To or Not to Consolidate SEO

If I were building a site, say selling sports paraphernalia, and imagine there are only two teams in the NFL, the 49ers and the Jets. They are totally opposite in location and league, but they are in the Super Bowl fighting to win. I want to sell all apparel, cups, stickers, whatever, that can have their logos and pictures on them.

After putting up a nice site, or before, if I decide to make a 2nd or 3rd site to drive traffic to that first site with tons of content on the Jets/49ers, etc., I need to know… is it better to create just one outside site with BOTH the 49ers and Jets info in that one, or make 2 separate web sites, one for each, and drive each one to the main sales site? Assume I will produce enough content for both even if I made 2 separate sites.

And if you think it is 2 sites, then are there advantages to making that 4, or 6, or 10? I know after a certain # it becomes negative, especially if all the domains are very new, but I need to know the limits of this method, if viable.

Thanks!

If you build two sites - interesting-info-about-A.com and interesting-info-about-B.com, then link them both to cool-merchandising-for-AandB.com, I don’t see any problem. Three different sites, with three different purposes, but all related so links are relevant. Fine.

If you build lots of sites about A, and lots of sites about B, purely for the purpose of getting links to the third site, then that’s going to look like spamming - because it is. You’ll also be shooting yourself in the foot, because all those sites are going to be competing with each other on the search engines.

Concentrate on building one really good, informative, authoritative site for each topic and forget about manipulating the search engines.

Thanks, makes sense… however, what I am thinking is, if i have a retail site that just sells those 2 teams stuff… i dont think 49er fans would appreciate seeing something like “Gang Green D Best in NFL” if the 49ers thought they had the best. So why not keep the retail site 100% neutral and then create as you said, 2 separate totally fanboy sites of which content the other team fans would NEVER want to read. Like Muslims would never want to read why Catholics are good… so this makes sense?

Yes. As I said, one site about each team and a separate site for merchandising is fine.