Are two blogs and/or websites better than one?
Many website owners, as their businesses expand, come to the dilemma of splitting their sites into a few microsites so they can rank better for their targeted terms. This is not really an easy topic and before you make such a radical move there is a lot to take into consideration.
Reasons to Split a Site Into Microsites
1. Your brand name is not doing very well and you would like a part of the business to be re-branded and market it separately.
2. Your businesses are expanding into a few different niches, thus the one site you have can’t really serve all those different businesses.
3. You think that by splitting your site into several smaller ones you will manage to engage the visitors interested in a particular service or product. Conversion may increase as users will think that they are at a specialist’s website rather than a generic one offering all sorts of services or products.
Risks and Dangers
There are certain risks you will be taking by making such a big change and you need to think carefully before you make any decision.
By splitting your site into microsites you will have to remove a great deal of content. That is going to affect two key elements:
1. Your long tail will be reduced, so will long tail traffic because there will be much less content on the (main) site compared to what used to be there.
2. The power of the whole site will be diminished as certain deep pages with a number of backlinks will cease to exist. Usually webmasters redirect those removed pages to the new microsite, thus the link juice will be permanently gone.
Subdomain vs Separate Domain
There are two different ways to embrace the microsite approach:
1. Generate them as subdomains of your main domain so if your main site is www.mainsite.com a subdomain microsite would look like microsite.mainsite.com
2. Generate microsites in a new separate domain, something like www.microsite.com
However, since Google stopped treating subdomains independently and now attaches some association between them, the first approach does not sound like a very good idea. That means that there isn’t much opportunity anymore to rank for both, so I would recommend choosing the separate domain approach.
Links Farms Issue
This is a quite controversial issue, but in theory, a great benefit of splitting your site into microsites is to interlink between them so each one passes link juice to another. Because this is a technique that in several cases have been abused by website owners who deliberately buy batches of websites just to easily get links back to their main sites, your site(s) may end up being banned from Google’s indexes. This practice is called ‘link farms’ and although not all websites end up being penalized, you should probably link between some of your sites – but not all of them! And definitely avoid reciprocal links as that is an obvious indication of potential link farms.
A Link Farm Example
Slow growth…
Each microsite would be looked at by search engines as a new site, which means you will need to do everything you would normally do for a new site such as creating back-links and all other tasks associated with domain development. Unless you have a massive budget, you will probably struggle for the first few months as you really need to optimize all those different sites. The more competitive your site’s niche is, the more time and money you would need to spend so your microsite will be in a position to compete with other long established power websites. If your niche is not that competitive that shouldn’t be much of an issue.
The Key Questions
The question to ask yourself before making such a big step are:
1. How long could you afford waiting and spending money until you see your new site(s) ranking on Google’s first page?
2. Is the situation with your current site really that bad? What if you spend all those money linkbuilding in order to gain more positions in the SERPs?
3. Is it really because of your brand name that you don’t get the traffic you are expecting? Have you looked carefully at your SEO campaign and how your traffic coverts? Is there anything you can do to increase conversion (i.e. enhance usability, fresh web design) ?
The Big Benefits of Microsites
The post doesn’t suggest that microsites are a bad idea. There are several benefits if done correctly with the main ones being:
1. You can have various keyword-rich domain names that are highly valued by Google. With a consolidated site you would never manage to fit more than 1-2 keywords in your domain name.
2. Your backlinks will mainly target the homepage as there isn’t any great need to link build for deeper pages. Many directories only allow links to homepages so there is a big advantage here.
3. Your brand name will be very close to your product or service, thus some visitors will think they are at the right place. Specialists’ sites convert better in general.
6 thoughts on “The Benefits of Splitting Off Into Microsites”
very good article. Yes, I agree with almost everything. Microsites is an excellent tool to enhance the visibility of your website, and of your e-brand.
This is a great article. You have discussed both advantages and disadvantages of microsites. Now, I think on SEO you would greatly be affected but in the long run it’ll prove to be advantageous. Thanks
great article. ive been wondering about this for a while. my main fear of creating multiple microsites is the loss of backlink juice
This post offers a lot of great information concerning micro sites. Thanks for addressing both the pros and cons. It allows website owners to properly evaluate whether or not micro sites is the correct answer for their business.
This post is very relevant to me as I have just reogranisd a set or sites, They could all be combined into one big niche site, but I felt that keeping each element seperate would keep me and the readers focussed on the specific point of that site.
You do have to shed a lot of content to make the transition as the general articles that covered mutliple topics just do not make sense on the new sites.
By splitting sites, you have an opportunity to re-evaluate everything that you are doing, but there is a lot of work to assess each piece of content and reformat where possible.
I had to justify the move and in the process was able to see exactly what my core messages should be on each site
thanks for the post.
Thanks for the great post. I agree splitting of into micro-sites can be very rewarding but the time spent managing all of them can be very demanding. It’s important to have a plan of attack on place and follow it.
Having a network of website, I fell, is the way to go.
I see a lot of people splitting off and launching loads of micro sites but they seem to get lost in the SEO end. They simply have to much on their plate and in the process their other sites get neglected and are forgotten.
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