We own a group of classifieds webs, where the main one is a horizontal (generalist) and the others are vertically specialized in some of the major categories.
They are built in a way that 90% of the content showed on the vertical ones is also shown on the main one but not indexable by Google to avoid penalization for duplicated content. The "duplicated" content is only indexable on the main one.
We get Google visiting us daily on each of these sites and have relatively good traffic and PR on all of them including tons of links between the sites.
We are currently evaluating the pros and cons of integrating the sites and just redirect the vertical sites to subdomains of the main one. There are a lot of pro's ranging from easier development, administration and maintenance, building a stronger brand, getting higher traffic rankings for advertising purposes and so forth.
On the other hand we still lack a good understanding about how this strategy might impact our current SEO position. Some areas we are unclear:
- We are going to miss all the linking. How will it impact our PR and consequently the positioning in search results?
- Google browsing attention. Instead of visiting us daily on all the sites and crawling x-time per each, it might just spend the x-time on one. Consequently the total content we get updated in a day may go down?
- Others?
Anyone wants to share thoughts on this?
Thanks
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