The idea is that each of them would be a totally different site with a totally different product. But all under an umbrella of the same company. I kinda want to interconnect all the sites together. I was thinking I would create a kinda “free advertisement” for my sites this way. Like if a potential customer is looking for product A and gets to site A and then he sees the ad for site B with a product B and goes to a site B to buy product B etc.
And I have a few questions or dilemmas to solve.
Yeah, on one hand it’s cheaper and easier to manage a structure of a few sites together, but how to brand those 3 sites…To try to distinguish them one from another or to try to find a common denominator and to show clearly that all sites belong to the same master or the same source?
From a standpoint of visual branding…It’s not clear whether I should create a separate logos for instance or not etc. Like how much of a common branding should be in those site that reside on the same domain, but sell totally different things?
That kinda “cross-advertisement”…Wouldn’t it be a potential distraction for a potential client?
Wouldn’t it create a wrong impression in client’s mind that since you can’t be a master in a few areas all at once, then it’s probably not a worthy place, since the owner is kinda a “master of none”?
Well, there’s always a way to TOTALLY separate (disassociate) all 3 sites from each other. Like to just put all 3 on a totally different domains with a totally different contact infos etc.
It all depends on the business objective, I would suggest to 1 money site which you will use only white hat strategies when comes to online marketing like SEO.
The other 2 sites are satellite site which will give backlinks to your money site. You can use any blackhat strategy to rank this site high and drive traffic to your money site when people visit your satellite sites.
We do not advocate the use of any blackhat techniques in this forum. They are unethical, and in any case are likely to have an adverse effect as Google makes more strenuous efforts to counteract them.
I completely agree with this instead of making subdomains for each product. However this should only be the case if the product is interrelated to a niche. If they are completely different the creating different domains for each is the way to go.
“Note that if your site uses subdomains and you wish to have certain pages not crawled on a particular subdomain, you’ll have to create a separate robots.txt”.
Since every domain has one robots.txt, the fact you have to create another means it’s seeing that [sub]domain differently?
Google has publicly stated that subdomains are not transferred any authority from the original domain. This means that with each subdomain, you are basically starting over from an SEO perspective. Your best bet would be to have these pages as subpages of the main domain.
You could also develop new websites on new domains for each product (depending on how scaleable/unique each product is) and say “This is a Company A Product”. In this situation, your best cross referencing point would be to establish and maintain a review site for your industry. Your company will then appear to be the main sponsor, and if this is done right, this site could become one of the most credible in the industry from a review standpoint, making it one of the most valuable backlinks in your niche. Plus, if people come to your site to learn about a niche, they will feel like they are reading a third party review of your site (and probably be pleased with what they learn about your products). In order to make the most of this, it would be best to purchase domain privacy and set up the hosting on a new account (preferably dedicated).