All my research is telling me multiple sites with product or service specifics is much better than one site selling everything.   Additionally you can get good links between the sites.  Anyone care to comment?  Additionally, does it matter if they are hosted with the same company or should multiple hosts be used?

It's a tough call....

A single larger site is much easier to rank as it generally would carry more natural 'weight' - outside of SEO it is obviously easier to maintain and tracking metrics and conversion becomes exponentially more difficult with many sites... so MORE EXPENSIVE... most certainly

For me I recommend to do what makes sense... If you sell Cameras I would not suggest a different site for each brand or for DV Cameras, Digital Camera, Traditional Cameras, Camera Supplies...

..but if you had a vertical like say.. Photography sevices... that I would take out from the core possibly...

You will not game the engines and somehow get higher rankings through multiple site schemes. It has been done to death by spammers and the SEs are wary of it.

SO do what makes sense and get on with the business of creating a quality product/service/resource ... because in the end, THAT is what is going to make or break you

I think you confirmed what I am thinking.  Our core business today is mobile products.  We are branching out into other very different markets.  Unless we change our main site to more a universal type site, I don't think we will get the results we want.  An example is a product we found about a year ago called Xlear.  It is an all natural sugar substitue that reduces plaque dramatically, changes your mouth PH from acid to alkaline that has many beneifts, tons of studies done on the benefit of this product.  Even with keyword research it has ranked terribly on our site.  I think because it is so different from our core business, it needs to be moved to a new site?  Additionally smaller niche specific sites are more easily maintained.

Moblie Sugar? Ha!

I would DEFINATELY move that off of the site.

Thanks.  I checked out your site.  I will be most likely talking with you about a project.

Well.. You should host with different sites to prevent problems like when one host's server is down, other sites wont be affected..

cross linking sites on the same server can be perceived as spam by SEs if the content / theme is similar.

If the content/theme is not similar then the sites should not be linked to each other.

I'd suggest 1 site for everything under one brand. If you're worried about server downtimes then replicate your server to the other side of the world and load balance at the DNS level.

Then, later down the line, create another brand, host it on another server and go into competition with yourself

Northie wrote:

Then, later down the line, create another brand, host it on another server and go into competition with yourself

Wow.. now that is what i call super..

I also had a notion that having multiple site's would work me multiple income sources, but even if there is a benefit... it is not worth your efforts and inputs. I have enough content to differently host 3-4 complete sites not related to each other specifically but still could be linked. But rather I prefered having a singlr big site and to promote it wisely. It is same as getting impressions on different sites or on pages of a site. Plus you can concentrate on user experience on your site and reduce the bounce rate.
So it's better to work hard for your visitors and provide them nice and rich content so that they return and recommend.