Splitting website

[nealrm]

I am thinking about splitting my real estate site into two or more sites. Right now we have both residential and commercial properties on different sections of the same site. I am thinking about moving the commercial section over to a different server and adjusting that site to be specific to commercial properties. As part of this I need to do a little research for the customization.

For those of you who have or will be searching for commercial properties, what are the parameters that you search by? Is there anything you like or dislike about sites that list commercial properties?

For those of you with SEO experience, any suggestions or comments? I am planning on have many links between the two sites.

Thanks,

[billbenson]

Unless your current site is doing poorly, suddenly splitting the site seems risky.

Why not start a new site in new geographical area or something else that is slightly adjacent to your existing site in either the commercial or residential area but not both. Build up the new site and either link to pages on your existing site or 301 them.

I still like the several niche site approach over the one size fits all site understanding as well the value G puts on authority sites. Commercial and Residential Real Estate seems like something that would be better on separate sites. Still, I don't know about breaking up a working site?

[vangogh]

I'll echo Bill's sentiment. Why are you splitting the site? What do you think will be the benefit.

As far as seo is concerned it's not going to be difficult for a search engine to see that both of these sites are yours. I have a hard time believing linking between is going to add any benefit. Search engines are also moving toward ranking brands better, meaning one bigger site is likely to benefit you more than several smaller sites.

On the other hand you could be more focused with each site and if there's a completely different market for each it could make sense. Personally I'd keep the one larger site since I think it will be less work. One site to market. One site to brand, etc.

As far as searching I can't speak to commercial properties, but with residential properties I'm going to want to search based on location, price, size (#of bedrooms, bathrooms, etc) and I'll want to be able to combine all those searches. I'd want to look for 3 bedrooms houses in a specific area in a certain price range.

[Harold Mansfield]

I wouldn't split them either. Unless you are starting a completely new division that is going to be run separately, I would just organize what you have better, to emphasize that you have both residential and commercial real estate.

If you are building a new section, I would do it on the same domain on a folder of the root, ie: yoursite.com/commercial.

[nealrm]

Thanks for the comments.

HouseViewOnline is well know throughout SE Missouri as a top site for finding and advertising residential real estate. The URL also encourages the perception that the site's sole focused is residential properties. Because of this, I believe that the commercial and rental portions have lagged in growth. To resolve this, I was planning of giving the commercial and rental portions their own identities (URL), databases, and customizations. Since I will be basically rebuilding these sections, I was thinking that it would be beneficial to split the traffic load across more than one server.

However, based on the suggestions above, I may keep everything on the current server.

[Harold Mansfield]

Thanks for the comments.

HouseViewOnline is well know throughout SE Missouri as a top site for finding and advertising residential real estate. The URL also encourages the perception that the site's sole focused is residential properties. Because of this, I believe that the commercial and rental portions have lagged in growth. To resolve this, I was planning of giving the commercial and rental portions their own identities (URL), databases, and customizations. Since I will be basically rebuilding these sections, I was thinking that it would be beneficial to split the traffic load across more than one server.

However, based on the suggestions above, I may keep everything on the current server.

I would think that if you already have a fair amount of traffic that you can promote the new sections, offerings, or services from within.
That's not to say that you shouldn't begin to start promoting your commercial offerings off line.
Do the same thing you do with the residential services..with the commercial services...you don't need a new domain for that, just direct people to the correct page, folder, or sub domain of your existing site.

Depending on what kind of account you have, servers can take a lot of punishment and today's set ups can handle pretty much anything you throw at them. Should you see an increase so much that you start getting overages, just upgrade your account.
If you have VPS, or run your own with the latest software you should be fine.

Bottom line in my view, if you are using the same resources as your residential services (same contact info, phone number, sales people, etc) , don't split up the sites.

[nealrm]

I'm getting a hint that you don't think that splitting the site is a good idea. :rolleyes:

How about the URLs. A simple redirect would allow me to have URLs that matches the content yet everything would still be on the same site. It would also allow me to match the URL to the marketing material. So when I market the commercial real estate portion of the site I could use www.CommercialViewOnline.com (http://www.commercialviewonline.com) and still use www.HouseViewOnline.com (http://www.HouseViewOnline.com) for the residential. The CommercialViewOnline URL would go directly to the Commercial properties.

[vangogh]

No reason why you can't point the new domains to the section on the site. I'd let the actual pages resolve to the one domain. I think keeping everything on the one domain will ultimately be the better choice when it comes to search engines.

Still you can safely point newdomain.com to olddomain.com/directory if it makes your other marketing easier or just makes more sense that way.