SEO Means Staying with the Mothership

More business presence online is better, right?

That depends… on how and where you locate that presence.

Case in point: I was chatting with the marketing manager of a national equipment distributor; his company recently spun off five divisions specializing in various products and services.

The problem: They launched five new websites, one for each division. That meant a dedicated new domain name (URL) for each.

Don’t split the focus (or dilute the Google juice)

Oops.. this company just made getting found online much more difficult!

Their “mothership” website - the original one that used to hold all their products and services - is 10 years old. Sweet. Google loves older sites, giving them more authority, and therefore higher page rankings, than newer sites.

In fact, brand-new sites are the worst off. Google puts them into “the sandbox” where you sit and wait for enough months to pass until you’re deemed by Google as not a fly-by-night or spammy site. Then you may, slowly, start to move up in the search result pages.

Staying with the mothership site, all the content of the 5 new divisions would have piggybacked on the “Google juice” (higher page rankings) that the mothership has accrued over the past decade.

The bad news

So what all this means is that this national company just:

• Downsized their mothership site by removing a lot of content to go into the new sites (Google loves content addition, not depletion!) and thereby hurting the mothership’s rankings.
• Possibly broke links that other sites had used to point to content that used to reside on the mothership.
• Put all this content into newbie sites that won’t get found online by anyone for quite a while to come
• Made all efforts in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) less likely to succeed.
• Spent likely tens of thousands of dollars on designing 5 new websites.

It is this last point, I believe, that kept me from getting further with the national marketing manager after our first, very enthusiastic meeting.

At that meeting, I didn’t drop the bad news that his 5 new sites were a mistake; I told him in a sales call soon after.

Reality check: No one wants to tell one’s boss that they just spent thousands of dollars on Internet marketing that just isn’t going to work and, in fact, has to be dismantled as soon as possible.

Oh, and this large company also has not put in place any SEO to optimize the mothership - nor the new spinoff sites. I may still hear from them… as their web traffic and lead generation drop off.