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The original reason for the question was I have a fairly good thing going with my current domain but a keyword specific domain became available.   So I really was wondering if it made sense to build that out (which I decided to do).

Imagine you have Miriamstuff.com  and it's doing well raking 15th for "Blue Whirly Widgets"  However you can't seem to break to the top.  A few of your pages do well "Blue Whirly Widgets with handles" etc.  Then one day you have an opportunity to buy BlueWhirlyWidgets.com... do you take it?

In my example it's real estate specific.  So the domain was a larger city option outside our metro area.

Nice, so you feel that the local "NAP" effect is strong enough to erode any SEO gains by having a niche.  Thanks for sharing.

I do have a physical office.   My current set up has a main hub site of domain.com and pages with cities on them and then "neighborhoods" further in.

I would normally never opt for a niche site but I've never had the luxury of an exact keyword match before.  The city itself is large enough (enough content) to stand on it's own - so it's just the effort it would take to get it up on it's own.

I think I answered my own question.  In instances like this if I have the resources then it's worth it only if the city is large enough.   If I was in Texas for example and had Texashomes.com - wouldn't it make sense to have Austinhomes and dallashomes as well and build those out?

Thanks for your response!

I have a main site for real estate that works fairly well.  There's city pages within the site.   I have been able to get the specific citynamehomesforsale.com domain and now I'm back to the old question of whether to build out a high traffic niche site to capitalize on the exact keyword match or should I just link it to the directory (domain.com/city)

Thanks!

I'd personally say yes, b/c other SEO geeks could look that up and tell immediately.  In practice, I see people do this and it works.  The key - thinking as if some real human looks at these sites - is that the content be unique.   If you are just creating 3 sites targeting the same keywords but are unique in their own way, then what's wrong with that?  Nothing.  If I was an attorney then I'd seriously have issues, but I don't think it matters that much if you aren't black hatting your link building.

That's easy then.  Of course.  Technically you see this on every search result... period.  Every site there is somehow ranking for the same keywords.  Real estate you see this all the time.  Do a search for [Your City] Real Estate or "Homes" and you'll see 5 to 10 results that have nearly the same content on their landing page.

I've used this strategy with real estate in particular.  What I did was create a "main" page that was where all my branded and best content went.  The other two sites were basically targeting the same search results and keywords but more emphasis was given to the niche or phrase.   The black hat way might just be create 3 sites and spin all the content or you could do the following.

For example

Let's say you want to do Atlanta Pest Control with 3 sites

I might have AtlantaPestControl.com be my branded/main.  Then my 2 other sites be Pest Control in Atlanta, Pest Control Services in Atlanta, Atlanta Best Pest Control or some variation. So you could easily do this with 5 words.

So for your example I would emphasis "2 of the 5" on each site.  This will keep the content focused on being fresh and not just re-spun.

If the companies you are working for are as big as you say then link your brand for two reasons:

1.  Most importantly - if your clients catch on to what you are doing they might view it as ethical, especially if they hire their own SEO person who is a purist.

2. If you're getting thousands of links for the same word over and over and over it could be over optimization...

My suggestion was to link the whole sentence as it accomplishes all your intended goals.

Alternatively, If you want to go this route, set up some sort of spinner.  Link Live Chat, then your brand instead or maybe the whole thing so that across all domains you get different links altogether.

For me it depends on the design.  The search engine robot gobbles text or code if you will in order.  So if there's no other content in the way and it's a page full of links then either one will do.  The first link gets the most juice but they all get divided by the number of links.  So while it may be a good idea to do a site map of sorts it's not necessarily boosting your site as much as it is helping to map it.  Since you didn't say it was a sitemap directly, then I'd say design it for google & people.

Since there's no content, I don't really think it matters.