How to treat a website with several different types of subject matter
-
I know it’s hekpful, when attempting to rank for a various cluster of keywords, to have a site that is primarily about that subject matter.
For instance, it would be very difficult to rank for keywords pertaining to window treatments, roof repair, lawn mowing, interior decorating, and vegan recipes.
I have a client who owns a multi specialty center that does plastic surgery, dermatology, welllness, ophthalmology, skin and laser treatments, and more.
I feel like the solution would be to make each verticals a subdomain, and treat each as its own website, for all intents and purposes, using WordPress multisite to manage it.
So, plastic-surgery.website.com, dermatology.website.com, etc., and have website.com act as the landing page for the center, linking out to the various practice areas.
what are your thoughts? Thanks so much in advance!
-
Again, I tend to agree. But when mapping it out on a whiteboard, and showing how the subdomains would link to one another, for cross selling purposes, it seems so elegant and clean.
his is one of those instances where my heart says yes but my reason, according to the evidence, says no.
-
If you attack with a collection of microsites, you lose the domain authority of a large website with overwhelming linkstrength. It is like attacking a battleship with a fleet of rowboats - none of them have enough strength to do much damage.
Also, there is a marketing advantage of the large diverse site. Cross-selling. Some plastic surgery patients might need dermatology services and they will see from the website that the single business offers both.
The large website will pull in more links, more domain searches, more brand mentions, and more of many other things that will build brand recognition and search engine strength.
-
thank you for the response.
Im inclined to agree, but it seems as one area improves another struggles. As though google is trying to determine what body of work it should categorize the site as.
Isnt this why microsites tend to be a good strategy? Because you can sort of comfort google by essentially saying, “don’t worry. This is a site about x and x alone, so sending users there is safer because there’s no chance they’ll navigate to content unrelated to their initial query.”
-
This topic requires books to explain. But with limited time at this season of the year, here is a quick stab....
Do not fear having a website with multiple topics. The strength of one topic can actually help power the rankings of all other topics as it builds domain authority.
Google has a patents on assessing a "body of work" which might be a folder on your website egol.com/dentistry/ or a subdomain on a website dentristry.egol.com.
Current SEO best practice is to prefer folders over subdomains because google currently seems to treat subdomains more like separate websites rather than a portion of a large website.
So, don't hesitate to build the multi-topic website but separate them clearly in to /folders/.
Always keep in mind that one folder full of /crap/ can damage the rankings of the entire website.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can anyone please explain the real difference between backlinks, 301 links, and redirect links?which one is better to rank a website? i am looking for the help for one of my website
Can anyone please explain the real difference between backlinks, 301 links, and redirect links? which one is better to rank a website? I am looking for help for one of my website vacuum cleaners
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hshajjajsjsj3880 -
Website removed from Bing and Yahoo
Hello, Our website howtoremove.guide was recently removed from the Bing and Yahoo index. The first thing we did was contact Bing Webmaster support to ask what the issue was since we did not get any notifications or messages in our webmaster dashboard. The email that we got back said “I have escalated the issue to our engineers and will get back to you once I receive an update.” Since then, we haven't received any word back from them, but we did not find any technical problems and we strongly believe we were manually penalized. We've never had issues with a search engine before, so we are at a loss what to do. Could you please give us advice as to what technical issue our website might have or what could incur a deindex penalty in our case? We want to do everything that is possible to get back into Bing and Yahoo search results ASAP. The website has primarily affiliate content, so we are doing anything we can to clean everything up, but any recommendations will be incredibly useful to us. We are also open to contacting an expert on this, but we have no idea where to look.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThreatAnalyzer0 -
Any Tips for Reviving Old Websites?
Hi, I have a series of websites that have been offline for seven years. Do you guys have any tips that might help restore them to their former SERPs glory? Nothing about the sites themselves has changes since they went offline. Same domains, same content, and only a different server. What has changed is the SERPs landscape. I've noticed competitive terms that these sites used to rank on the first page for with far more results now. I have also noticed some terms result in what seems like a thesaurus similar language results from traditionally more authoritative websites instead of the exact phrase searched for. This concerns me because I could see a less relevant page outranking me just because it is on a .gov domain with similar vocabulary even though the result is not what people searching for the term are most likely searching for. The sites have also lost numerous backlinks but still have some really good ones.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CopBlaster.com1 -
Why my website disappears for the keywords ranked, then reappears and so on?
Hello to everyone. In the last 2 weeks my website emorroidi.imieirimedinaturali.it has a strange behavior in SERP: it disappears for the keywords ranked and then reappears, and so on. Here's the chronicle of the last days: 12/6: message in GWT: Improvement of the visibility of the website in search. 12/6 the website disappears for all the keywords ranked 16/6 the website reappears for all the keywords ranked with some keywords higher in ranking 18/6 the website disappears for all the keywords ranked 22/6 the website reappears for all the keywords ranked 24/6 the website disappears for all the keywords ranked... I can't explain this situation. Could it be a penalty? What Kind? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emarketer0 -
Do Page Views Matter? (ranking factor?)
Hi, I actually asked it a year and a half ago (with a slight variation) but didn't get any real response and things do change over time. On my eCommerce website I have the main category pages with client side filtering and sorting. As a result, the number of page views is lower than can be expected. Do you think having more page views is still a ranking factor? and if so is it more important than user experience? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet1 -
Website not being indexed after relocation
I have a scenario where a 'draft' website was built using Google Sites, and published using a Google Sites sub domain. Consequently, the 'same' website was rebuilt and published on its own domain. So effectively there were two sites, both more or less identical, with identical content. The first website was thoroughly indexed by Google. The second website has not been indexed at all - I am assuming for the obvious reasons ie. that Google is viewing it as an obvious rip-off of the first site / duplicate content etc. I was reluctant to take down the first website until I had found an effective way to resolve this issue long-term => ensuring that in future Google would index the second 'proper' site. A permanent 301 redirect was put forward as a solution - however, believe it or not, the Google Sites platform has no facility for implementing this. For lack of an alternative solution I have gone ahead and taken down the first site. I understand that this may take some time to drop out of Google's index, however, and I am merely hoping that eventually the second site will be picked up in the index. I would sincerely appreciate an advice or recommendations on the best course of action - if any! - I can take from here. Many thanks! Matt.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | collectedrunning0 -
Recover rankings after having a website temporally unavailable
Hello i have this website www.productosalpormayor.com and because i forgot to renew the domain it was 15 days unavailable ... it was ranking pretty well i had 4000 a month from google , but right now i have 0 ... the keywords that used to be on the first places are very far away or dont rank anymore... Is there something i can do now.?.. I need this website back to ranking because i am about to launch new products on the website. Thanks a lot, David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conexion330 -
Does having several long title tags hurt you?
Our title tags are dynamically generated, and some have over 140 characters. Does having a large quantity of URLS with an excessive number of characters hurt you in any way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0