May 24 2010

Consolidation and Amalgamation of Your Websites, the Pros and Cons!

Using multiple websites (satellite sites) to market products in similar areas is something that many small business owners consider and usually practice. Using these websites to retail separate products can be effective, but what are the advantages of consolidating all of these together?

If your firm for example sells St Lucia holidays from one website and Barbados holidays from another site. These two websites clearly target two different audiences and both have their own unique terms to target (possibly even keyword rich URL’s as well). Starting off with the Cons of Consolidation, so the good side of satellite websites:

Cons to Consolidation:

  • If the URL is keyword rich in your individual sites, you get an added bonus from Google, so if your site was StLuciaHolidays.com, you get an extra lift.
  • You are link building one or two very specific terms to these sites meaning the power is very focused, and the ability to rank well is just as high.
  • You can focus all of your content, so all of your references throughout the site will be to one location or product, which means your sites term relevance, is boosted.
  • Your homepage will be even more powerful, because the majority of your terms will be directed here, with most of your anchor text rich links heading here as well.
  • Directories can be picky about which page you link to, so with a site like this, the chance to link to the home page is a bonus, and directories prefer this to deep linking.
  • Your homepage becomes a power page for select terms. All of the above makes your homepage all powerful, designed for specific terms. There is no need to link to deeper pages.

Pros to Consolidation:

  • Power directed into one single domain.
  • Your Brand image can be expanded across other audiences and press coverage becomes easier to produce and cheaper.
  • All of your terms benefit from the boost the homepage receives when all the power is funnelled through one domain.
  • Social Networking can be expanded as well, targeting a greater audience allowing your site to receive greater recognition, further building a single brand.
  • One disadvantage with having multiple satellite sites is that if you link between them, there is a chance that they appear to Google as “Link Farms” designed specifically to build power between each other. This could damage rankings and devalue link power.
  • Building links to deeper pages passes power though the sites, and with combined power from the homepage gives a more realistic relevance to the deeper pages, which improves Google trust.

Mark works as an SEO for a Worthing based Search Engine Optimisation company.

8 Responses to “Consolidation and Amalgamation of Your Websites, the Pros and Cons!”

  1. seoworldwide (SEO Worldwide) says:
    December 31, 1969 at 11:59 pm

    Pros and cons of consolidating your websites – http://bit.ly/bW0vKB

  2. Jaspal Singh says:
    May 24, 2010 at 1:21 pm

    If the URL is keyword rich in your individual sites, you get an added bonus from Google, so if your site was StLuciaHolidays.com, you get an extra lift.

  3. David says:
    May 24, 2010 at 7:38 pm

    Good points, but it still doesn’t solve the issue of which is right. That can only be solved by resources, if you don’t have the money and time to support multiple sites with different content and different links you are better with consolidation.

  4. Waterfront Real estate says:
    May 28, 2010 at 8:50 am

    Keyword rich domain is really good. Thanks for information about pro and cons of consolidation.

  5. Chotrul says:
    June 20, 2010 at 6:08 pm

    I have a client who has split their companies services up into nearly a dozen sites. It makes their job, and my job so much harder. There’s so little power in any of the sites – if they’d have had one site, then any link would have passed *some* link juice through that site – whereas here it’s all silo’d. Not a good deal.

  6. Brighton Models says:
    July 16, 2010 at 7:53 am

    Very ninteresting post. I would add the following:

    -If the market is really competitive consolidation is the way to go as with microsites it would take ages until you get all of them powerful enough so they can compete with the other established websites.
    -If the market is not that competitive then having a few microsites (but not too many) would make sense given that you have the resources (time and money) to optimise them. Keyword-rich domain names are a big advantage e.g. londonmodels.co.uk rather than bmmodels.co.uk . Also, a microsite the seems like a specialist for a specific term, will probably convert better.

  7. Andri says:
    April 16, 2011 at 1:58 am

    Big effort for consolidation and its maintenance.

  8. the ridges in summerlin says:
    December 11, 2011 at 1:17 pm

    Very informative post. It is important that someone knows the benefits that come with this and also the negative side of things. This will help one to think before deciding to consolidate or amalgamate websites.