Aggregated Data Portals and SEO
Portals present data from lots of different sources, and can provide the user a great place to see what’s going on around the web. From an SEO perspective, portals are considered by a lot of people as SEO spam.
If you have a portal, your SEO tactics need to be at the top of their game, because so much is going against you from the get go. Since portals often don’t provide any unique content, search engines typically see them as low on the trust scale. If you maintain multiple portals on multiple key words, SEO can be problem. There are lot of concerns, from hosting them all on the same server IP block, thus looking like a link farm to maintaining unique content on each domain. One of the best strategies is to look as each portal as a separate site, and make sure that they are presented that way to all the SEO indicators. Use unique sitemap.xml files, use unique naming conventions, use unique IP addresses, even use varying geographic locations for the servers. All these factors will divest your portals, and reduce negative impacts. The line search engines draw between a useful portal and search spam is very narrow, and you really have to understand SEO to be successful in the portal space. The more key performance indicators you can pull away from dynamic to human driven, the more useful the portals will be, and the more significant your standings will be in the search engines.