Setup of three major retail sites.. need advice.

[kavaliauskas]

I recently have taken a new position responsible for three large national retail sites which are all owned by one parent organization.  Through a series of acquisitions, these three major brands have been brought under one umbrella and a brand consolidation is likely not to happen within the next 2-4 years.  I have a number of questions I’m hoping to get some feedback on, but first a little more background is necessary.

A year ago (before my time) the three sites were over-hauled, but were designed to use one common custom CMS and all of the navigation and nearly all the content is the same (with some exceptions, such as tags, url, etc.).  All of the brands have identical products and services; however, each one services a different demographic in the US.  The design was intended for ease of management, but is terrible for seo.  Additionally, without the geographic reference, they all compete for the same keywords.  They have now begun a very large ecommerce project utilizing an ATG platform.  The initial direction is to use one platform for all three brands, but keep them on separate domains and with the use of basic switching, replace nominal content such as logos and references of the brands for each of the domains.    I’m concerned with this approach and would like to hear your feedback..

When optimizing a page for one keyword set, are they likely to be filtered due to dup content?  The argument that management has is that all three current sites rank very well for one keyword on all three sites.  They feel it won’t be an issue due to this.

One option, that is currently still available, is to tri-band one ecommerce site, but it would have to be on an entirely new domain.  The other three domains are very well established and are PR6s.  Management, and even I, is afraid to abandon these other domains, but having a single domain would allow us to have unique content and really leverage all efforts to one domain. Thoughts?

Any knowledge or thoughts what kind of impact having three domains on one ATG platform will be?

Thanks much! John

If you feel it will help, please message me and I can share the urls... Also, how would you handle a company blog in this case?

[znotes]

Hmm, not sure as i'm kind of new to seo, but my instinct would be to pick the one w the top keyword ranking(s) and redirect all traffic from the other two (if that's possible). You'd lose your PR w a new domain and keeping it as is, you are surely getting hit by Dup Content.

Also, as far as mgmt's argument, if all 3 sites rank high for one keyword, why not just consolidate all traffic into one place? Also, they should be looking at more than 1 keyword i would think..

Lastly, you might want to look at a site like going.com or timeout.com to see how they manage pages in different cities yet keep it all under one domain.

Hope this was helpful.

-Zack

[SWKurt]

I assume if you are talking major retail, then there is quite a bit of offline marketing as well that points to the domains in question and unifying under one roof would be difficult from that standpoint as well.

I have managed a similar situation on two separate occasions as an e-commerce manager. In the most recent situation, we had overlapping product sets in two large websites, with the same backend, and ranked for both on certain terms.  From an SEO perspective, we found the biggest headache not to be overlapping product set but dealing with the shortcomings of the platform itself and how it hurt both sites.

With firmly established individual site and strong PR for both, you are in good shape. I think the bigger concern - from my experience - is in making sure you get the platform configured to retain the strength already in place and be in a position to grow it.