Multiple blogs

[djeyewater]

I was thinking of starting 2 blogs - an insect photography blog and a flower photography blog, both of which would embed photos from and have links back to my main photography website.

Hopefully the blogs would get a bit of traffic that might not otherwise find my main website, and refer some of that traffic onto my main website. But I would also like to maximise the SEO benefit for the main website that the blogs could have, and have a couple of questions about this:

1. Would the blogs have the same SEO benefit for the main website / images if they are created on blogger under the same account, or would it be better to create them using different accounts, or have one on blogger and one on wordpress.com?
   
2. If the blogs and main website are all added to the same google account for the purposes of adwords or webmaster tools, would this affect the SEO benefits at all?

And of course, any other info about doing this sort of thing would be appreciated.

Thanks

Dave

[Hyena]

1. Personally I'd install WP on your main domain (of your main site) and run the blogs there.

2. Adding your site to Adwords or Webmaster tools won't provide any direct SEO benefit but you'll be able to use the data from them for SEO related tasks.

[djeyewater]

1. Personally I'd install WP on your main domain (of your main site) and run the blogs there.

Could you explain why you'd do this? Surely external backlinks would be worth more than internal ones?

2. Adding your site to Adwords or Webmaster tools won't provide any direct SEO benefit but you'll be able to use the data from them for SEO related tasks.

I know it wouldn't have any benefit. I wanted to know if would have any detriment since it lets Google know you are running all the sites, and so they might dilute the 'strength' of interlinks between sites run by the same person?

[Hyena]

Could you explain why you'd do this? Surely external backlinks would be worth more than internal ones?

Well you're assuming those blogs will get traffic and then feed traffic and backlinks through to your main site. Why not cut out that variable and have this extra content on your main site (under the blogs). Surely any backlinks those blogs would attract would then be attracted by your main site instead?

I personally think it's better to concentrate your efforts into building the strength of a single domain (and site) rather than diversifying your content onto external separate domains just for the purpose of getting external backlinks.

I know it wouldn't have any benefit. I wanted to know if would have any detriment since it lets Google know you are running all the sites, and so they might dilute the 'strength' of interlinks between sites run by the same person?

I don't think there would be a detriment, I have all my separate sites registered with Google Analytics, webmaster tools etc and I haven't seen any negative impacts over the years.

I'd say if you're going to the trouble of hosting the sites on different IPs that sort of thing to try and disguise the shared ownership from Google, then maybe register them with Google under different names. Really up to you if you think that's worth it, personally I don't.

[djeyewater]

Thanks for the advice, much appreciated.

Dave

[annescoffield]

Would the blogs have the same SEO benefit for the main website / images if they are created on blogger under the same account, or would it be better to create them using different accounts, or have one on blogger and one on wordpress.com?

Account don't matter. If you want these blogs have SEO benefit, you have to do apply SEO in both of these blogs.-

If the blogs and main website are all added to the same google account for the purposes of adwords or webmaster tools, would this affect the SEO benefits at all?

Like I said, account doesn't matter. Actually it would be ok if your blogs are under of just 1 account. It would be easy to handle as long as each do have unique content/s.

[cruncher06]

Have you considered getting one or two twitter accounts. You could find other twitter users that are interested in your blog topics and post to your twitter feeds using TweetDeck which would allow you to post to both accounts simultaneously; From there you could create a fan page on FaceBook and use Yahoo Pipes possibly to create a custom notification so you don't miss anything.

I use all of these; let me know if you would like to know more. Or if any of this needs clarified.

[AlexDawson]

I would be tempted to have the blogs as two separate places, the reason for this isn't about SEO but about marketing, if you have two different niche subjects and showcase them individually you could actually get yourself two sources of traffic and perhaps get interest from both the flower and insect loving communities.