![\"trash\"](\"https:\/\/paulgillin.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/01\/trash.png\" "\\"trash\\"")
As you can tell from the list to the right called \u00a0My Other Sites, I have a fairly busy online life.\u00a0 I maintain a half dozen websites myself and contribute to a few others.\u00a0 Until recently, I housed each of these sites in its own account at GoDaddy.com.\u00a0 This was expensive, but it’s the cost of doing business.<\/p>\n
A few months ago, a GoDaddy support representative thought he was being helpful by convincing me to consolidate all those accounts under one master account and reorganize my sites subdirectories. Then I would simply forward each domain to the appropriate subdirectory.\u00a0 The cost savings were compelling.<\/p>\n
I made those changes, although not without difficulty.\u00a0 At one point, I trashed an entire database and had to rebuild it from Google cache pages.\u00a0 But I eventually consolidated five sites into one account.<\/p>\n
Look Back in Horror<\/strong><\/p>\n Last week I decided to take a look at the search engine performance of all my domains using HubSpot<\/a>‘s excellent Website Grader<\/a> tool.\u00a0 I was stunned to find that the consolidated sites had plummeted in search effectiveness.\u00a0 While my two main blogs – this one and newspaperdeathwatch.com<\/a> — both scored better than 98% on Website Grader, the consolidated sites ranged from 65% down to a pathetic 7%.<\/p>\n I couldn’t find any explanation for this, so I consulted the smartest search expert I know: Mike Moran, author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc<\/a>.\u00a0 He confirmed my suspicions.<\/p>\n “Redirecting domains to subdomains saves money but, as you saw, it can sometimes hurt search rankings a great deal,” he wrote. “My suspicion is that search engines downgrade these sites because anyone working this hard to save money is more likely to have a low-quality site, and might even be a spammer.”<\/p>\n This logic baffled me until I thought it through a bit.\u00a0 Google constantly fights a war against spammers and link farmers who tried to game the search algorithm.\u00a0 One tactic they use is to buy up thousands of domains and point them to sites that are nothing but collections of keywords and links.\u00a0 It’s safe to assume that some of these scavengers try to save money by consolidating their sites in a single directory.\u00a0 Google’s strategy actually makes sense.\u00a0 Unfortunately, it can also penalize people whose motivations are sincere.<\/p>\n I’m now going through the tedious process of restoring all of my websites to their original accounts.\u00a0 Please excuse the occasional 404 error.\u00a0 And learn from my example: don’t try this at home!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As you can tell from the list to the right called \u00a0My Other Sites, I have a fairly busy online life.\u00a0 I maintain a half dozen websites myself and contribute to a few others.\u00a0 Until recently, I housed each of … Continue reading