Mutliple Websites for Same Company (different areas of practice)

[goldbergweismancairo]

My company has had one primary website for a number of years, a few years back we created a second website separate and apart from the first one to generate more business in a niche market that we cater to. Since then we ended up adding 3 more websites to help increase our footprint with more content. Each of the new websites deal with a major aspect of our business and the content generated on those websites are related to those areas of our business.

My question is - is it bad idea to have a network of 5 websites for SEO-purposes? What are the pros and cons and why? Any supporting resources to back up your position would be greatly appreciated.

Note there is no "duplicate content" problem here, all content we create is unique to the site it is hosted on.

[wickedsunny1]

Cross linking between own sites isn't a bad idea. but its good to keep the anchor text different.

I wouldn't consider this a bad idea i am doing it myself.

Since you mentioned there is no duplicate content, i think its all cool.

[josh-riley]

This was a common practice for some a few years ago and many still do it. My understanding is that search engines started to figure out the interrelation and there's some SEOs I know who consolidated rather than risk being penalized because if it's not done well, it seems spammy.

Part of it also had to do with managing multiple sites, plus the user experience (why are there so many sites for what seems to be one company?) can be compromised.

I've noticed the trend of even major sites, with different business niches, moving under one domain - like Honda or Ford - rather than keep them separate.

[gmk1567]

As long as you have a good content plan in place, you will be good.

Already you don't have duplicate content. So no need to worry about the negative impact.

If you want to increase SEO benefits then you need to show differences in several areas like tone, anchor texts, link sources, etc. Such practice will help to increase rankings of each site for a specific set of keywords.