Back to Wordpress, a multi-site installation

Well, some of you know I love to test new things, and Jekyll was one of those things. I have been blogging on Drupal for years, and then I switched to Jekyll for this site.

I have created it with multiple section some kind of mini-sites. I mean it is like a sub-folder installation of Wordpress Network.

Each sub-folder features its own atom feed, and its own index. But I think this is not optimal for the visitor, as if someone subscribe to the main feed, he might get updates from sections he just do not care about.

So, here comes one question, is it better a site with multiple sections or multiple blogs focused only in one topic each. I have read some advices about this topic, and most of the sites focus on SEO. From the SEO perspective, both approaches have their pros and cons. Wikipedia, is like the one site with multiple topics, it gets so many back links that is a really strong domain, and almost anything it covers it will rack first or second in Google search results. But, on the other side, Google loves sites that focus on one topic. Even though I am not thinking about SEO now, it is good to always consider it a little at least. So, there is middle point, if you have one domain, actually sub-domain for each topic, you will still be able to create a strong domain and brand, according to Google it is now treating sub-domains the same way as sub-folders. And a good example is about.com, you have different topics one per sub-domain, and I think this is a better approach for the reader as it is easier to focus on one topic at the time, and subscribe only to topic you might be interested in.

The problem with this is that usually sub-domains is harder to maintain than sub-folders. Here is where Wordpress comes in again, even though I love Jekyll, and I prefer to use it instead of Wordpress or Drupal or any other CMS, I thing that using Wordpress Network (multi-site installation) is a good way to manage all content under one platform, one database, and still be able to offer sub-domains (one per topic) to readers.

There are a lot of sites that say that is not a good idea to use Wordpress multisite to separate topics (or categories), but I really think it is a good option. Yes, is harder to maintain, and maybe not the real idea behind a Wordpress Network, but I think is good for readers, and we (bloggers) should write for readers, not for Google.

So, I think I will be keep this site as my technical blog, a continuation of Go2linux, Where I will write about Linux, Mac OS X, and CMS, coding, development and sys admin tools.

I think the food section, and photography section will move to its own sub-domains. I already have Food and some Geek news.

I will run that as an experiment, and see how it works, I can always redirect all those post to this site and move them here if I realized that the experiment is not working.

Does anyone has an opinion about this topic?