70 sites on one instance/server negative for SEO?

[wozniak65]

Hi Guys,

One of our clients is building individual sites for each store they have, which in total would be 70 different websites on one server (they used the word instance).

I was wondering if there could be negative issues with this for SEO purposes?

Cheers,

Mike

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Wozniak65

It's a very strange and outdated approach. If they really want to go down the route of promoting each store individually then far better to build one central website and have a page for each store location. They could then use local citations for each of the locations that the store is in.

It's not so bad for the SEO them being on the same server it is the fact that most of the content across the 7- websites will be duplicate content with only the location different. This would effectively kill each of the sites from an SEO point of view before anything else.

Considerations:

1. Acres of duplicate content
2. The immense amount of work involved to build 70 websites
3. The immense amount of work required to keep all of those sites up to date.
4. The central company information will be the same for all 70 stores presumably.
5. The ip address of the server will be the same for all 70 stores.

It's like having 70 micro-sites for the same company.  For me it's  huge no no Google Panda released in 2011 directly targeted skinny sites with low value content in favour of well written, well constructed content rich and engaging sites.

I honestly think you should press them to go back to the drawing board in favour of a one site/multi-location solution.

Regards Nigel - Carousel Projects