For Barbara, her websites will be hidden for being duplicates and her goal of having more customers find her will be undermined, as Google hates duplicates.

But, let's say you have different sites without duplicate content. Rather your different websites are geared towards covering several categories of your services.

For an example, here is a fake scenario in which we will use a random (non-existent) business name,  "MyCity Quality Roofers & Gutters Inc."

MyCity QR&G has their main website at www. ourmainsite .com

They also have a dedicated site for their roofing at www. ourroofingservices .com

And let's say they further have a third site for just their gutter services at:

www. ourgutterservices .com

If you were to create 3 websites similar to the roofer's scenario, your sites would be allowed and Google would not hide the sites. However, the key is to make sure your content is unique and not replicated. 

As long as their content is not duplicate, they are good to go! And this could be a smart move as they are networking with backlinks and targeting potential clients in a very specific way. However...

There are downsides to this approach - that would be not receiving the accumulated gross traffic that you would normally have if ALL visitors went to one website.

Imagine if you will, 3 eight ounce glasses represent your websites.

You have 8 ounces of water. This water represents your web traffic, people who are looking for your services.

Now equally pour that water into those 3 glasses.

You'll barely have any water in each glass. Google sees those glasses aka websites and says, "meh, not that great." And passes on the ranking, showing other websites will full traffic.

Take away two glasses and pour that water into one glass. Now your glass is FULL and it looks good. Google sees your glass aka website and says, "Sweet! This is a popular website, look at all that water aka traffic, let's show it to everyone because it's obviously awesome."

This is what happens when you dilute your traffic over several websites, even IF your content is unique... you could risk losing rather than gaining.

More traffic to a website gives Google and other search engines a message that your site is popular and thus deserving of a higher ranking. So we suggest you make this decision carefully. Ideally, one highly performing website is best.

Now, let's talk about what constitutes a website for a second...

Is your facebook page a website? No.

Is your Business hub on Pinterest a website? No.

Is your Google My Business landing page a website? Sort of.

Most of these are account pages that link back to your site. The only tricky page among those is the Google My Business landing page, because it is a domain that you own. Just make sure your content is as unique as possible and clearly tell potential clients where your official website is. You can also go into your domain DNS settings and redirect your GMB landing page traffic to your main website.

Have a question? Contact us.