How many different websites do You have?

darkman

Ok I know Neil used to have a couple sites right? as per planet neil used to go to several different places I thought. My wife and I are having a hard time deciding what to do, I do several different types of photography and some may not appeal and may actually turn other clients off from working with me. IE fetish photography, boudoir photography and wedding. I was going to have a site larryclarkphotography.com with all my stuff on it, as a catch all, but then have a separate site for each style. I have weddingphotographyofsandiego.com and the wife says just point it to my main site. I said no, I want to take advantage of the keyword phrases for SEO search engine traffic. and I want it to be just wedding photography, not pointing to a site with many type of styles. Make sense?

what would you do? have several or one and why?
thanks
Larry

Neil vN

I have over 200 domain names registered.

The planetneil domain for example .. I had to make sure I get most miss-spellings of the domain as well:
planetniel.com
planetneal.com
planet-neil.com
etc.

But this really just goes to one website.

My main website used to consist of three domains interlinked via the single navigation bar. It looks like the same website, but you're actually moving between different domains on different servers.
At the moment, my main website just consists of 2 domains ..
neilvn.com
oneperfectmoment.com

I wanted to move everything over to neilvn.com .. but realized I would lose too much Google juice, so I kept the domain for my Latest Work blog.


As for using different domains for SEO purposes, all lifting each other up .. there are contradictory opinions about this ... different domains linking to each other .. vs ... one domain with more substance. I also suspect that Google knows when websites are add-on domains on the same server. Dunno.


I'm hovering on the idea of making neilvn.com my main website, even including commercial work. But the opinion is always that commercial clients would be put off by weddings. Probably so. But it becomes hard work maintaining disparate websites. For example, my Latest Work website was fallow for nearly a year, while I concentrated on FB.

Some rambling thoughts here .. which probably won't help you reach a conclusive decision.

Stephen

Larry,
All sites should have content that is unique and has substance to maximize Google search results. Never have two or more domains resolve to the same or very similar content. So, for example, don't point weddingphotographyofsandiego.com to your main web site. That will definitely hurt your ranking.

Linking sites to each other can hurt your Google search results, but as long as each site in the "network" has unique content, it hurts less, as Google's algorithm will not flag the linkage as spam sites.

darkman

I think I am misunderstood partially. I wasn't going to interlink the sites. What I feel is to keep certain contaent on certain sites instead of having one site with, fetish, wedding, boudoir, hollywood glamour, landscapes etc.

each topic would have it's own website, IE: weddings go on weddingphotographyofsandiego.com
boudoir goes on boudoirphotographyofsandiego.com
etc...

what I was saying about the SEO is the keywords of the domain name would be for the seo purposes as well as keeping the content separate.
I am sure that wedding prospect wouldn't want to see some of my more uhmmm intense fetish work,

Stephen

Larry, laying out sites like that is fine from a SEO perspective as far as I can tell in my experience working for large websites and learning from SEO consultants (I am not an SEO expert, however).

However, if your name appears on each of those sites, there is going to be a chance that Google will put all the sites in the search results if someone searches you by name. As you become more popular, people will start looking for you by name. If your fetish site is something you don't want people from your other sites to find, you will probably have to hide your name on that web site (i.e. use a pseudonym or use a contact web form) to prevent Google from indexing it based on your name.

Neil vN

Larry .. sorry, I did actually get your question, but started rambling.

cakencamera

I have never thought about buying more domains, I have two that serve their purpose, saying that if I bought more do I merely point them to my main websites?

Neil vN

Back to this topic of how many websites ... as i mentioned there are two main domains,
oneperfectmoment.com
neilvn.com

I have been busy (along with my web techie guy) to create different layers to my website, to have various sections (nearly) separate from each other.

For example, the Tangents pages:
http://neilvn.com/tangents

... are separate from the studio rental pages:
http://neilvn.com/studio

The menu for each set up pages contain the navigation to just a few pages.

In this way I am busy expanding ... and simplifying.
Now potential brides wouldn't be confused with a link to Tangents.
And someone who wants to rent my studio, won't be confused by other non-essential links.

Zenon

Two. Zenfolio for my serious stuff and photobucket for everything else.