For years, there have been discussions within the SEO world about whether a large, comprehensive website is better than several small niche websites. Experience shows that both have worked well, based on smart, strategic execution. Likewise, both have failed due to poor execution. So which one is truly better?
There has not been a definitive answer from Google, however, as to which option is better from a pure search marketing standpoint. This week, John Mueller of Google expressed Google’s stance on this during a Hangout session:
From my point of view, that’s usually something we recommend against, just because it’s a lot easier for you to maintain things on one website, where things are kind of interconnected on one website… I’d recommend trying to focus on like a smaller number of websites and keeping everything together and kind of tying everything together in a reasonable way so that when users find your content, they can easily kind of move along that path to actually converting into whatever you want them to do, if you want them to buy something or sign up for something.
For businesses deciding between a single-site and multi-site strategy, it behooves you to first consider whether you can ensure each niche site offers rich, useful content. If you cannot, a single-site strategy will likely serve your business, SEO and customer needs best.
