3 Ecommerce Stores All Under One Roof - Good idea? SEO Benefits? Concerns?

[venturagroup]

I run multiple ecommerce stores in one particular market. I've been considering merging them all together and using a Single sign-on and allowing users to swap between websites. Each site is unique in their own way and are already ranking well on their own. But the goal is to merge them altogether to create a better user-flow.

An example of what I'm trying to do is what Zurb.com does (http://zurb.com/apps). They have all of their different products but they're under different domains.

Another example is http://www.envato.com/sites and all of their brands to their sites.

Will this negatively impact SEO efforts across the board or will we eventually benefit from merging them. Also, is there a correct way to do this. For example; Should I make one site the "parent website" and then create sub-directories of the other websites and work on the DNS to point to the right locations.

I'm not the technical person on our team but I do lead the marketing and I can't find the right answer for this question.

[GregB123]

Sam wrote: "Each site is unique in their own way and are already ranking well on their own."

Another possibility is to leave the sites where they are (since they already rank well) but let them all share one single Shopping Cart / Checkout system. I know of a few e-commerce system that allow this. UltraCart and AmeriCommerce are two. You can put the "Buy Now" and "View Cart" buttons on any site and some social media sites (you don't even have to own the sites, which opens interesting possibilities for guest blogging with a shopping capability)

Then you could just re-style the three sites appearance so that they blend well together yet stay distinct. Like three old neighboring houses that were all built in the same era. And freely offer navigation between all three so it pretty much acts like one big website. Maybe put a logo in the header of page saying something like "Part of the Gizmo Group of fine stores". Many people would barely notice that they are moving from one domain to another.

The upside would be safety. If one of the three sites gets a penalty, the other two can continue to pull in customers while you repair the penalized site.

Just tossing around ideas. I've considered doing this with some unused domains we own. Hope it helps you...

[gazzerman1]

Years ago I tried to do the same thing and Google Trashed all my sites.

So tread very carefully, use nofollows if you are going to link to them or interlink between them.

It is something not often done and very few will be able to give you a definitive answer.

One thing is for sure, people on Google help forum do not understand owners of multiple businesses and will tell you to merge them under one site. Or question why you own more than one site and how you are able to successfully mange them at the same time rather than give you an answer of which they also do not have the answer for.

My best suggestion is to ask John Mueller from Google in a hangout he will give you the best answer, view upcoming dates here https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/office-hours

[venturagroup]

Thanks for the tip. I'm going to join in on a call next week. You're right, it's hard to find people dealing with the same issue and I'm reading both sides of the argument with no real answer.

[venturagroup]

Interesting concept with merging them with only the shopping carts. It may be safer to keep them separate since they're already ranking well on their own. I'll check out those vendors you suggested. Thanks for the feedback!

[GregB123]

Your welcome. Here's a little insight on the two shopping cart systems I mentioned. Note that both systems have added (and are promoting) the standard e-commerce hoopla of auto-generated product pages and the sort of stuff systems like BigCommerce do. But they do both also have the simpler option of just using the cart and checkout system and allowing you to put your Buy buttons anywhere you can reach.

I started trying to set up AmeriCommerce because it had the most features. But as I got in deeper, the complexity of the features and the poorly written technical documentation overwhelmed me and I gave up. If you have some brainy tech guys they can probably understand the documentation better than I could.

I then switched to UltraCart and have found it much easier to use. You can see the standard cart appearance on some example pages on their website. My cart at EasyDigging.com is pretty heavily customized. They will soon have a easily modified HTML/CSS based cart available. There documentation and tech support is pretty good.