Difficulties of maintaining multiple domains from a Search Engine Optimisation perspective

November 27, 2006

Many companies will register many different domains, one for each brand name which they may own, whilst all related to the same product. From a search engine perspective there is not an issue with registering all of your domains, and from the customers perspective this makes it simpler for them to find the products they want. In a ideal world these domains will not be interlinked, or have any content duplicated between them.

However most companies will have pages within the domain where duplicate information will be in place, for example a brief introduction to the company may be located on both domains; and things get even more complex when it comes to the same product being branded with a different brand name, the sites then become duplicates of each other. However we have wrote many blogs on duplicate content in the past.

This blog is about why a company with a single domain, will usually get better results than a company with multiple-domains. For the purposes of this blog we will not take into account the duplicate content issue as posted above, or the duplicate product information that could become a issue and we will focus on the other issues.

Search Engine Optimisation takes time - Many smaller companies see there website as a child of the business, and nurture the site. This attention to every small detail off the website makes for a stronger website, where less work is required to make it search engine friendly. However in a lot of cases the companies with multiple sites see the internet as a major way to provide income, which in this day and age it is: However they try and push there products through badly structured websites which search engine spiders find hard to navigate, and re-use code that should really be refactored before re-use to save on the implementation timescales for the website, simply reskining there other websites with a new domain.
Updates - Multiple websites require a lot more time to update, It is virtually impossible for a small company to come up with fresh content on the timescales that the search engine spiders view your site.
Flash Content - Many off the larger sites on the internet make extensive use off Macromedia Flash content. Whilst search engines are becoming more advanced, and are now able to perform some simple spidering of flash content, the time it takes them to perform the extra processing will almost certainly limit the number of pages the spiders can crawl. Plain standards compliant HTML, whilst not as visually exciting as Flash content is always better for the Spiders.

If you want your website to be successful in the Search Engine Results Pages, it is highly advisable to get a search engine optimisation specialist in to analyse your website and make the required changes.

Regards,
Nathan Hall
SEO Programmer