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SEO Mistake #3: Spreading Your Content Over Multiple Domains

Domain names are practically a dime a dozen these days. And who doesn’t know someone who has at least that many in their portfolio? Purchasing a new domain is as easy as hopping out of bed at 3 a.m., doing a quick search to see if it’s available and whipping out your credit card.

Setting up a new site to go along with your shiny new domain name can be just as quick and easy with some of the site builder tools and blog tools out there. And Viola! There’s a shiny new WordPress site ready to go.

It’s so easy to do, and there are so many reasons that make setting up a new domain name sound good. But from an SEO perspective, is it really the smart thing to do?

When You Should Use a New Domain Name ws Sub-Domain

Sometimes it does make sense to use a new domain name or to setup a sub-domain. (For those who don’t know, a sub-domain is a part of a larger domain and the subdomain name is added before the top-level domain with a period, e.g. subdomain.topleveldomain.com.)

If you’re selling a single product, such as an e-book, and you have an army of affiliates that will want to send their customers to a single domain and sales letter page that has nothing but the product to purchase on it, then multiple domains may be a good idea.

Or, if you’re company provides information on multiple, unrelated topics, you may want to setup a website for each topic. For example, if you have an online store and a place where you talk about and support the brand you sell, would benefit from separate domain names (like a store.topleveldomain.com and a support.topleveldomain.com).

Using a sub-domain makes sense if you’re setting up a monstrous website like About.com with multiple content categories that need to be completely separate from one another – but still under the same domain name. Sub-domains are also useful if your company offers several completely different products. For example, Google uses sub-domains in this manner: maps.google.com, news.google.com, mail.google.com.

When You Should NOT Use Multiple Domain Names or Sub-Domains

That said; you need to make sure your customers or visitors can navigate your site easily and that you consider the impact of a separate domain or sub-domain on your SEO efforts before you start building.

The first question you need to ask yourself before you start building is why you need more than one domain name or sub-domain.

If your reasoning is so that you can take over the search engine results pages (SERPs) with several websites, go back to the drawing board.

This is a bad idea from an SEO standpoint because the search engines frown upon the practice of having multiple sites with essentially the same content. Anytime you’re attempting to deceive the search engines, you’re walking on thin ice with your site’s credibility in the eyes of the search engines.

That’s just the SEO perspective. Unless you have an army of website updaters and content writers, keeping each of your sites fresh and meeting the needs of your visitors is going to be nearly impossible.

It’s best to keep similar content, or content that targets the same market, on one site and in one sub-domain. Think long and hard about what impact you’ll have and what your motives are before you branch out.

Stay tuned for next week's SEO article. Or, stop by the new website of Volition and get a jump with your own personalized site review.