Best SEO practice - Umbrella brand with several domains

[remkoallertz]

Hi, we have several blogs and comparison sites on specific topics. All the domains rank on top positions in very competitive niche markets. We think that we can get more profit out of the domains when we put them under an umbrella brand. Customers that visit domain A can then also find products easily on domain B.  We see this for example on health.com, with several brands in the top.

To maintain or improve our rankings i'm looking for specific information for the link structure. For example, is it better to have the 'about us'/rel=author on each domain, with contributors on that specific domain or is it better to have them all in the (umbrella) brand domain.

At the moment we have the structure like this:

domainA.com, domainA.com/blog, domainA.com/about-us  and  domainB.com, domainB.com/blog, domainB.com/about-us.

I think to maintain the rankings it is best to keep specific content (like blog/ about us) on the domain. So is it the best to just do side wide links with a logo (like health.com) and what about hosting? We work with wordpress, so all domains will be hosted on one ip? when we use the multiple site option of WP?

All information on this topic is more than welcome

[Paddy_Moogan]

Thanks for the question:

"To maintain or improve our rankings i'm looking for specific information for the link structure. For example, is it better to have the 'about us'/rel=author on each domain, with contributors on that specific domain or is it better to have them all in the (umbrella) brand domain."

I'd say that it comes down to how much you want to differentiate your current brands from each other. If you want to keep them quite distinct and each one has it's own team / writers / USPs etc, then you are best to have each domain have it's own sections.

"I think to maintain the rankings it is best to keep specific content (like blog/ about us) on the domain. So is it the best to just do side wide links with a logo (like health.com) and what about hosting? We work with wordpress, so all domains will be hosted on one ip? when we use the multiple site option of WP?"

In terms of cross-linking, I'd say that you should try to do this where relevant and as James has pointed out below, as long as you're not doing this in huge volumes, you should be fine and not trigger any problems with Google. The only time you may want to be careful is where your domains are competing for the same types of keywords. I would avoid cross-linking too much with exact match keywords as this could be seen as manipulate, I'd keep it on brand and to relevant pages.

If the domains you own are in the same niches, then you may hit problems of them competing against each other. I'm not sure if this is the case? If they are in the same niche, then Google certainly can look at things like IP address and footprints that links the sites together, it is hard to know to what extent this would harm you but Google certainly prefer to show diversity in search results rather than having multiple sites from the same company.

[James77]

I would if possible try and concentrate on a single brand/domain as opposed to multiple domain - on the assumption that an identical piece of content will rank higher on a single strong domain than it would on any of your less strong segmented domains.

With a single domain you also don't have the issue of worrying about how to cross market across domains (although as you point out many sites do so - Moz / OSE being one example) . Of course this also gets rid of the worry about whether google may see cross linking between multiple domains as a 'Link Network' - unlikely if it is just a few domians but if you are talking about 10's of different domains then this could well raise a flag in googles alogrithm.

It is still unclear as to how google treats multiple domains owned by the same companies, and on the same theme. Many websites have sub domains for their blogs and other sub-sections and the standard thought a few years ago was that you were better off moving those into folders. However, I think things have now changed such that if there are enough connecting signals it doesn't matter if its a sub domain or sub folder. When considering this, as a subdomain is technically a separate site, you would think that if similar connecting signals where to appear between 2 separate domains, then Google could (and probably should) treat them as they would sub-domains. However, whether there is some, all or no truth in this is likely to be a debate that will be speculation until Google confirms something along these lines.