Develop old or develop new?

[randy776]

I have a question that I a little puzzled over. We have 30+ sites. Rather than make the issue complex, let me simplify by one example.

If we have a site that is a education portal, featuring colleges and universities from all 50 states. This site is well represented in google, getting lots of searches, and lots of traffic.

A second site is also education related to one factor (say law degrees). This site is apprently sandboxed, and gets little or no traffic from Google. Of course we hope one day to emerge from the sandbox and get the deserved traffic.

My question is this, say we are going to add a new section of pages that would fit in either/both sites. In this example let's say a page for Paralegal degree programs. If we add this page to the first site will it automatically "inherit" the google position of the site (ie no sandbox, bancklinks etc)? I am assuming the answer is yes.

Given that, is there any true benefit to continue development of my related sandboxed sites, or should I start focusing on the one site that is already active in Google search positioning?

I hope that makes sense.

[randy776]

Sorry, I should add that the secondary sites ironically are well represented in Yahoo. Whereas the Gioogle site is not.....strange I know, but that's the way it is. I know the easy answer is develop both since each get traffic from different search engines, but I fear the duplicate content penalty from google!

[cspelts]

Just because a new page could logically fit on either site does not mean you should put it on both sites! If you do, then your problem is not the sandbox, but duplicate content.

If I were you I would take a very close look at both sites and make sure there is no overlap in content - make sure that each site is truly unique. It can be really easy to inadvertently use the same phrases, same structure, and if there is too much duplication Google will drop the newer of the pages.

As to where to put your new page, my suggestion is to think long-term and put it on the site where it fits better. Maybe it won't show up in searches immediately if you put it on site you presume is sandboxed – but the sandbox does not last forever. If it’s crucial that it get indexed now, then yeah, put it on the ranked site – but you may have to deal with moving the page later on.