So as usual, I was teasing Keith on Facebook while telling him how BOOOOORED I was because from a Search Engine Optimization standpoint, I was in “Marinate Mode™” as far as my websites and my client’s websites go. I recently just finished spending an entire day recoding and consolidating two of my websites into one “Wikipedia of Fence Building”.
I had nearly 50 pages on each website and because of the potential of duplicate content issues I decided to merge the two websites. One was Keith’s former fence company website that I purchased from him and one was my fence company’s original website that had been running for nearly 8 years now. The decision to consolidate the two was based on a number of things.
The primary issue was that I could see one of my competitors reporting me to Google because I did have several other websites as well. Google states that, “However, if our review indicated that you engaged in deceptive practices and your site has been removed from our search results, review your site carefully. If your site has been removed from our search results, review our webmaster guidelines for more information.” Why take chances right?
I had to recode each page because the two sites were built on different CSS platforms and both CSS files could not be consolidated into one. The entire relocation process took me the whole day, but in the end I feel much more confident that considating them was the right move. After considating the two, I used a program to check the links throughout the site and was able to uncover many broken links using Xenu.
I used to use a program to detect the backlinks to a website, but the website owner got rid of the tool, which was a huge mistake because it was better than any other backlink tool out there. I will eventually manually check my websites page by page for links to the old website, but in the meantime I used an .htaccess 301 redirect for page by page so I could maintain my email address at the old domain name.
What Keith doen’t know is that with a blog, this process would have been damn near impossible. You see when you add tags to your WordPress blog, WordPress and Google uses those to create a unique URL address for each tag. So if Keith tags this post as: SEO, websites, duplicate content, WordPress, and relocating website, then there would be FIVE URLs for just this one post. If you multiply the 50 pages I relocated on my website by 5 tags each, I would have had to have 250 redirects in my .htaccess file, and thats a low number since I imagine that most WordPress blog owners use way more than 5 tags for each post.
If you have multiple blogs, and the blogs cover similar topics, then you could potentially be having your site’s ranking suffer because Google’s ranking algorithm is far more complex than it was even a year or two ago. As webmasters continue to try to dominate the rankings with multiple websites showing up multiple times in the TOP 10 or using multiple websites to target different rankings, there will always be someone that is going to rat you out.
I know of one marketing company competitor who has 10-15 websites each targeting a different niche of marketing. One website targets email marketing, another targets SEO, another targets AdWords, and so on and so on. BAD MOVE. I have reported him to Google, meerly to analyze how Google decides to handle it. Will they ban him completely? Will they notify him and make him take all of the excessive websites down? Will they drop his PageRank from 5 to ZERO? Only time will tell, but I’m not taking the chance. You can.
This was a guest post by Will Harrison of WebYourName.com As you can see, Will and I don’t see eye to eye on blogs but I guess all of us can’t be alike.
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Nice one Will but i must say this is a techie post – not that i couldn’t follow though. It’s amazing how there isn’t THE WAY online. We all have to do what works best for us.
Phew Keith, I first thought you were referring t yourself in the 3rd person until i got to last lines.
.-= Olusegun´s last blog ..Free Make Money Blogging E-book =-.
That was a pretty good post until the last paragraph Will. I try not to judge but wow, report someone as an experiment? What’s wrong with 15 sites targeting different niches? Perhaps I’m missing something but that just seems wrong.
.-= Brian D. Hawkins@List Of My Blogging Friends´s last blog ..Joining Google’s PageRank N/A Club =-.
I quite agree with you Brian. There is absolutely no need to set up someone just to “experiment”
.-= Olusegun´s last blog ..CUT YOUR ARTICLE WRITING TIME IN HALF =-.
I’m with Brian, and I do not believe it’s against Google TOS to build different sites for different niches, that doesn’t even make sense, mirror sites are not allowed, but different sites for different niches is not a problem.
LOL, Google doesn’t notify and ask anyone to take their sites down, they just deindex sites and they do not do that unless there are true blackhat tactics verified, like SPAM and phishing sites, mirror sites, invisible text, keyword stuffing and using doorway pages, none of which are relevant to the site that was reported to Google, as described by the author.
.-= JR @ Internet Marketing´s last blog ..Website Speed Now A Definite Factor in Google Rankings and 12 Tools to Check Site Speed =-.
Interesitn post. I didn’t now, that consolidationg two sites is such a problem.
It makes no difference if it were a blog or not, what if it were 2 e-commerce stores with over 1000 pages on each one, with no blog? I guess we should think e-commerce stores are bad too?
How often does this type of problem arise? How many times have you had to consolidate 2 web sites? Personally I don’t think it matters, blog or static site, it is a difficult process. I guess the only way it would be easier would be if you only had 5 static pages on each site, then it really wouldn’t be worth consolidating since I would call them worthless anyway.
Also, what “most” bloggers do doesn’t cut it around here Will. I use one category, and 2-3 tags max. And what you miss out on with your sites is the fact that those categories and tags create snippets of the article, on archive pages, that are indexed by search engines.
And on to the final part of your article. I see nothing wrong with having 100 niche site for a particular niche. I used to have half a dozen fence sites so I could write about wood, aluminum, vinyl chain link, etc… did you report me while we were in competition? If so, I guess Google didn’t care because all of the sites ranked well, and they did it much faster than everyone of my competitions sites ever dreamed of. Why? Because Google likes blogs that are updated regularly…. you still don’t get that part.
.-= Keith Bloemendaal´s last blog ..New Project: Help Wanted =-.
Keith – no offense man, you know you’re loved.
But seriously, do you read guest posts before publishing?
I’d comment on the post itself, but fear being reported for imaginary conspiracies and falsehoods.
OK I’ll just choose one – there is absolutely nothing wrong with multiple micro-niche sites within a parent niche
.-= Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing´s last blog ..DEDC Remains DoFollow – BUT… =-.
I did read it, but just because I may not agree with everything Will talks about doesn’t mean I shouldn’t publish it. I personally know Will, and I give a little extra leniency because of that.
I am not one to deny someone a post here just because I don’t agree with something they say. I prefer to let everyone read and debate it (like adults).
.-= Keith Bloemendaal´s last blog ..New Project: Help Wanted =-.
Learn something new everyday. I never knew that Google could consider you a monopoly. But it does make sense. Can you image have 10 sites that do really well in the same market and having every single one of them show up on the first page of Google? You could dominate that entire page. Not cool.
You know, after reading the comments, I also agree. I am getting ready to start another niche site about Jewelry. Does that mean that you’ll report me? Is that from jealousy? How weird that someone would spend their time trying to get others banned versus just working harder to compete and do more for themselves. Hmmm…
The last part of this article look interesting to me. As a SEO practitioner I always want to know more about SEO and you just give me a good practical example Will Harrison.
.-= Arafat Hossain Piyada´s last blog ..The ultimate resource center of Microsoft Kin (Updated) =-.