The Venture Skills Blog

We got a question from a concerned reader…

I have a question for you is it better to develop 1 large site or several smaller ones?
I’m preparing to develop a new ecommerce site with nearly 500 products should I create several sites?

There are pro’s and cons to both routes so lets look at them individually…

Mini Site

I’m a fan of the mini site we just launched one this morning, no press release no major bang, couple of forum links, and a link in a post to someone question I doubt it will see much traffic. However in the long run it will provide immense amount of value as part of network for a long term project.

The site shippingcharges.co.uk is one of 5 E-Commerce sites that we are developing, each site is small and caters for a specific niche, eventually the sites will all filter to one main site selling to that niche.
By splitting the site up we create much more focused sites to attract in users each site has the advantage of.

• It’s own Page/site strength
• Reduced supplemental results risk
• More nets more traffic

Mini sites are really useful if part of a larger network, able to pass its link strength to a new site or particular page helping it in the SERPs, just be careful not to rely on this technique as such sites tend to suffer from inflated strength, their results are because of interlinking within the network rather then outside links. When developing a mini site network seek out external links to each site and avoid to much reciprocal linking within your network.

I’m not alone in thinking mini sites are great and to help you on your way here are a few resources.

• Mini sites don’t always make mini money
• Mini Sites Revisited
• Building a Niche Part 1, Part 2

Full sites

Not everyone will agree that mini sites are the way forward and they are certainly not suitable in all cases. Mini sites are exactly that sites designed to have a small function they may grow but they were conceived as small sites. Many people fall into the trap of half developing a site, leaving it lacking in content and moving on this is not building mini sites this is wasting your time.

Full sites have advantages including:

• More long tail keyword searches
• More pages
• Less work
• Cheaper to develop

The larger the site the more words, keywords and therefore keyword pairs there are, which in turn leads to a general increase in organic traffic. Sure a mini site may rank well for a good keyword pair, but a large site should/could rank well for 100s of pairs and a general rule as a site grows so does its organic traffic.
Larger sites are cheaper to develop, 1 script, 1 theme etc and ultimately one of the hardest part of mini site development is finding content to fill such sites in addition to contents for your main site.

In the past one of the problems with larger sites was that pages were caught in the supplemental results where they would remain. A mixture of new techniques and changes to the algorithms seems to have made this far less of an issue and many speculate that the supplemental index may be removed before to long.

So Mini Site or Large Site?

Well I personally love the mini site technique, creating 3 or 4 satellite sites to your main site and host content or tools on them these in turn deep link into the main site helping to drive users to the content. But it does take time, effort and some cash to develop a site of any size and mini sites do require effort. If you have an existing site doing well then seriously consider a mini site but if this is your first major project concentrate on the main site.

What about all Mini sites

Plenty of people make money through just through mini sites alone but this sort of technique requires you to be a jack of many trades developing sites in multiple niches.

Do you have a question for us let us know and maybe we can answer!

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