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What Happens When You Launch a New Site Section? If there's a close relationship between your new site section and the historical trusted aspect of the site, you'll likely pick up some traffic quite quickly. However, sites stall a bit after that. They get a little taste of the good traffic for their new section, but then it stops growing. Over a period of time, it will remain frozen, but then if you're doing the right things (developing quality content, link building), you may see a jump in traffic. My own conjecture is that a combination of quality inbound links and time raises the trust level of the new site section. Once you cross a trust threshold, you enable a new period of growth until you hit the next threshold. Then the cycle repeats. I've seen this behavior several times now during the development and promotion of new sections of content on existing sites. How Can You Speed Things Along? We already mentioned the two most important things above. Developing quality content was one of them. While search engine crawlers can't measure content quality in a direct sense, they can understand the relevance and depth of a Web page, provided you put enough text out there for them to chew on. Also, if a new site section is really thin on content, you can send negative signals to the search engines. The other thing you need to do? Our old friend, link building. At least some of the signals for evaluating trust are based on link analysis. Getting high quality links from high quality sites will help you establish that trust. The above is a sandbox scenario, but applied to new content section on an existing site, it operates much the same way. You benefit from the inherent trust of the existing domain, but still need to prove it to the search engines by getting new links to the new section itself.

This week at the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, Cutts joined the discussion around nofollow during the duplicate content session. According to Outspoken Media's Lisa Barone: A debate broke out mid-session when Matt Cutts got involved about whether or not nofollow is still effective. Of course, as soon as it got hot, all search representatives got very tight lipped about who said what and what they really meant. As far as I could, Matt Cutts did NOT say that they ignore nofollow, but he DID hint that it is less effective today than it used to be. Later, Cutts addressed the issue again in his You&A keynote. When asked about PageRank sculpting, Cutts said that it will still work, but not as well. Basically, using nofollow will still prevent PageRank from passing from the linking page through the nofollowed link. But that PageRank is no longer "saved" to be used by other links on the page. It just "evaporates," according to Cutts. Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz has some visual aids to help describe the process. This change mainly affects those SEOs that have tried to optimize their pages using the nofollow tag for PageRank sculpting. It's safe to say that most site owners have no idea what PageRank sculpting is, which is probable a good thing, since it can quite easily be done wrong and cause more problems than it solves.

Consider Dedicated Hosting If you're using shared hosting for all of your sites, and you link them together, it's imperative you move each site to its own dedicated hosting. If you're not sure if you're using shared hosting or how your sites are configured, check out who else is on your IP with a tool like this one at Axandra.com. Shared hosting is traceable, and Google knows you own all of those sites – so they're going to either "ding" all of them, or only give one site credence in their results. In the scenario above with the bed and breakfasts, just putting each site on its own dedicated hosting set up sent the newer site from page five to bottom of page one in about three months. If you must interlink your sites, and you want to continue to do so, make sure you arrange your hosting correctly. So we learned that having multiple sites isn't a bad thing, if you've set them up correctly. Consider also the time and marketing investment five sites involves versus one site. You have to weigh the benefits of having five against the cost and judge for yourself. I certainly can't guarantee this will solve all of your problems, but it worked for me and I definitely think if you're working on more than one site in a niche or location, you should consider trying out this technique.