One Website, Multiple Top-level Domains
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I have two clients, both of which have a single website, with multiple top-level domains, many of which represent "subpages". For example, when you navigate to the home page, the URL is "[CompanyName].com". However, when you navigate to a subpage, the browser appears to remain at the same website, but in actuality (as you can tell from the URL bar) you've navigated to "SubPage.com".
Client A is an insurance company that has multiple branded insurance products. Each product is independent of the other (it's unlikely that a single client would purchase multiple insurance products from different brands) and have their own brand. Thusly, each section of the site that represents a different brand has its own top-level domain. The website design/structure remains the same, with some light color changes and image swaps.
Client B is a consultant and offers various services. None of these services are "branded" (a single client would hire the consultant for a wide range of available services). Each subpage on the site represents a different service and has its own top-level domain.
Here are my questions: Are either Client A or B breaking guidelines set forth by major search engines? Are either Client A or B hurting their optimization with this trickery?
My inclination is that Client A is doing it right, but Client B is not. Your insights would be appreciated!
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I can't say for sure with out seeing the sites and making sure I understand your question 100% but it sounds like both of them are hurting their SEO by having so many domains that they want to rank....client b more so than client a.
Client A is passing link juice from ClientASite.com to Subpage.com. It's not a huge deal if Client A owns subpage but it's going to make ClientASite.com less competitive from an SEO perspective.
Client B - same thing but worse since his clients would purchase multiple services that are SubPages.
My question is why are they setup like that? Have you thought about building them both new sites and 301'ing the SubPages to pages on the main URL?
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