Comment on Forever Autumn AdSense WP Theme by SEO Dave.

WordPress SEO Theme Forever Autumn Template First four questions are yes, yes, yes and yes :-)

Blackhat SEO techniques are where you do things to get higher rankings that Google doesn’t approve of.

Like link farms, if you had 50 sites and a page on all 50 sites with a link to the other 49 sites that would be a link farm. Or added hidden keyword lists within your posts so the article would do better for those keywords, it’s blackhat SEO and liable long term to result in a domain being pennalised.

Since as the domain owner you are responsible for all the sub-domains if Google for example found on a network of say 100 sub-domains ten of them had serious blackhat SEO techniques used (like hidden keyword rich text) they would probably ban the entire domain rather than just ban the 10 offending sub-domains, they might assume as the domain owner you are probably gaming the search engines on more than the 10 sub-domains they have found and ban the lot to be safe.

In comparison if you owned 100 domains and used blackhat SEO techniques on ten of them and the other 90 are whitehat SEO, the 90 whitehat SEO domains are probably safe.

If you plan to build sites that don’t push Google’s webmaster guidelines sub-domains are as good SEO wise as a stand alone domain.

BTW SEO wise building 10 websites with 3 pages each is not as easy to rank as 1 website with the same 30 pages of content. Some SEO factors (backlinks) are additive, you will not get the same SEO value linking to 10 websites as linking to 10 pages on one site with the same links. Basically it’s far easier to do well SEO wise if all your content is on one domain, all your link building efforts can go into that one domain.

That being said if you plan to build a LOT of content (I have hundreds of thousands of webpages) then using separate domains or sub-domains can make sense to niche the content. Wouldn’t have made much sense for me to have a domain with WordPress SEO themes and Classic Literature on the same site, had it made sense my theme content would be ranking higher than it does now because the classic literature domain is quite old and has lots of old links which have a lot more SEO value than the links to this site. From a pure SEO ranking perspective I’d have ALL my content under one domain.

David