The SEO benefit of breaking up content onto different websites

Question

I have a client who's been told that breaking up his content onto multiple websites will give him an SEO boost. I'm wondering if this is true.

Let me break it down thus...

• the client has bought multiple domain names
• he does training in VMware, ITIL, Novel, Citrix, etc.
• he wants to make 1 website which just talks about vmware training, 1 website which talks about novel training, 1 website on Citrix, etc.
• each website would use a related domain name (e.g. the VMware specific website would use www.vmwaretrainingmelbourne.com.au)
• all the websites use the same design/layout (you can tell its the same company)

Will breaking up the site in this way really provide better Google rankings?

Answer 1

Specious.

SEO, beyond ensuring that your website is intuitive to humans and search engine crawlers, is almost entirely made up of backlinks and domain authority (empowered by backlinks). By moving across different domains, you're decentralizing the authority of your root domain.

For all that energy, you'd benefit more just investing in some backlink packages.

A better design is to keep it all on one URL, but make a sort of "hub" for each big topic.

• domain.com/topic1
• domain.com/topic2
• etc.

Wikipedia wouldn't be so prevalent if it were federated across a bunch of smaller websites.

Answer 2

Short answer: it depends

Long answer: The information you've given indicates there's already a content rich site that covers those topics. Since these topics are relatively well related in terms of IT Training, it seems to make sense that these would aggregate search value better under one umbrella domain, with each topic forming it's own silo/channel/theme. Then all of the back-links and internal-linking is contained within that domain, allowing strong distribution and containment of ranking value. The single site becomes synonymous with being the authority in that vertical and collecting all of that authority which can then be passed down and optimized for those target phrases.

Conversely, if the main site hasn't already performed well in search, or is in the early stages of development, then the hub/spoke approach could work well, were the main site is maintained, but each silo/channel/theme is broken out onto it's own domain, linking back to the hub and taking advantage of the current 'exact domain match' boost that some sites are seeing.

There's no single right answer to this, and there's also a lot of other variables in play. Read more: http://econsultancy.com/us/forums/best-practice/seo-optimization-single-site-vs-multiple-feeder-micro-sites

Answer 3

Put is all in one website. And get links from other (non his) related sites. If you break up your content you will break up your SEO. I say this from experience.