The pros and cons can both be quite compelling here so it usually comes down to a question of budget and available manhours.

Pros

Targeted niche sites allow the client to be far more specific about exactly what it is that they do. This can make them far more competitive in that particular niche. As an example, one of our clients installs fake grass in commercial applications and outranks the largest national hardware chain here in Aus simply because he does one thing very well while the hardware chain sells thousands of products.

It also makes the site much easier to manage and browse from the user perspective while also being easier on the crawl budget as well.

Cons

Multiple websites means multiple SEO campaigns. You have to duplicate all of your effort for everything from page titles and meta descriptions to content and link profiles. If you have 10 micro-sites then your time investment will increase 10x!

Thinking of the user experience, you  may miss out on same conversions and/or upselling if users only visit one of these niche sites and don't realise that you provide several other services that they're after as well. Sometimes, being able to get everything they need done by a single company can be a very strong selling point. Much like paying 1 renovation company to do your entire reno rather than orchestrating 20 different suppliers and service providers.

There are ways to manage this second point to some extent like including badges or a list of other services you provide, though I would warn against inter-linking between each of these sites.

So, if you have the time and resources to put into it, you're likely to see greater success from multiple small sites but for more businesses, this just isn't viable. In that case, a well structured site and navigation is going to be your best bet, as well as strong and relevant internal linking from blog posts and building backlinks directly to those category pages from their respective industries.

Hi Manas,

It's quite tough to give general advice on something like this because it often needs quite a specific answer, depending on your company name and that keyword you want to target.

If your company name is very close to that larger keyword, like Car Hirez and you're trying to rank for that branded term and Car Hire, it can be a little tricky. Without further info, my best suggestion would be to put that company name everywhere that it makes sense, and always in the same order.

I don't mean cram your company name whenever you can, just make sure it's in all the usual places like the page title, logo alt text, in your content, in all of your NAP listings, your link anchor profile etc. Keeping it to the same phrasing each time is also important for you to establish that those 2 or 3 words as your actual brand name, rather than words.

For example, don't allow alternation between ABC Car Hire, ABC Rental Cars, Car Hire from ABC etc. if the name is ABC Car Hire, make sure it's written that way wherever practical.

Of course, to rank for that broader term, the usual rules apply. Include that keyword in your page title, H1, content, internal link anchors etc etc. Treat the branded term and the keyword as separate items; that's how you want them to be viewed.

Interesting question but unfortunately I think the answer is quite boring (while the inner workings behind it are fascinating)!

With the advancements Google has made in recent years around semantic search and truly understanding both what your website is about and the intent behind a user's search, I really don't think that space is going to make any difference.

They have no issue at all in understanding that Car Hire terms are very relevant to me when I'm searching Car Rental. Far more impressive is that I can search for the phrase "I need a car in Perth tomorrow" and I still get car hire options for that location. I didn't mention Hire or Rental at all yet they still nailed it based on my intent!

I've seen countless other examples of this over the years so based on that alone, I'd say the difference between C300 and C 300 is immeasurable.

While it's true that two websites with exactly the same strength may rank differently with and without that space, SEO is just too complex for that to ever be possible in the real world.

To answer your question directly around how to target both, I'd suggest using the correct C 300 format and let Google work it out

Matt Cutts answered a very similar question some time back in this video response.

In short, it's not a problem having these date/category pages, provided you've got them formatted correctly. Basically, just make sure that on each of these pages, you're only showing the heading and a small snippet; usually a paragraph or two and maybe an accompanying image.

If you're doing this, search engines have no issue understanding that it's essentially an aggregation page rather than duplicate content. If you're unlucky enough to be working with a CMS that just dumps then entire posts onto each category/tag page then you're definitely playing with fire!

If you're using Wordpress, often the simplest way to go about doing this is using the "more" tag which you'll find at the top of the text area when writing a post. Clicking that button will add into the HTML which cuts the snippet off at that point and provides a "read more" link to the full article. Here is a link to more info about it, note that current versions of wordpress do look different to these screenshots; you're looking for a button that just says "more", rather than the icon they use here.

The best way to deal with it is to update your template to automatically cut it off at a certain length for you, it just depends on whether you have access to a dev to make this change.

This is a tough but common problem. In the perfect world, you'd hire a team of high quality content writers on a contract to populate each of these pages with genuine, unique content.

Since this isn't the perfect world, you're probably on a budget that doesn't allow this to happen. Assuming your site is already live, that means you no longer have to deal with the "push it live with sparse pages or spend a few more months preparing properly" conundrum.

That being the case, my suggestion here is always to just do it properly and it takes however long it takes. Assuming you've had the site up like this for some time, your rankings are unlikely to drop in the next month or so. Start populating content from the top down, namely from your primary landing pages to your category pages, subcategory pages then finally the individual products.

In my experience, ~300-500 words seems to be sufficient for a product page so you may be able to stretch that budget with a good writer to maybe 4 or 5 pages, maybe. It's more about offering value that an arbitrary word count anyhow.

You could always get them to do the first few and you follow their lead from there, perhaps getting them to proof-read the first 10 descriptions that you write? Not ideal and I'd only attempt this if your writing abilities are ok (they seem to be?). If you're going to go this route, I'd suggest using Grammarly to keep an eye on your spelling and grammar for you as well - it can integrate with Word if that's your tool of choice or you can type straight into their web app.

Anyhow, back on topic, doing it this way means your most valuable/sold/profitable products will be getting content first and you're not compromising on quality. We've done exactly this with a number of medium sized ecommerce sites and the results are always great (albeit in conjunction with other work we're doing). Naturally, the faster the better but you have to start somewhere.

There was a Whiteboard Friday on this exact topic and I think I just found it but the video is broken and it was old so they don't have the transcript The closest I could find was this one which is also quite old but worth watching. Don't forget that Google's intention is to ignore duplicated content so if you're just copying from other sites, there's a good chance you just won't rank with those pages.

Hope that helps!

Assuming you've only got one instance like this, search engines are typically smart enough these days to see this is an anomaly rather than a pattern of intentional spam.

It wouldn't be the worst idea to disavow them I suppose but if it were my site, I wouldn't worry about it. On the other hand, if you have a number of instances where this is happening, I'd look to address that quite quickly.

Google understands that weird things like this can happen to all of us and they can't be judging everyone by the individual links or perceived actions. As a perfect example of this, my latest client has never done any form of digital marketing. Looking at their backlink profile they have 7 quality, natural backlinks and 2 Polish spam/scraper sites in their backlink profile. They can't help having their site scraped, just like you can't control the structure of that site you have 45k links from

No problem Lauren,  happy to help.

I did just remember a working example of a strong company here in Aus that has split their services across multiple niche sites, no doubt for all the reasons I listed. They do rank very well for each of their niches; usually #1.

The site is http://www.carsales.com.au/. You can find their other sites under the "Our Sites" menu item in the top right corner of the nav and also under "Sites" in the footer.

This is about the best compromise I can think of, though I'd be hesitant about those followed links between each site. If you went this route, I'd suggest making them nofollow at least.

Best of luck with the campaign!

I agree with Eric here so I won't repeat what he has said, simply offer additional suggestions.

Firstly, you can click on each entry from that Crawl Errors window in your screenshot and from the window that pops up, check out the "Linked From" tab. It will show you all the pages this broken one has links from.

If you're having no joy finding them on the pages manually, you can try the Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Crawl the site and if the 404s show up here (if they don't they probably don't exist anymore and you can mark them as "fixed" in Search Console) then click them and check out the "Linked From" tab at the bottom. This tool shows you not only the pages it's linked from but also the anchor text so you can go to the linking pages and use ctrl+f to find the offening link(s).

Hope that helps!

Hi Ricky,

More often than not, when we see this from a new-to-us client, it's because their previous SEO provider put some content on their homepage and drove 100% of the links there but did nothing for the other landing pages.

If you're comfortable dropping your URL in here I'd be happy to take a closer look, but if this is the case for your site, I'd suggest starting by boosting the content on each of your landing pages (to give you an idea, our internal expectation is 1500+ words of quality content per landing page, styled so it isn't a wall of text) and revise your upage titles, meta descriptions and headings as well.

Working on building some links to these pages will also help out quite a bit. Basically, the common  mistake is to almost over-optimise the home page, ignore the rest and wonder why it's only the home page that ranks

Similarly, make sure your nav is as flat as possible and links directly to these landing pages rather than just from a broader "services" page or something.

1) Analytics data is based on the UA code on the page. Assuming your pages are built on a template, by default the UA code for yyy.com is going to receive the visit, not yours. You could ask them to put your UA code on there but... that kind fo defeats the purpose of having analytics in the first place when you're blurring the data!

2) From a user perspective, it would be a little confusing to click a top nav link and end up on another website, so yeah I would suggest putting that link somewhere else on the site and making it clear that they're about to leave yours. Bonus points for using target="_blank" to open that other page in a new tab, also for user experience.

**3) **Right again. If yyy.com has nothing to do with xxx.com (as in the owners of X and Y don't even know each other) then it's a very strange request and one I'd be hesitant to even entertain.

The quality of their site can hurt you to a minor extent, I'd just be more worried about the confusing user experience and the fact that you'd be electively sending your users to their site, while they offer you... what?

The reason they want that link up there is simply the implied strength of that location. Link value is typically seen in order of priority from top left to bottom right; a link in your top nav gives them a sitewide link from almost the very top of every page. Good for them I suppose, though sitewide links aren't great, but not something you should do.