Some people believe that more websites, equal to more search engine visibility. But this is not true, in fact most of the times, just the opposite of it holds true. It’s fine to have multiple websites when you are dealing with different businesses that are to a great extent mutually exclusive. But if for the same business you have multiple sites that’s only going to mess things up for your revenues. As you know, the Monks never make empty claims, we have firm reasons to back our point this time too!
Here is a list of reasons why we recommend having a single website for a business:
Consumes more time, cost and effort
Maintaining multiple websites is multiplying costs and efforts. As websites need regular updating, the content and design efforts increase along with the number of websites. A single website itself entails so many costs as anything that is new today is old tomorrow, you need to keep putting new content, revamping codes and design. To top that most people have to outsource website development and website overhaul projects as it’s not their domain, which means costs increase sizably. In such a scenario if you have multiple websites your costs are bound to sky-rocket.
Deteriorates search engine ranking
A very important tool for getting ranked high on search engines is list building. List building is a time consuming process but higher the number of links that point to your site, higher would be your sites ranking. If you go around list building for all your sites you’d again end up with half-baked results for all the sites. Instead you can pool your energies and do the task for a single site, and see its rankings scale up with time.
Also having updated content on your site is very important for good search engine ranking; most people do this by posting blogs on a regular basis. But this isn’t very practice when it comes to multiple websites, as generating keyword rich blogs for multiple websites can be a humongous, time and cost consuming task. And not doing this task for your websites can have ill effects on their rankings. So you are better off concentrating on one website and generating quality content for it, rather than putting efforts into multiple websites and generating poor content for all of them.
Diverts traffic
Having multiple websites would mean that they’d compete for attention on search engines, which would lead to decreased traffic on all of them due to traffic diversion from one site to another. Unless and until you offer distinct services under each website do not opt for multiple websites, as they’d be placed as competitors on search engines.
Leads to content duplicity
In a rush to create content many people duplicate content form one of their sites to another. This just makes them look bad in front of search engines as well as visitors. Search engines hate duplicity and punish websites for it by ranking them low. Even if you have distinct content, the sites would have almost similar services, same business location and contact numbers, search engines would consider these sites as duplicates, and yes of course they’d rank the sites low penalizing them for duplicity. So either you create unique, quality content for each website making sure that you have different service offerings and contact numbers to support each website. Or alternately you could have just one website to reduce your worries and to up your search engine ranking.
Causes confusion and mistrust
When people type in a specific keyword and all your sites appear (as your websites offer similar services they’ll obviously have similar keywords too!) they might explore all these sites, and all your sites would display similar services, contents, etc. This would lead to confusion and mistrust among visitors as they won’t be sure if all these sites belong to the same company. The visitors will be confused as to who they are really dealing with, which will definitely not help you with building lasting business relations with them.
So now what’s the solution?
Focus on having just one great website, rather than having multiple lousy ones. Keep that one website updated, fresh and keyword rich. So now you thinking, “What do I do with all those URLs I bought huh?” worry not, Monks have a solution to this one too! Put a 301 redirect code on them in a way that they redirect to your main website. Search engines consider websites with this code as permanently moved sites, so you never lose any traffic that is generated through these URLs, as they redirect to your main site.
Still wish to opt for multiple sites? Then you could probably make sure that you do not cause any of the above errors and link them all with one another. This will make visitors aware they belong to the same company. And yes! We can’t repeat this enough, do this only if you are offering distinct services on all your sites.
What are your views? Should the same business have multiple sites? Share your take by commenting in the section below.
Webby Monks
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