Breaking up a site into multiple sites

[timdavis]

Hi,

I am working on plan to divide up mid-number DA website into multiple sites. So the current site's content will be divided up among these new sites. We can't share anything going forward because each site will be independent. The current homepage will change to just link out to the new sites and have minimal content.

I am thinking the websites will take a hit in rankings but I don't know how much and how long the drop will last.  I know if you redirect an entire domain to a new domain the impact is negligible but in this case I'm only redirecting parts of a site to a new domain. Say we rank #1 for "blue widget" on the current site. That page is going to be redirected to new site and new domain. How much of a drop can we expect? How hard will it be to rank for other new keywords say "purple widget" that we don't have now? How much link juice can i expect to pass from current website to new websites?

Thank you in advance.

[EGOL]

A long-time military strategy has been "divide and conquer".

The same holds true for a website.  The strength of one part of the website supports the strength of other parts of a website.

If you remove one part, the remaining part will take a hit if the part that was removed had valuable links.  The part that was removed will not perform as well as it was partially supported the the strength of the rest of the site.

I'd like to spin off a couple parts of my site - and I have good business reasons for doing that.  However, I know that I will suffer traffic hits and income hits.   I will also suffer visibility hits because one part of the site promotes other parts of the site, and lots of my visitors click back and forth through these different parts of the website.

So, instead of being happy about having a bunch of tidy little sites, I am sticking with the big site because it kicks ass.

[timdavis]

Yes, I do understand the site would be stronger if it remained one site but that is not going to be possible. Yes, I know all new sites wont rank as well.  We will do aggressive content and link building to help the recovery. What I was looking for was some people who have experience doing this to see how big of an impact I can expect and how long it takes to recover based on other's experiences.

[Fatueque90]

I had 2 business websites & it became an issue because our backlinks were all from the same sources & were competing & I do not believe Google liked us being 1 business with multiple websites.

We combined ours into 1 & it's going well as we managed to retain rankings.

If it's a business website you have then in my opinion you should keep things the same as more & more people are creating multiple websites & Google will eventually be forced to act against it.

I type this as someone who battles a Competitor with 5 websites.

Personally I think your rankings will nosedive as your homepage will be thin content & Google won't like the new domains with no authority or backlinks.

I'm no expert but i'very been around the block.

What has prompted you to want to split the domains?