Today's question comes from Josh K and Dallas.
Josh asks, I manage three websites that sell the same products across three domains.
Each site has a different selling approach, price structure, target audience, et cetera.
Does Google see this as Spammy or Black Hat?
Boy, this is one of those occasions when I really kind of wish I could ask some follow up questions.
On one hand, if the domains are radically different, layout, different selling approach, different structure, like essentially completely different and especially the fact that you said it's only three domains that might not be so bad.
Clearly, if it were 300 domains or 3000 domains, you can quickly get to a fairly large number of domains that can be crowding up the search results and creating a bad user experience. By the time you get to a relatively medium sized number of sites.
The thing that was interesting about the question is you said it's the same products as in identical.
So it's a little weird if you're selling identical products across three domains.
If you were selling like men sweaters on one and women sweaters on another and shoes on a third.
I've said before, there's no real problem with having different domains for each product and a small number of domains.
Two, three, four for very normally separable reasons can make perfect sense.
But it is a little strange to sell the same products.
So if they're really identical, that starts to look a little bit strange.
And especially if you start to get more than three domains,
I would be a lot more interested to hear more about what products it is that you're selling.
So those are some of the criteria that we would look at.
Definitely.
I found that if you have one domain, you've got the time to build it up to build the reputation for that domain.
In my experience, when someone has 50 or 100 domains, they tend not to put as much work as much love into each individual domain, and whether they intend to or not.
That tends to show after a while, people have the temptation to auto generate content, or they just try to syndicate a bunch of feeds and then you land on one domain versus another domain, and it really looks incredibly cookie cutter comparing the two domains, and that's when users start to complain.
So those are a few of the things to consider whenever you're thinking about going from just one domain to whether to go to multiple domains or not.