My secondary sites are outranking my primary site

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Samantha Landa: Additional context: I`m a content writer who`s new to SEO strategy, so I appreciate your patience and understanding if I`ve misunderstood my priorities here. One of my big goals is to increase organic traffic to our primary site.
  
  
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  James Slattery: Combine & silo. Then one site to maintain and get links/content for. Better to have one strong domain than 3 weak ones
  
  
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  Samantha Landa: Thanks a lot, James. The other sites haven`t been maintained or updated in years but rank in positions 1-5 for many of the primary site`s target/relevant keywords and phrases. When you say combine, does this mean we`d redirect the entire domain or do a 301 on a page by page basis? (I`m not sure if there`s a difference)
  
  
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  James Slattery: Samantha Landa yup that combined power will help the entire project. Combine and 301
  
  
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  Samantha Landa: Appreciate your insights on this! Thank you.
  
  
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  Ammon Johns: For me this all hinges on a true understanding of WHY the company "has one website it`s trying to promote, but also owns multiple other websites that each have extremely similar (but not identical) topical content."
  
  You absolutely need to learn the strategy or decision-making that was involved, and precisely who made that decision, what the plan was, and whether or not that plan has been abandoned or whatever. People don`t tend to `accidentally` create even one website, and certainly not multiple websites.
  
  Because whatever that plan/strategy was, those websites competing against each other was absolutely a deliberate part of it. Without understanding why, it would be very easy to make bad decisions.
  
  
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  Samantha Landa: Absolutely. Great point. I won`t be making any decisions without consulting with the people who signed off on this strategy. My preliminary suspicion is that they wanted to create keyword1dotcom, keyword2dotcom, etc. thinking that search engines would rank a site/page higher with the keyword in the name.
  
  
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  Ammon Johns: Samantha Landa one tactic some used in the past was to deliberately attempt to have multiple sites all have positions on the first page of a SERP, so that effectively any result people selected would eventually come to them, in one way or other.
  
  
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  Samantha Landa: That`s what I suspect happened here. I`ll need to confirm. If this is indeed the case, would you echo James Slattery`s suggestion above of combining the sites (301s) and siloing the content? Or since 2-4 of these sites do tend to all appear on page one, it would be better to just leave them be (in which case, is there any point linking to the primary site from these other sites `for backlink purposes` if users get the answers they`re looking for)?
  
  
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  Ammon Johns: Samantha Landa possibly. But that depends on whose idea it was, and whether they are still in the company, and whether there are internal political implications.
  
  You need to know the strategy, the who and the why, so that you know whether this is something you need to discuss with someone, and if so who.
  
  
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  Samantha Landa: I`ll look into it, and if I get a clear answer I`ll probably come back here for guidance if you don`t mind.
  
  
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  Ammon Johns: To the broader question of strategies, well, there are many viable ones, and owning more than one site in a niche is still a very genuine one. Lots of very big, very respectable companies have multiple brands that ostensibly compete with one another, very deliberately. There`s nothing wrong with the strategy itself, and is effectively just like a trainer or stables having more than one horse in the same race.
  
  Sure, focusing all efforts on one single point of attack (one website to compete in the SERP getting all the links, content, resources the company can get it) makes for a more efficient use of resources, at least in a perfect world.
  
  However, having multiple sites that use different strategies, or appeal to different segments or demographics in the market can sometimes be the more effective (and efficient) that trying to `one size fits all` of a single offering. Then there`s the ability to split-test entire strategies across those sites or subcompanies, resulting in them all competing to be ever more efficient than their sibling.
  
  
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  Samantha Landa: Definitely. One thing I`m trying to keep in mind is resources. Our `secondary` sites are many years out of date and don`t reflect modern on-page SEO best practices (you should see the keyword-stuffing) or brand standards, so they need a complete overhaul. I don`t think we currently have the bandwidth to keep these sites updated on a regular basis. But the points you make could support a good argument to grow our team - being able to niche down, test and compare would be extremely useful.
  
  
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  Adam J. Humphreys: I think you answered your own question in the first part around competition. Consolidate and have strong category descriptions. 301 redirect to either the same page or one with the same relevant information. You will lose very little link equity if it’s the same content and redirected properly. Page structure and content does matter though. Whatever you do make the right information easy to get to with little work. We are an instant gratification society.
  
  
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  Samantha Landa: Thanks a lot for your insights, Adam!
  
  
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  Buth Main: Google recommends to consolidate pages and content. So, you can use 301 redirects and I can say it a good strategy. It works in many cases. But that`s not an easy thing to do. Also it takes several months for Google to reevaluate the changes of a site. So, it will difficult to recognize that you`re kind of on the right track. A split test doesn`t help you because it is a business site that have to make money. Anyway there is no detailed info to give an advice. You can redesign the main site and add anchor links to boost organic traffic traffic. This is why SEO is hard. You can`t predict result. But you can follow recommendations Your second question... both options work for SEO. Again, it depends on the target audience, needs of your visitors, your SEO marketing strategy.