Why is Envato.com structured like it is.

[HashtagHustler]

Envato.com is a marketplace for various things. They act as an umbrella for 8 different websites that fall underneath them and each one offers a specific thing. Is there any SEO benefit to doing this?

Wouldn't it have been better off for them build all of these into envato.com. i.e.

envato.com/themeforest as opposed to the current ThemeForest.net

The only thing I can think of really is branding?

Let's assume that they didn't do this because they needed space to house all of the digital data or anything like that.

[benjaminmarcinc]

I wondered that too, i buy a lot of things from them and each department has a different name, maybe they just kept adding on services. It seems like they are just several websites linked together not just one website.

[LesleyPaone]

Envato is a big company with a lot of web assets, so it is really for branding of each / ease of use. Some people that use themeforest might have never heard of codecayon before and vice versa. They also have the size of site to support this kind of layout as well, they literally have 10's of thousands of pages for each site.

You also have to consider that during the development of these different sites, SEO was different as well. Exact match in domain names did more than it does now. So having theme, code and so on in the domain name helped back then too.