Create generalized or specialized websites?

Recently in a forum post I was asked if websites were better generalized or specialized.

The post was in regards to Paper Shredder Reviews , which is a fairly specialized site.

This is a great question.  Here is my answer.

The Short Answer:

Depends on your time and resources. 

If you have lots of time and resources create the larger more general site.  If your resources are limited create the smaller niche site. 

The Long Answer:

The paper shredder site scope is limited. Yes there are much bigger search terms to compete for. One thing to remember, there is much stronger competition for the more popular search terms.  When you go after the smaller targeted terms they are often easier to compete in, allowing your to rank higher with less effort.

If I were to create an office equipment review site, more resources would be needed.  There are more items to research, more product attributes to code and add more products in general.  Then I would have to try to rank each of the different types of office products. Much more information to manage.

When I work with the paper shredder site, the products and product attributes are similar. There is less research needed and fewer products manage.  In terms of SEO, the domain says paper shredder reviews, the url contains shredder reviews, and all the pages that link to each other are about shredder reviews.  With all elements being about paper shredders it will be easier to rank for paper shredders.

Compete to win, whatever you do. 

In my opinion it does you no good to be on page two of Google.

The original jReviews forum thread

Do you create the more specialized or more generalized sites?

Comments (3)

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written by doors and windows, July 08, 2009

So for example my site is on "doors and windows", do you think I should keep it specified to doors and windows until I have time to broaden it to other aspects of home improvement?

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written by Steven Johnson, July 09, 2009

I would focus on getting the current site working well and focus it on just doors and windows. It might seem weird to see articles about tub repair at a site called doors and windows.

Your current site is a little confusing. The home page talks about shopping online for doors and windows but I can not find that on your site. (my guess is the site is still under construction.)

I would probably create a second site and focus it on whole house repair. You will learn a lot from your doors and windows site and take that knowledge to your second site. You can use the traffic and PageRank from a well established doors and windows site to get the new site up and going much faster.

Hope this helps!

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We combined 2 sites to great effect
written by Ben Hunt (web designer), November 17, 2009

We used to have 2 separate sites, 1) http://webdesignfromscratch.com/ which has 150 articles and tutorials about web design, which fed through to 2) our Agency Site (where we actually earn our living). The tutorials site was doing really well, with thousands of great links about "web design", but we only got a drip of traffic through to our agency site.

What we did was to make the main, high-value domain our agency site with a section that still included all the legacy content with the link love. So we've capitalized on lots of link juice about "web design" and redirected the site's topic to be about our "web design agency", which has worked great. Traffic is down, but conversions are up, as more people are finding out about us.

So I guess I'm saying, if you want traffic to move freely between your content, keeping it together on one domain works better.

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