New SEO trend: Splitting of portal domains

 

It is almost many years ago that I first foresaw the death of the wide portals. “All-purpose portals” such as Wikipedia, eHow, Jubii and Scandinavia Online in Denmark and one of the most successful international portals About.com have all since had to true this. When the first Google Panda update rolled out in 2011, it became a serious step in the right direction and a serious wake-up call for these portals. Many of them subsequently experienced very severe declines in organic search engine traffic and very almost none of them initially found solutions to their challenges.

But now something new has happened. About.com rebranded to DotDash.com in 2016 and has since embarked on a series of notable domain splits. And even more remarkable is to see the results. They are, to put it mildly, storming forward in Google. In this post, I will take a closer look at the background to such a split, the results it has given About.com, and whether it is possibly something you should also consider. 

A website can never be everything for everyone

In the infancy of the Internet - then in the 90s, there was a widespread notion that wide all-encompassing portals were the way forward. That websites that contained everything people could want was the best strategy if one wanted to dominate the web.

And for many years it went very well. In Denmark, Jubii and Scandinavia Online (SOL.dk) were dominant mastodons. And in the United States, About.com became one of the world's most visited websites. 

But the problem is, as I already predicted at the time, that if you try to be everything to everyone, then you easily end up being indifferent to most people. The success did not last either. Jubii is only a shadow of itself today and SOL.dk is completely gone

Global or local authority

One of the good arguments - both in terms of branding (awareness and trust) and SEO services to gather everything on one domain has always been that you then gather all the attention and authority around this one domain. And since authority is important for how well you rank in the search engines, it makes - in isolation, good sense. The problem is just that you also easily end up with a supermarket that may have everything, but which is not particularly good for anything. So it may well be that by gathering it all, you achieve a globally strong authority - but you tabulate the local authority that is linked to individual topics or areas. 

About.com splits up

Since the rebranding of About.com to DotDash.com, they have been splitting up their site - from the huge About.com site, where articles on almost everything were to be found, to a number of specialized portals.  Initially, they split About.com into LifeWire.com (technology), TripSavvy.com (travel), ThoughtCo.com (education), TheSpruce.com (Do-it-yourself), VeryWell.com (health), and The Balance. Com (jobs). Search Metrics has made a fine analysis of how it has gone, which you can read in its entirety here, and one must truly say that the results are absolutely amazing. Overall, they have seen far more organic traffic from Google than they had before. And the split does not stop here. They have gone even further and have split each of the new topic portals further. The same type of splitting has happened for the other new domains. And with great success.

Do you also need to split up your domain?

Probably not. They are the few who run a website that is comparable to About.com - as it were, with so many millions of articles across all topics. But that does not mean that we can not learn a whole lot from this exciting case…

Focus and wind!

One of the most important things we can learn from the About.com's case is that it increasingly pays to focus. We can not be everything to everyone. It's worth more to be the best for a few. And this applies both in terms of topics and location. For example, if you want to start a website that sells books it is an almost hopeless battle to have to conclude with Amazon or Danish Saxo in terms of wide coverage, but maybe you have a chance to win an audience if you focus on a niche that they may not cover super well - an area where you, or your writers, are super experts. Then you can create strength, credibility, and authority within this very subject, which even the mastodons may have a hard time matching. 

The same is true if you are a local craftsman, service provider, accountant, or lawyer. It is easier to get to rank on e.g. "Hairdresser in Lyngby" (or equivalent automatic local-filtered searches in Google) and much more relevant if that is where your salon is located. There is virtually no value in your hair salon showing up when a lady in North Jutland is looking for a place to get a haircut. 

Customers expect perfection

Unfortunately, just being local or topic-specific is not enough. Your website must also be technically perfect. Customers today are accustomed to using the great websites that Amazon has spent millions on developing. They expect high speed, great usability, that everything works perfectly on the mobile, etc. Regardless of the fact that you probably do not have exactly the same means as Amazon, customers expect the same good and smooth experience with you. And the same goes for Google. They do not take into account that you run a small or local business with much fewer funds. If your website is too slow, poorly mobile optimized, has not implemented SSL, AMP, or some of the many other technical details that Google expects today then you will have a much harder time ranking well in Google. Fortunately, there are solutions to it, which today cost so little that most people can join. Among other things, we have had a lot of focus on living up to all the high technical requirements that Google and the users have today. The only reason we can then sell it for the very low price we do is that the entire technical platform is developed in a way so that we can sell it to many - in contrast, to e.g. Amazon, which has paid for it all itself. And it is certainly not always easy. Not at all with a giant site like theirs. But the fact that they have been so extremely careful has certainly helped to make the transition, and the good results, turn out so quickly. So not only does your website need to be perfect. If you are making major changes, it is also important that it is handled perfectly. If you are in doubt about anything in that regard then promise me that you are grabbing someone who knows what to do and how so that you do not lose a lot of good (e.g. your rankings in Google) on the floor. We help many with such relocations. 

Will my recommendations change?

No. If you have otherwise followed my good advice over the last many years, then this new SEO trend will not change anything for you. For many small and medium-sized businesses, it will still be a good idea to join forces in a single domain. It requires both a lot of content and large investments in marketing to run a multi-brand (or multi-domain) strategy.