Would you make One Domain high authority, or multiple niche sites?

[ProductPearson]

I have seen this question asked a lot around the web, but I want to hear it from you guys. I want to expand my categories on my site (news, technology, gaming, fashion, business) etc into sub sites, posted on subdomains, ie fashion.searchbuzz.co. - I am about to begin working very hard to promote searchbuzz.co as a high authority domain, but  I worry about niches and SEO.

Are there SEO problems when it comes to having such diverse content on the same domain, even when they are on sub domains? I plan to use Wordpress Multisite so that the sub domain websites are all slightly different and have their own abilities.

Would I rank better if I had a number of low level niche blogs and have overall more traffic each month on all the sites? Or would I gain more traffic from a diverse amount of content in different categories and subdomains on a domain which I make high authority by using good SEO for many years to come?

I look at sites like Hubpages, Squidoo and Yahoo even who have such diverse amounts of content, yet still manage to rank well in search engines, but then there are many arguments against it on the web.

What does Moz say?

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi, it would be one domain any day. With multiple niche sites, you might win the SEO game for a short while but the advantages of a single domain that will become super stable and authority in the long run is something that you should ideally looking for. Though having multiple sub-domains for diverse content is justified a little bit but, sub-folders are highly recommended over sub-domains for many, many obvious reasons and changes in the way they are treated by Google. Moreover, with a single domain, your SEO efforts will not be diluted and you can eliminate lot of operational overheads.

With a sub-folder strategy for categories, all your content will belong to and strengthen the root domain. Personally, I will not go for sub-domains unless I am trying to target different countries using them i.e. each sub-domain targeting one country. For example: de.abc.com, cn.abc.com etc. Having that said, based on the results, I do not mind porting all the content on the sub-domains to their respective sub-folders and implement 301 from the sub-domains to corresponding sub-folders. In the past, I have seen many instances where the sub-folders out-performed the sub-domains.

I would like to conclude by saying, its my strong suggestion that you aim for a very stable and wide domain like the mother tree rather than tiny, puny mushrooms spread all over. All the best to you my friend.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

[ProductPearson]

This is what I was hoping to hear really.

The only thing about having folders instead of subdomains is that I find there are issues in terms of interference, especially when I use a plugin such as "Smart 404" which will attempt to find a page for you should there be a 404 error. I had my Invision Power Board forums on domain.com/forums and I had to move them on to a sub domain at forums.domain.com because there were many links on the site and from inside the admin panel on Wordpress that were linking to pages on the forum. Even when disabling Smart 404 I suffered the same issue.

I am wondering how I can go ahead and use sub folders and have a seperate site, for example using Wordpress Multisite, at domain.com/technology, and it not cause any issues should there be a news piece on the main site that has technology in the title, which could happen. What are your recommendations for overcoming that?

Would you say its okay to place seperate whole sites on sub folders as an extension to the primary domain, as opposed to just categories.

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hmmm, for this question: I am wondering how I can go ahead and use sub folders and have a seperate site, for example using Wordpress Multisite, at domain.com/technology, and it not cause any issues should there be a news piece on the main site that has technology in the title, which could happen. What are your recommendations for overcoming that?

Let us take an example: domain.com/technology.html and domain.com/technology. In a scenario like this, the target term is, 'technology' that would be in the titles on both the pages (on the technology.html page and on the homepage of domain.com/technology/ ). So we have a keyword cannibalism here, two pages competing for the same keyword. In cases like this, we should decide which page from our website should rank for the term and put rel=canonical on the other page pointing to the preferred one.

And yes, you can definitely port all the mini sites to their respective folders on the main domain without a second thought. Once you move them, just make sure to go for page-to-page 301 and you should be good.

Would like to share a personal experience here. I had a client few years back that wanted to with a mushroom websites approach and many of them targeting the same set of keywords/phrases and with an intention to occupy multiple positions in search results. Despite me making them aware of the possible consequences, they insisted to go with the strategy. First few months were very fruitful but after that disaster struck. Many of those websites were thrown out of index overnight. We took down all of those websites and moved the content from them to the sub-folders of the flagship website. It took 6 weeks for us to see anything good happening and after that, there was no turning back. The flagship website literally ruled the niche and became an authority in the niche.

Here is thread here on Moz regarding the sub-domain strategy. Please go through it and it would be of some help to you. It talks about sub-domains vs sub-folders.

http://moz.com/community/q/multiple-subdomains-my-worst-seo-mistake-now-what-should-i-do

And here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/subdomains-vs-subfolders

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi