Online Marketing Today

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“Hey Duncan, Glenn Twiddle here. My question is this. If you rank really well for certain keywords, and your site kind of lends itself to being suitable for a variety of niches, say you are number one on Google for ‘real estate sales training’, and you wanted to also rank for ‘hypnosis training’ or something, does adding links out there in the world for keyword set number two, kind of ‘dilute’ your ranking for the first set of keywords where you’ve already succeeded? i.e, do you start drifting DOWN in the first set of rankings? Thanks mate look forward to hearing from you.” ~ Glenn Twiddle

Hi Glenn,

The short answer is “more than likely”.

If you’re already ranking well for the first “theme” (real estate sales training) then your search engine rankings are holding on their own merit.

Changing how Google views the website as an “entity as a whole” is going to shake things up. The extent of that shake up depends on how you structure things and how solid those rankings are in the first place.

If you start adding unrelated content then you’re going to see a pretty decent negative impact in ranking. If you do that then you’re diluting that overall theme relevancy, a factor that Google takes into consideration when deciding where your website ultimately ranks. The more unrelated content you add, the more the overall theme dilutes.

Of course, it would also confuse the heck out of your visitors as well.

So if you were to do this you would want to ensure you create two entirely different themed sections / major categories on the website and only place relevant content in each section. You would then only generate relevant incoming links to each section.

However there is the main issue in how you deal with your home page.

It’s already going to be themed around the first topic, and no doubt you would want to introduce visitors to the second topic which means linking to that content.

So this is where the biggest impact is likely to occur because essentially you’re splitting the theme relevancy of your website into two entirely different topics.

The impact of doing this isn’t so bad if they are very closely related (a logical subtopic or complimentary category of the first) but if they are totally unrelated things would have more impact. For example “hypnosis training” is totally unrelated to “real estate sales training”.

If you were to add “real estate marketing techniques” instead then you’re overall theme remains similar and the impact would be less to non existent.

The question here is why you would want to do this in the first place.

There is no real search engine optimization advantage for the new content / themed section.

I’m guessing that there might be some cross over in the interest of one niche audience to the other you have in mind. However at the end of the day you’d be much better off simply setting up a new website themed entirely around the second topic and linking one to the other – or simply cross marketing via your email lists etc.

This would ensure each website has its own tightly themed focus and it would protect the first asset that you’ve already worked hard to achieve good search engine rankings for.

The alternative would be to add a new sub-domain to your existing domain (and ensure the established websites home page remains the same), but at the end of the day an entirely new keyword rich and relevant domain name is only $8 and would look more professional.

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