Forum Moderators: phranque

Message Too Old, No Replies

Making a price comparison search engine. SEO advice needed

One domain or multiple domains?

         

directwheels

7:56 pm on Jun 22, 2010 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I recently identified some electronic products and found out that there is a market for it. There are probably a total of 100,000 variations of these products out there.

I wrote some crawlers and they went out to various stores and gathered prices of these electronic items. The next step is to create a site to show these prices and send traffic back to the stores with affiliate links. I already have a working prototype at this point.

Most of my traffic will likely come from people searching for model numbers (ex. Samsung ABC123 or just ABC123) and other longtail keywords. Much of my content is the manufacturers' product descriptions, which every other site is using.

If I launch my site with all the products and the various types of pages, it will likely have 400-500k pages. It will be lucky to get 5000 pages indexed being a new domain. I am guessing that the amount of links I will need to carry all those pages would be insane.

I am thinking maybe I should create niche sites instead with about 500-1000 products in each, so I would only have less than 2000 pages per site. For example, all the blue widget products will be on it's own little price comparison search engine site that lists only blue widgets. At the same time, I can get a keyword focused domain for each to help it a little. There will be little to no link building for each site, since building links for all those sites just won't scale.

What does everyone think about my approach? The idea is that a site (even though new and don't have a lot of links) with few pages can outrank mega sites on a very specific keyword such as a model number. Does that logic make sense?

I have already set up some tests and the small sites do seem to outrank the competitors, but it's only been a month or so. I will need to give it more time to see. But I would love to get some input.

Thanks!

idolw

8:10 am on Jun 29, 2010 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I guess it is all about logic. When you put a megasite online and all content it has is copied descriptions it will never rank. You need to find balance between the original useful content and the copied product descriptions.
I would plan for a megasite that will eventually reach all parts of your niche but start small with only those you can deliver good content for.
Say, you want to sell all car equipment in the long run. That's everything from tyres to windscreen wipers. Start with a general domain name which suits you for all your widgets and put just tyres there (imagine tyres bring most $$$).
Once you rank for everything- tyres and are authority start something next as another section of the website. It should rank reasonably quickly and you may recycle your previews customers to sell them new stuff you have.
And so on.. Just like Amazon did it ;)

directwheels

11:55 am on Jun 29, 2010 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Thanks for the tips idolw :)

Sgt_Kickaxe

6:04 pm on Jun 29, 2010 (gmt 0)



Unique content, images and descriptions are a must.

If you launch a million page site with aggregated content Google will love it at first and then out of the blue send you exactly zero visitors.

On the other hand if you INTENTIONALLY create a mashup site of other people's offers, and link to all of those sources, you may very well jump ahead of them in search. You'd be showing multiple prices, multiple descriptions etc. Mashup for teh win is Google's latest message.