Whilst the subjects are related in some ways I don't think you should confuse your visitors by having two websites on your domain.

With domain's as cheap as they are now there is not much point in doing what you are doing. Is there a reason why you did not buy a second domain name?

I would recommend that you purchase another domain and move the second website.

edit: speeling

[edited by: BeeDeeDubbleU at 5:36 pm (utc) on Nov. 29, 2006]

Many thanks for your reply. I put the second one in a subdirectory because I had lots of spare disk space. I can avoid confusing visitors, I think, by not having too many links back and forth between the sites. I think I should reduce the number I have. It is the possible effect on my search engine rankings I am worried about. Also, I have just upgraded my hosting package to one which allows subdomains, so am wondering whether it would help matters to put the second site in a subdomain rather than a subdirectory. I make so little money from them that buying a new domain would probably turn my minuscule profit into a loss.

Ask yourself if Amazon started a new site with a new domain name after establishing Online Book Sales and moving into Music CDs etc.

Of course they didn't. Your curent setup is projecting 2 very much related themes and IMHO will reinforce the credibility of each other. The overall site will consequently be larger than each of the 2 individual sites if they were split.

I would stick with it and build on what you have. That is however just my opinion and I have no firm Data on which to base that opinion.

Domain names are on sale in the UK for £1.99 a year or less.

Regarding the comparison with Amazon, I cannot agree with this. Selling books and CDs is not that far removed. The truth about Amazon is that they sell stuff, it doesn't really matter what they sell. Also, they already had a massive following when they started to diversify. They don't have to worry about SEO when everyone knows they are there.

At Ian_M's level every website should have a focus. A site about English literature should focus on English literature. A site about short story writing should focus on short story writing. Don't cloud the issue for your visitors.

My 2p!

On the basis that your topics are NOT worlds apart ...

Two 'sites' on one domain:
FOR - cheap; facilities and marketing shared, page rank shared, incoming link benefit shared, no problem for SEs, they don't care where content is, so long as they can reach it, internal links will help visitors and not harm the site in SEO terms.
AGAINST: Risk of duplication, risk of reader confusion - both pretty small in this case.

Main site and subdomain:
FOR: - Cheap.
Against - SEs treat subdomains as an entirely different domain; so no sharing of links, page rank, marketing. Potential SE problems with interlinking. Risk of duplication, risk of reader confusion - both pretty small in this case.

Two separate domains:
FOR - No risk of reader confusion.
AGAINST - Horrendous cost of second domain and hosting - not really! ;)
Risk of duplication - pretty small in this case.
No sharing of links, page rank, marketing. potential SE problems with interlinking.

My conclusion:
For the moment, I'd keep on one site, saving and profiting from shared marketing, page rank etc., plus the ability to interlink without fear, which allows for mutual promotion.

If the sites begin to pull away, or have the potential to go down different paths, you can always split in the future. Either way, I'd not go down the subdomain route at all - there are no significant benefits and the disadvantage won't go away.

Meanwhile, if you see or think of a domain name you like for the second site, buy it now, and 301 to the existing site until you feel you need it.

Many thanks for all the input on this. It's been really helpful.

When I began my site in 2002 it had no focus at all, it was a hobby/experiment and it remained so for two years.

I began cataloging everything and it became a general interest directory with topics in every direction...

At a point in 2004 I noticed that one topic began getting a LOT of traffic from Google, to this day I have no idea why. I began building upon that topic adding as many pages there as I could. Now that topic is paying me very well, better than any job I could ever dream of getting. I didn't pick the topic, Google did.

But I never removed the old pages, to this day I have pages on over 400 different subjects. No focus but lots of traffic--to just one topic.

Keep adding things and watch the search terms that work very carefully.

I have two good-sized sites that have evolved in unexpected ways, so that each of them has two major topics.

On one of them the topics are evidently more interrelated, because over half of the visitors who do more than click in-and-out will end up visiting pages on both "sides" of the site, and the actual written feedback I get is almost always from someone who's interested in both. There's no way I'll separate that one into two sites, even though someone looking at it from the outside might have a "huh?" moment. I do use sub-directories for that site, but not subdomains.

OTOH, the other site seems to mostly draw two completely different sets of visitors. I'm planning a major update and have gone back and forth about whether to break it up - there are reasons for going either way. I'll be adding some of the ideas from this thread into my thought process.

Thanks for these further thoughts. My sites also began as hobbies and still are mainly hobbies. Do others make use of free reprint article services to build up your sites? My sites are founded on my original content, but I am expanding them, in some areas, with free reprint articles, and also submitting edited versions of my own work to reprint article sites. I am working on the assumption that both are a good idea, but with numerous copies of the same articles floating around the internet isn’t there a danger of 'duplicate content' coming into it somewhere?

with numerous copies of the same articles floating around the internet isn’t there a danger of 'duplicate content' coming into it somewhere?

That question/issue comes up at every conference, and the answer is "yes." This is a real problem because it's sometimes difficult for the engine to determine the original version of the content.

I've seen several cases where the 2nd or 3rd copy of some article ends up ranking better than the original. And I'm sure I'm not the only one to see/experience that!