Split A Website Into Categorized Add-On Domains

A-B Split Testing - Some Of The Advantages And Disadvantages

I recently attended a seminar where they were telling newbies that buying into 10 websites for example, and therefore 10 domain names, was the way to get traffic. I was then asked by a friend some days later what I thought about this idea. I told him the reason why they say that is not necessarily to make money from you buying 10 websites from them, even though that may be one of their hidden agendas, but because they are on about keywords and marketing.

One website alone cannot generate enough keywords and advertising. If you have a clothes website, with 30,000 visitors per month, for example you might want to split it up into three websites (i.e. boots.com, hats.com and clothes.com) in order to target specific traffic and more importantly to introduce more keywords and advertising markets.

In other words; If clothes.com is limited to certain keywords in meta-tags and/or limited to the types of classified ads, forums and blogs it can advertise in (because clothes is a word/sector that is too general) you might have better luck advertising boots, hats and clothes as separate sectors (websites).

SPLITTING  MONEY  AND  VISITORS

So what about the money and visitors? Surely if the all-in-one clothing website has 9,000 visitors per month, who buy £300 worth of goods per month, it would just be split into three equal sections? Hats should get 3,000 visitors per month who buy £100 worth of goods. And the same should apply to the Boots and Clothes websites, right? Well that should be the theory but it might not be the reality.....for you. It would depend on certain factors.

It might not happen that way because visitors know you for your strongly branded clothing website (i.e. clothes.com) and would never think of you, or associate you, with having a hats website (i.e. hats.com) and a boots website (boots.com). Although you would advertise in the hat and boots forums, blogs and classifieds for example your visitors might not look in them.

They might of seen your clothing website years ago in Google, under the search term “Clothing In London”, but have never thought of searching for “Hats In London”. Why? Because they know if they want a hat or pair of boots they go to your well established clothing website. Failure of your own success in other words.

PUTTING  THE  THEORY  TO  THE  TEST

To put the theory to the test I nominated my well established, 5 years old, yoingco.com FREE Computer Lessons website as the guinea pig. It can be split into sections that are equal in terms of keyword, promotional and advertisement strengths.

Yoingco.com had an average of 14,000 to 16,000 visitors per month up until March 2010, was ranked number 2 (page 1, position 2) on the main search engines and had links in many forums and websites (including Wikipedia and Microsoft). In its first 3 years it dominated the number one spot, mainly due to its unique attribute of step-by-step examples using pictures and text.

Fig 1.0  yoingco.com receiving up to 16,000 visitors per month (100% of traffic) until 28th February 2010

Visitors were forced to go to yoingco.com for its first three years simply because it only catered for Windows XP users. When Windows Vista came along in January 2007 I then created the add-on domain vistalessons.com but never really promoted it, even though I updated my computer lessons for the new Windows operating system (Windows Vista). On top of this, I pointed/redirected vistalessons.com to yoingco.com. So at this point yoingco.com was getting 100% of the traffic as a Vista Lessons website.

Fig 1.1  vistalessons.com has its own traffic from 1st March 2010

In October 2009 the operating system called Windows 7 came out, so I decided to create a new add-on domain for it called tutorialswindows7.com and make new computer lessons for it. So for this experiment I split yoingco.com and vistalessons.com into two websites and kept tutorialswindows7.com as a separate website. Because of tutorialswindows7.com being new it did not get the same kind of promotion as the other websites, therefore its visitor numbers were already low.

Fig 1.2  tutorialswindows7.com is new but has a steady flow of visitors

Yoingco.com on the other hand was well-known for its FREE Computer Lessons. It had plenty of content, keywords, advertising, links and so on – Hence its number 2 position. In google you only needed to type yoin into its search edit box and yoingco.com would be offered as a suggestion. Typing computer lessons into google brought the website to the top. So with yoingco.com being an ideal guinea pig, what did the split test results reveal? and did it damage yoingco.com or improve it?.....read on!

THE  SPLIT  TEST  RESULTS

One of the first things to notice from the results, taken from March 2010 to May 2010, is the way the visitors dropped like flies. The results for March 2010 reveal that yoingco.com and vistalessons.com combined only managed 7,778 visitors in total. So where did the other 7,000+ visitors go?

Remember what I was saying about people knowing your brand website first and foremost, above. Well the same has happened here. Because yoingco.com is the known website people do not think to look elsewhere, at vistalessons.com for example. In this case they have gone to yoingco.com expecting to find the Windows Vista computer lessons only to find them replaced by Windows 7 computer lessons.

So why not tell them about the vistalessons.com website from within the yoingco.com website? using an advertising banner or link. Well I did that, but that is not the reason why the visitor numbers dropped. The reason was because they could not find yoingco.com anymore.

The Disadvantage Of Back Links

When you advertise your website you will most likely promote its domain name (i.e. yoingco.com) and very rarely promote one of its web pages (i.e. yoingco.com/hardware.htm) simply because you know you might change the file name of that web page or even delete the web page, for whatever reason(s). And the same applied in this case, I always advertised/promoted yoingco.com. However, this does not stop other people from linking to your web pages.

The downside of this for yoingco.com was that, over the years, people have found my web pages and linked to them directly as opposed to linking directly to yoingco.com only. This is one reason why the visitor numbers dropped, because all those linked web pages no longer existed when I changed the content from Windows Vista to Windows 7 - This meant people clicking on a website link from another website, forum or blog for example (i.e. hardware_vista.htm) would be met by a 404 Error (Page Not Found).

Unreported DEAD Back Links

Surely the visitor would see the broken link and report it to the administrator of that website, forum or blog? Or at least look at the url (i.e. yoingco.com/hardware.htm) and then go to its domain name (i.e. yoingco.com). Unfortunately administrators do not always receive reports of broken links or do not care because your link was used only once in a forum for example - Someone might of answered a forum problem by saying "to fix that problem you visit yoingco.com/hardware.htm". Because that problem was solved at the time, and because that forum posting is now old, the administrator no longer cares about your broken website link and may even delete the post and therefore your broken website link.

The only good thing to come out of this scenario is that you inadvertantly flush out dead links. In this case I went back to some of those websites, forums and blogs (if they had not died already!) and posted an updated link to the new Windows 7 web page and explained that the Windows Vista web page had moved to vistalessons.com. This is difficult though because if the website, forum or blog has not died yet your credability might of, espcially if you have not visited that website, forum or blog for a year or so (because you spammed your advertisement at the time!).

SPLIT  TEST  RESULTS  -  Disadvantages

The so-called "GURUs" will lead you to believe that splitting content has the benefit of a more targetted audience by way of specific keywords, promotion and internet marketing which is true to an extent but they do not warn you of the above! Furthermore, they do not tell you the disadvantages of splitting content. One of those disadvantages is that no everyone likes to visit three separate websites. Some people like to visit an all-in-one website instead, just as some people like to visit a shopping centre (shopping mall) instead of visiting individual shops.

Going back to the clothes website, mentioned at the beginning of this web page, the so-called "GURUs" would say split that clothes website into clothes.com, boots.com and hats.com. That way you can market all three websites with specific keywords and advertising/promotional campaigns. However, not everyone can afford three websites and even if they can they might not have the time and energy to manage and market all of them.

Losing Visitors And Potential Customers

To put this into perspective, with regards to my websites too, it is the same as having a clothes shop in the high street for 5 years. One day you decide to experiment and set up two more shops. So you now have a general clothes shop with no hats or boots inside it, because they have moved into shops of their own. Now assume those other two shops are in different locations/towns because you could not buy the shops next to the original clothes shop.

You would lose general clothes customers in two ways. 1) because they now visit your boots shop and/or your hats shop only. And 2) because those who want to visit your boots and/or hats shops find it too expensive/far to travel to. In both cases they are no longer interested in your general clothes shop. You would gain new customers to all shops over time but for now your clothes shop has taken a drop in customers.

The above perspective is what has happened to yoingco.com. It has dropped in visitor numbers partially due to the vistalessons.com and tutorialswindows7.com websites being separately available. The other two websites have also gained, specific/targetted, visitors thereby wiping out some of the original yoingco.com visitors. On top of this Google started promoting tutorialswindows7.com in place of yoingco.com because it found the content of these two websites to be the same and therefore promoted the more meaningful domain name (tutorialswindows7.com).

SPLIT  TEST  RESULTS  -  Vista Lessons

The split test results for vistalessons.com show an increase over the period of March 2010 to May 2010. Although I promoted this website over those three months it's popularity was down to two things. 1) Because it was at the top of the major search engines, partly to do with its domain age (3 years) and because yoingco.com also used to have the Vista Lessons on it (which were interleaved by the search engines). And 2) because most of my visitors are Windows Vista users as opposed to Windows 7 and Windows XP users.

SPLIT  TEST  RESULTS  -  Targetted Traffic

On first impressions the yoingco.com results look bad, but in reality the split has created better targetted traffic for vistalessons.com in terms of now knowing which specific web pages the Windows Vista users are clicking on most often.

When yoingco.com also had vista lessons on it, and visitors were going to yoingco.com more than vistalessons.com, they would click on the MS Office Installaion web page for example.....making that page a good landing page. Whereas with the split the vistalessons.com visitors no longer clicked on that MS Office Installation web page that often. This was partly due to that web page now having a different url of course which was not linked to - So only the yoingco.com back link existed for that web page, but no back link was ever created for that web page when it was on the vistalessons.com website.

What the above shows is that I would need to repromote (readvertise) certain web pages, and the three websites in general, in order to give them a boost and to have them equally reckognized if possible. At the same time the question for me should not be Should I Split My Websiets Up? but should be Do I Want, And/Or Need, An All-In-One Website?.....and if so, WHY?

SPLIT  TEST  RESULTS  -  More Testing

With the above results and insights in mind, this month (1st June 2010) I have left vistalessons.com as a separate website but have redirected tutorialswindows7.com to point to yoingco.com so that yoingco.com gets the visitors from tutorialswindows7.com. I will show you the results next month.

JUNE  2010  RESULTS  -  Slowly But Surely

Although it's now Saturday 17th July 2010, because I was busy with other articles, here are the results for June 2010. They show traffic progressing in favour of yoingco.com, with its traffic also coming from tutorialswindows7.com, at the expense of vistalessons.com.

Fig 1.3  yoingco.com is gaining traffic again.....slowly but surely.....




Fig 1.4  .....at the expense of vistalessons.com.

I suspect the vistalessons.com traffic will stay around 4,000 to 5,000 visits per month over the next month or so, while yoingco.com should jump up to around 8,000 to 10,000 over the same period.....if I do not advertise these websites anymore. Obviously I will though, through forums and submitted articles for example, so that their traffic improves further.

So as you can see; under the above mentioned scenarios it should take my websites about 3 Months to recover from damage (i.e. loss of traffic), but nothing is guaranteed of course. At the end of the day you might have to split your websites in favour of experimentation, and that's what it's all about - Trial & Error Testing in order to know more about your visitor's habits. Without experimentation you will just be guessing.

If I look at my statistics further (not shown here!) I can see there is a difference in the type of pages viewed from each website, even though they contain roughly the same lessons. This is another benefit of experimentation. So I encourage you to be brave! and split your website up.....but only if you are brave enough and more to the point, have at least 10,000 visits per month.