Thread: Multiple Sites Targeting Subsections of the Same Niche

Will had quoted an article from SEOmoz SEOmoz | New & Interesting Insights Into Google Rankings & Spam from Pubcon in a separate thread (Tips on Google Reconsideration Requests). So I went to read that article and part of it really worries me.

Here is a quote from the article:

Having Multiple Sites Targeting Subsections of the Same Niche can be Indicative of Spam
Matt Cutts today mentioned that "having multiple sites for different areas of the same industry can be a red flag to Google." Though Googlers have mentioned this before, today's site review panel brought renewed attention to both Google's ability and proclivity for carefully considering not only an individual site, but all the other sites owned by that registrant/entity/person. Given Google's tremendous amount of data on web usage behavior, many SEOs suspect that they track beyond simply domain registration records

I operate 3 or 4 sites in the same niche, in several niches, so the idea of Google considering this as spam is quite worrying.

What do you guys think the implications of this are?

First, there is a "link sp*m'" issue of "having multiple sites for different areas of the same industry " when the sites are interlinked. But that is not to say that having multiple sites is sp*m. I would minimize the amount of interlinking to where it makes sense for the user or use banners and the rel="me" tag on the links.

Second, I would ask myself are the content and topics unique on each site. The sp*m issue here is duplicate content that has been spun or re-written.

It would be very difficult to use an algorithm to penalize multiple sites in the same niche for the same owner. Most of the big corporations have multiple sites. So, using an alogo would be shred the search results to ribbons.

Much more likely that Google would flag the sites and make a manual determination to issue a penalty.