Several Site Ideas: Combine into one massive site? or separate them into a network?

[willpower101]

I have a ton of content for a few different genres. But should I make them into one site, like mashable? Or multiple sites, like gawker media. (Techcrunch is a weird blend. )

Also what does this mean for social media, youtube, twitter, facebook, etc.,
Am I going to have to maintain 5 different accounts?

Here is the content:

• startups/business/finance
• inside the movie industry
• college/grad school info
• Internet/social media/technology
• Series on learning math

___________________________________

So lets look at similar sites -

1. Mashable has: Mashable Social Media, Mashable Tech, Mashable Business, Mashable Entertainment, and Us/World News
...ALL on their single site.

2. On the flipside Gawker media has them all separated into:
Lifehacker.com, Gizmodo.com, Kotaku.com, Jalopnik.com, io9.com, etc...

3. Lastly, you have Techcrunch.com, that did something weird recently. It went from a network layout to a massive site setup.
So it used to be: techrunch.com, mobilecrunch.com, crunchgear.com, cruchbase.com, crunchnotes.com
But now they've combined the first three into subdomains /mobile and /gadgets, and they left crunchbase.com and crunchnotes.com standalone.

[eeedc]

Search engine optimization is easier if it's all one site like Techcrunch. Branding is also easier as Netflix learned the hard way. Of course the subjets have to be sort of related to each other. Techcruch is all related to technology. I don't know how math is related to movies or startups.

[Acro]

techcrunch got...crunched when AOL acquired it.

[willpower101]

So should I combine startups/business with the tech/internet site and then have two others, movie industry and college admissions? My friend pointed out that no one goes to to mashable for business info as much as they go to say, businessinsider.

I'm leaning toward the network layout. Just every piece of advice I read that's less than 12 months old (since google panda) says google caters to giant sites now.

[dcristo]

Your chances of success are significantly greater if you were to create separate niche sites that cater to a specific audience.

[Gerry]

Your chances of success are significantly greater if you were to create separate niche sites that cater to a specific audience.

Then link back to each other to create that network

---------- Post added at 12:52 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:51 AM ----------

Just every piece of advice I read that's less than 12 months old (since google panda) says google caters to giant sites now.

Would love to read that link if you have it handy. I have several sites top ranking and I am not sure they would be classified as giant sites.

[willpower101]

Not a specific link, just reading on forums.digitalpoint.com (I know I know, not the most reputable site) but you can search for [google panda (size OR small OR large) site] yourself and see random results or filter to the news category. Obviously I have misgivings about these claims myself or I wouldn't still be interested in the idea of a few networked sites. (I'm leaning towards the thought that it mainly effects people who have hundreds of sites with insignificant content.) But I still consider it.

[dcristo]

No problems with cross linking related sites its encouraged for targeted traffic. What Google has issues with is cross linking on a massive scale (unrelated sites) and thus the only reason you are linking is for SEO manipulation. That being said, I doubt you would have a problem linking unrelated sites for a few networked sites.