be a construction industry site. Let's say our content is generally related to the construction industry and our readers work in or own construction businesses. We might have brands and individual publications that cover everything from concrete innovations to lumber pricing to interior design. While all of the content is generally is related to construction, most interior design professionals may have zero interest in lumber pricing.

That's essentially where we're at. For branding purposes the interior design folks think it would be better to have their own uniquely branded website, but they'll obviously feel the pain of the break from the main construction site.