Disadvantages of Running Multiple Blogs

PureBlogging ran a post by web designer Steven Snell on the subject of the advantages of running multiple blogs. In it, Snell offered what he sees as the top ten benefits. These included the chance to improve total income, increase networking opportunities, apply experience from one site to another, expand your total audience etc etc. All excellent ideas, certainly.

However, there are a couple of pitfalls for the unwary in terms of search engine optimization. The main one is that Google (and some other search engines) don’t like webmasters with multiple sites. Back in the depths of SEO time, the big G deemed that gateway and other blackhat SEO strategies did not fit within its terms and conditions and so de-ranked domains that had lots of inbounds from other domains hosted on the same servers. Therein lies the clue. Don’t use the same server to host your different sites.

Moreover, Google has access to Whois data for your site, so if you set up a new domain, do not use identical registration details across different sites. It’s not cheating, it’s just avoiding unjust penalties.

The second trap would be if you were tempted to duplicate content across your different sites. It is your copyright, after all, so why shouldn’t you? Well see the previous couple of paragraphs for one reason, but also think about the fact that duplicate content between unrelated sites is not a good thing in terms of your positioning in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and multiply that by ten-fold and you will get some idea how hazardous it could be.

Finally, if you have lots of cross links between your sites even if they are on different servers, with different registration details, you could also fall foul of the Google algo because it can easily spot linkswaps, even if the link swaps are three-way it would only take one inadvertent two-way link to tie all three sites together and de-rank them on the basis of blackhat practices.

So, yes, there are many advantages to having more than one site, and maybe for some the above will not apply, I doubt Discovery, CNN, Nature, BBC, and others get penalized, but if the Google algorithm sees you activities as being in anyway spammy…well you know what the bottom line is already.