GMChost.com Webmaster Guide

If you run a Web site and own only a single domain name, you may be missing out on a great deal of potential traffic. Continuing changes with the search engines have been adding to the list of reasons for owning more than one domain name.

The most recent reason to setup multiple domains is the trend toward "theme-based" indexing. One way search engines are thought to be attempting to improve their search results is by looking for over-all themes to a Web site that match the user's search. This concept has been discussed in recent years, but evidence is growing that Web site themes will play an even greater role in how well your pages rank in the coming months or years. Therefore, you may want to take some steps now to be prepared for that shift. This could improve your rankings or keep them from falling in the future.

Since search engines differentiate Web sites by their domain name, it makes sense to group content that falls under a single theme or topic under the same domain name. That way the search engine is more likely to say "hey, this site is all about blue widgets. Therefore, I should rank it higher for blue widgets than for other sites that only briefly discuss that topic."

If you're a large organization like GM or IBM who offers dozens or hundreds of diverse products on your Web site, then the search engines may have a difficult time establishing an over-all theme. You then risk losing those "bonus points" for having a theme that matches your keywords. Even if you're a small business selling only a handful of products or services, it may benefit you to organize each product/service into its own domain name. Once you organize your content into separate domains, you could of course have a primary domain that discussed all your product offerings and linked to each site as needed. You could keep a consistent look and menu structure across all the domains so that the end user would not notice or care how the content is physically organized.

The ways in which a search engine can determine a theme can vary. Some people discuss elaborate theories of how "themes and vectors" could be computed but when it comes down to it, we really don't know yet how they will be computed. Most of the evidence I've seen so far is that the search engines do not do a great deal in regard to detecting Web site themes, at least not yet.

In general though, search engines are expected to look for similar keywords and synonyms to those keywords not only on your primary page being considered for a top ranking, but also on other pages on your Web site. Therefore, if you sold baseball cards, it is better if the majority of the pages on that Web site also talked about or mentioned baseball cards. This would only reinforce the search engine's perception that your site is a good fit for searches relating to that topic. Does this mean that the content of the main page you are optimizing does not matter? Far from it. You must still make sure that the content of each individual page is optimized well.

In addition to looking at your own Web site, the search engines could look at the content of sites that link to you. If many sites related to baseball link to your baseball cards site, then that reinforces your theme and could improve your rankings. Some people believe that links from sites that do not relate to your theme could hurt your rankings. However, I believe that's unrealistic since it would penalize too many popular, high quality sites that command links from a wide-array of business types.

In reality, no major search engines will develop a "perfect" theme based ranking system that implements all the cool theories available to them. They will all find it impractical to factor in the FULL content of all the other pages on your site along with all the pages that link to your site to establish a perfect theme. They must continue to return results to your search within a couple seconds. Since they must do this for thousands of users searching against hundreds of millions of Web pages, what they can do in theory and what they actually do in reality will always be two separate things.

The most prevalent way search engines will establish themes is by analyzing links. If a link to a given page includes the term "baseball cards" in the link text, the search engine can safely assume that the Web site, or at least the page being linked to applies to baseball cards. Google is one engine that is known to do this already. Therefore, achieving more links to your Web site is desirable. However, it's far more beneficial if those links include keywords important to your Web site.

Tip: If you have an affiliate program, make sure that any example links you provide to your affiliates include keywords in the text that links to your site. Encourage them whenever possible to use your important keywords in their links to your site.

Evidence is also growing that links within your Web site can influence your ranking when they include important keywords. Therefore, I'd suggest that you cross link your pages with links that include your important keywords. When the search engine spiders from your home page to your doorway page, it will more likely rank you higher if that link includes your targeted keyword or keyword phrase.

Therefore, try to have links from multiple pages to a single doorway page that all include similar keywords. If you ran a baseball card site, you could repeat a menu option with the phrase "Baseball Card History" on every page. If you had twenty pages on your site, that would be twenty pages that all pointed to the same page with the phrase baseball cards in the linking text. The search engine would then know that the theme of the page is definitely related to baseball cards.

Please recognize that if your Web site uses graphical images for your menu, then you may not have any hyperlink text for the search engine to see. The search engine will not know that the graphic says "Baseball Card History" unless it is a regular text link. One way to overcome that is to repeat your menu items in text form at the top, bottom, or side columns of your page.

It's also a good bet that the search engines realize that many links on the Web are in graphical form. Therefore, to get around the problem, they may look to the image's ALT tag for a description of what that link is all about. Therefore, even if a search engine is thought to ignore ALT tags for the ranking of THAT page, it's logical that they could use them to learn about the content of other pages when the image is also part of a hyperlink. Currently I have no strong evidence that the search engines factor in the ALT tag in this way, but it doesn’t hurt to include the keywords.

For those of you who are new to HTML, all this talk of ALT tags and link text may be a bit confusing. To help you out, here's some links from the help pages of our WebPosition Page Critic that explains ALT tags and Link text.

ALT tag:

http://www.webpositiongold.com/critichelp/contents/ALT.htm

Link Text:

http://www.webpositiongold.com/critichelp/contents/LinkText.htm

Books on learning HTML:

http://www.webposition.com/resources.htm#books

As the search engines produce better "maps" of the Web, there's a good chance that they could penalize or ignore pages that have only outgoing links and no incoming links. I've heard claims that this has happened already in some cases. Therefore, I continue to recommend you have links to your doorway pages whenever possible, even if they are from the same domain name. Ideally these should be visible links. For a discussion of the pros and cons of hidden links see:

http://www.webposition.com/hiddenlinks.htm

Other benefits of organizing your site into multiple domains:

1. The inter-linking between those domains will increase your link popularity. For more information on link popularity see:

http://www.webposition.com/mp-0500.htm

2. Each domain can have its own home page. Some search engines tend to rank home pages higher than other pages, all other things being equal.

3. Each domain can include different keywords in the domain name. Evidence suggests that some engines rank pages higher when the keyword is included in the domain name.

You should exercise caution before dividing a site into multiple domains. Things to keep in mind:

1. Do not duplicate pages on the same domain or across multiple domains. Some of the search engines look for duplicate pages and could ban your domain if you trip too many red flags. Therefore, keep the content of each domain unique.

2. Although the link popularity for your domains may be more focused and "themed," you could have fewer external links to each domain than you would if you put everything under one domain and encouraged all links to go to the same place. However, many search engine consultants are claiming the engines will focus more on the quality of your links than the quantity. I think that quality is a factor, but so is quantity.

3. Be careful to not have too little content on each domain. Search engines could spider a site and conclude that there are too few pages to be of value to people, thereby penalizing pages on that entire domain. Try to have at least 15 to 20 pages on a domain.

So what is my conclusion? If you have a large amount of content covering an array of topics, you might be well served to move the content to separate domains, or at least think in those terms as you add new content to the site. If you moved any pages to another domain and currently have some good rankings with those pages, you'd need to put redirect tags on your existing domain so that the search engines are redirected to the new location. Most engines when they revisit the page will ignore the page with the redirection tag and only index the page it directs to. Otherwise, if you have good rankings now, you could shoot yourself in the foot by moving those pages. Ask your hosting service for the method they recommend for redirecting pages.

If you don't have a large amount of content to work with or enjoy great rankings already, then follow simpler strategies to establish themes without physically breaking the site into multiple domains. Most importantly, do a lot of cross-linking between your Web pages while using the keywords in the link text and ALT text. This is something everyone can do and it will make it easier for the search engines to find your other pages. It's also the method that the search engines will most likely employ to establish "themes." We already know Google and other engines give heavy consideration to the links from one site to another, and there's some evidence that they give weight to links within the same domain.

For more information on hosting multiple domains, see last January's article at:

http://www.webposition.com/mp-0100.htm#THREE

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