Multiple Websites - High Rank or Penalty

There are website owners who think having multiple sites and domains will take them to a higher website visibility, conversion and brand image. But will it? It is true that having multiple sites will be useful to a wide range of customers – especially if you have an international business - however, it may trigger penalties from the search engines. It may cause problems with the search engines.

There are cases where multiple sites or domains are actually needed. But these sites must have their own unique contents and business purposes to justify their existence. There are acceptable reasons for owning multiple sites. The director of the Search at WebSourced’s KeywordRanking.com pointed out three legitimate reasons why business owners turn to having multiple sites or domains:

Legitimate Reasons for Multiple Sites

• Brand Recognition with sub domains;
• Product Branding; and
• Regional Marketing.

These may justify having multiple sites. But altogether, having a number of domains that point to a single site may set off penalties from the search engines.

Issues/Problems With Multiple Sites

Having multiples sites can generate a lot of issues and problems with the search engines. Some of the most common are as follow:

• Duplicate Content



Having several sites pointing to a particular site may cause duplicate content issues. There are cases when some of the sites are already useless, they just carry relevant keywords that will point out to the main site. In this case, search engines will just keep the main domain (or probably the best site) and get rid of all the other insignificant ones.

• Short Term Results



Having multiple sites with different names and even different hosting companies may give you a considerable result. But don’t hold your hopes too high – most likely it will be a short term result that will still trigger a red flag from the search engines.

• Static and Dynamic Site



Some companies use a dynamic and static site. These sites will have different IP addresses; however, both of them will have the same content. This will most likely cause penalty from the search engines as well.

These issues and problems may actually be causing search engine penalties. At times, search engines get rid of the other sites and leave the only significant one. For the case of the dynamic and static sites, search engines utilize the Robots Exclusion Protocol that doesn’t crawl on the dynamic site. Multiple sites and domains receive penalty to avoid ranking falsely on the search engines.

Multiple sites are used for the purpose of gaining higher visibility on the search engines; however, if not used accordingly, it results to penalties. Find out the legitimate way of increasing site’s visibility, see our SEO Services or contact our SEO Specialists.