Google against splitting site? Your thoughts?- Thanks

[greeneagle]

We are considering splitting our Site into 3 major sites:
1)Web Design and Maintenance. - Do's & dont's , primers etc..
2)Targeted Industry Marketing - with many helpful tips & links for our targeted industries
3)Webmaster Resources (currently expanding from 8 to 90 topic specific pages) will be very comprehensive - looking to start newsletter in future.

We already own the related URLs and are registering more.

However, in recent comments I have seen; it appears that GOOGLE does not recommend splitting up your site. In your opinion (or knowledge) do better rankings come for sites over "x" number of pages?

What would you do?

Thanks in advance
Ken
http://www.mountaineagleweb.com

[bmchild]

This is pure speculation and opinion. Just something to consider.

It seems to me that if you split them up you would be able to have more market specific keywords, which should increase the page ranking in the search results.

But on the flip side, if you do split them up, then instead of having one huge site you'll have 3 smaller ones which, if i were a machine, would make the sites look less popular and less relavant which would then make the sites lose page rankings.

Of course what it all comes back to is how are the users going to feel about your site? If splitting it up is going to be easier for the users then I would say split it up. If they may not even notice you could just point the urls you bought to the main site or maybe forward them to the appropriate subsections.

[touristips]

Hello,
I was a bit skeptical at first then understood that google penalizes for duplicate content.

I have divied up my mega site into 5 sites that compete with each other and all bring orders.

Mega site brings in most.

What you want to do is avoid duplicate content and make each site different in terms of hrefs, nav bars and content.

The things that bots will crawl!

You will want to have specific keyword goals on each site.

[outkast]

I feel dirty. Do you? It seems that so many of us, me probably being the most guilty, spend so much time trying to figure out how to make the Google monster happy that we sometimes forget we need to just build a site that our users (if they could ever locate us) will find helpful. The questions are asked, the answers are given, and they all lead back to Google. I think Google needs to figure out how to index our sites. How to display the useful content, helpful links and resources we build for our industries. Rather than us trying to build for this ever changing "algo". I am tired of it.

Do you think this post will affect my PR? :)

[activebiz]

I agree - websites are to be designed to be attractive to your visitors first. And if the content is well written, makes sense - and you outgrow your current space because it starts loading slow after 50 thousand pages - then split the site.
We did just that a number of years ago. Although the "mothership" is still huge, we have (in our art-gallery) each artist in there having their own "mini-website".
That gave us the opportunity to have tutorials etc. on another domain, but the actual index page for those domains (9 total) are still located on the main website.

We have been listed in Google since they started and have to say, they have always been very good to us - but then - we never changed our approach back and forth on the whims either or cheated etc. Careful alliance forming with other quality sites (in our case the arts) over the years has obviously paid of far better than having thousands of meaningless links.
Google will find its way - I do beleve that their primary concern is to get rid of all the trickery - which in the end is a very welcome thing for all the "honest" websites that are out there.
Possible that they need a few more months to clearly define the new guidelines - don't we all know that new structuring always has glitches? And then we work them out.
LOL

[cbp]

spend so much time trying to figure out how to make the Google monster happy that we sometimes forget we need to just build a site that our users (if they could ever locate us) will find helpful.

This is what I think Google is trying to do with changes to algorithm/addition of filters - is rank sites based on what is "naturally" good for visitors to the site and not on "unatural" patterns (eg over optimised) - whether they are actually achieving that is another point :-)

Advice for a very long time from many of the high profile SEO's out there (and in Google's own guidelines) has been ... build for the user and not the search engine..

Back to original qustion in this thread from greeneagle - I think what you are proposing is OK. I think what Google (or that Google person interviewed in the corridor) mean is that don't splitt your site into a lot of subdomains (? = spam) - I keep going back to what Google say - paraphrased it is something like: "If its OK for the user, then ...." - what you are proposing makes good sense from a users point of view.

CBP

[greeneagle]

The next obvious question is:

Do I have to have a high quantity (100+) of quality pages to make it up to top levels in the GOOGLE alogrithmic PAGE RANK scale?

I haven't seen PR 7-10 issues addressed at that level!

ANY PR 7-10s out there?

It stands to reason that GOOGLE will value masive information higher, but this does not seem to be a linear scale - Seems more alogrithmic, or somewhere in between!

Thanks,
Ken

[cbp]

PR is on a log scale (I seem to remeber someone suggested the base was a 4???).

Getting up to a 4 is not hard - going from 4 to 5 is harder - getting above a 5 and you are doing really well - as for >7 ...

CBP