I was approached by someone with 30 web sites looking for a way to consolidate them for management purposes, but also not wanting to damage any ranking or positioning they have. All the sites have different content (but same niche) and similar layout (but different branding).

I was thinking you could use Wordpress MU and domain masking, but is this the optimal set up for SEO? I have no experience with that. Obviously we do not want to serve all of these site from a single IP or even multiple IPs in the same block.

So, how would you set up 30 web sites if you were going to have to manage them and perform SEO on them?

First ting to do is your website has a good content so that, visitors will have an interest to visit your website, and it is a good factor in SEO as well.

When you say,

consolidate them for management purposes

do you mean bring all of the content under one domain?

Hi,

Firstly, 30 websites is alot of websites. For ease of management, I think you should look for a CMS (search engine friendly one of course) to manage all of them. I have come across CMS's that can host multiple websites. Problem with this is, they will all have the same IP address.

I am not sure if having all 30 websites on the same server and IP address will be a problem if all the websites have unique content. Anyone has any comment on this?

do you mean bring all of the content under one domain?


No, we want to keep the domains the way they are.

I certainly ain't no SEO rockstar but I don't think it takes one to see the answer to this.



You have 30 sites.
You don't want to damage the rankings of any of them.
You don't want to serve them from the same IP.


What's left but to keep them as 30 different sites?

No, we want to keep the domains the way they are.

Is there a reason for that? (If it's similar content) generally sites will perform better if they're contained on the same domain.

People incorrectly assume that more sites = more traffic

The content isn't similar. It's unique for each segment of the niche. Here's an example.

The niche is auto racing.

Site 1 is about funny car drag racing.

Site 2 is about top fuel drag racing.

Site 3 is about NASCAR.

Site four is about offroad racing.

And so on...

Visitors to each site are only looking for the content on that one segment, they are not crossing over to the other segments. So in this instance, with this user behavior it makes sense to have the separate sites.

The management of all the sites is the main problem here. Some of the sites have not been updated in a year or longer due to the volume of work. We're trying to simplify the management portion while not impacting current rankings - ie, the one IP problem.

Ah, so it's not really how the sites are set up that's a problem, sounds more like internal procedures. I'd start out by defining things, who's responsible for what, work flow, time frames, etc. Whiteboarding should help. Then for day-to-day stuff a simple excel spreadsheet can make a pretty good site management tool (date, site, section, page, task, person responsible, approval, notes).

Visitors to each site are only looking for the content on that one segment, they are not crossing over to the other segments. So in this instance, with this user behavior it makes sense to have the separate sites.Personally I would say that those niches are very well related, and unless there is an explicit branding reason for seperating them you would be making life far easier for yourself keeping the content on one domain and using sub-folders of even subdomains to seperate it into sub-genres.

Not only would you not have to worry about issues like IP addresses and whois info from an interlinking point of view, but you would also benefit from the weight of content on a single domain amd by consolodating your inbound links you wouldn't be far from having an authority site.