Questions
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Is it Bad to Break Up A Site into Multiple Sites?
I agree with Jared that generally splitting up the site can lead to drop of SEO results. It will also increases your work load since you will have to work SEO on 3 sites instead of one. However, it seems that you are concerned with usability of your site and in my humble opinion that should take a presence and should be addressed. I would suggest splitting the site under a single domain. You can have essentially 3 sites with very few crosslinks (so users would not get confused). www.mydomain.com/patients www.mydomain.com/doctors www.mydomain.com/researchers On each of the 3 home pages, you can have a cross link to other two home pages. E.g. on www.mydomain.com/patients page you can put link like Click here for the medical professional to route user to www.mydomain.com/doctors
Web Design | | SirMax0 -
Breaking a Big Website into Multiple Unrelated Sites
Really great question and there really isn't any one right answer here. In general, from an SEO perspective, I lean toward one consolidated website that is really well organized. That way all of your SEO efforts benefit one domain. For example, instead of building links to three sites, you can concentrate on building links to one website. Even if the content for patients gets more links (let's say), if everything is on one domain those patient oriented links will still help the content for therapists earn rankings because they'll contribute to overall domain strength. Along with the SEO though, my other question would be if there is any great harm in having one website serve multiple audiences? There are numerous examples of companies who are able to do exactly that with their content. Doing so requires a strong information architecture to clearly define what each section is, who it is for, how sections are labeled, how you navigate to various sections, etc. Totally doable, and good IA tends to also be good for SEO too. That said, in some cases one audience group might be distracted/offended/annoyed by content that is intended for another audience group or maybe there is just one set of content you'd rather one group not see. Do you have any situations like that? Have you surveyed users for their opinions about the content to identify these pitfalls? Of course, the other question to ask here is if there is a strong business case for dividing the sites apart? It doesn't sound like it based on your question, but I want to throw that idea out there. I've worked with some organizations where they have one department focused on a certain audience group. To simplify dev and maintenance, the business case is pretty compelling to split the sites apart. Still though, in a lot of cases it is easier to have one website because then all dev, design, branding, etc. budgets (of time and money) can be focused on the one domain vs. divided across multiple domains.
Content & Blogging | | Matthew_Edgar0 -
Can the Lightboxes on My Site be Crawled?
Oh, do you mean the disclaimer? I can take that out of the about section, and it will only appear on the front of the site. I guess I wasn't clear what I was talking about. If you select a category on the front page, the click on a company, then a lightbox opens up with a video and other info about their company.
On-Page / Site Optimization | | bosleypalmer0