A Copenhagen exporter rarely owns a portfolio of brands. What it owns is a language and market estate — a .dk carrying the domestic business, a .com carrying the export business, a .de a distributor once asked for, an old address from before the rebrand, and a careers page sitting on somebody else's server. Nobody was ever handed the job of running them.
Advice about running several websites assumes they are siblings: same market, same buyers, same measure of success, differing only in scale. A Danish company's estate is not that. Its properties speak different languages to different buyers at different stages of life, and nobody in the building has ever had authority over all of them.
Five properties, and no one whose job this is
Take an ingredients maker in Brøndby, west of the city, supplying enzyme and culture blends to industrial bakeries and dairies. Its buyers are production and quality departments in Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Norway; Danish orders are modest. Ask the commercial director how many websites the company has: one. Ask finance which domain renewals it pays for: five.
- The .dk carries the home business. Danish datasheets, the food-safety documents customers pull during an audit, and everything the account base already knows how to find.
- The .com carries the export business. The English catalogue a purchasing manager in North Rhine-Westphalia reads before requesting a sample. Commercially the important one, built last.
- The .de exists because a distributor insisted. Registered in 2016 after the partner argued that regional bakeries would not click through to a foreign address. Six pages, translated once, untouched since.
- The old domain refuses to go quiet. The trading name changed in 2018, but the old address still takes visits on old product codes, because those URLs are printed in specification sheets in customers' quality binders.
- The careers page is on a recruiter's domain. Vacancies for process engineers and lab technicians live there, and that page outranks the company's own jobs section for the company's name.
None of that was decided. It accumulated, one reasonable-at-the-time choice at a time, and it describes most exporters of this size in the capital region.
A blended figure across five properties describes none of them
The first instinct on seeing a multi-site dashboard is to look for the total. Resist it. These properties answer to different rivals, in different languages, at different points in their lives, and adding them produces a number with no referent in the world.
| Property | Language and market | Who reads it | Contested by | A good result looks like |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| .dk | Danish, domestic | Existing accounts, auditors, journalists | A nameable handful of Danish suppliers | Documents found quickly by people who already buy |
| .com | English, export | Purchasing and production abroad | Every ingredients house selling into Europe | Entering shortlists that were previously closed |
| .de | German, one market | The distributor's own customers | German suppliers with local sales teams | Supporting a partner's conversations, not replacing them |
| Legacy domain | Mixed, historic | Anyone holding an old specification | Nothing — it competes with its own successor | Every old code landing on its current equivalent |
| Careers page | Danish and English, hiring | Candidates and their friends | The company's own jobs section | Two routes to the same vacancy, not two vacancies |
Read down the last column and the point makes itself. A rise in average position across the estate could mean the export catalogue broke into a German shortlist — or that the legacy domain climbed for terms it should not rank for at all. Opposite events; one total cannot tell you which occurred.
Half the work is finding out who can already see what
Before any of this can be organised, somebody must answer a question the company has quietly avoided: who holds the keys. In a firm this size the honest answer is a small archaeology dig, and it is genuinely half the project.
| Property | Who set it up | Who can still get in | Awkwardness |
|---|---|---|---|
| .dk | A marketing manager, 2019 | Her private Google account | She left in 2021 on reasonable terms and will probably help |
| .com | An agency, one campaign in 2019 | The agency, at owner level | The engagement ended; the grant never did |
| .de | The German distributor | The distributor's IT contractor | The domain is registered in the partner's name, not yours |
| Legacy domain | Whoever built the first site | A shared hosting login, three people | Nobody is sure which of the three still uses it |
| Careers page | The recruitment agency | The recruiter alone | You are a tenant and always will be |
A workspace does not dissolve any of that, but it makes the mess visible in one screen. Verified properties gather under a group of linked Google accounts, so one consent flow covers Search Console and Analytics instead of five separate acts of remembering which login belongs to which domain. Individual sites can then be shared with named addresses — and, the part that matters after the archaeology, that sharing can be withdrawn again.
One workspace, one project per property
With the keys collected, the organising idea works precisely because it is unremarkable: each property becomes its own project, and people get seats onto the projects they need. The estate stops being a folder of bookmarks and acquires an inventory.
Projects — the unit that keeps the estate legible
For an estate whose properties share an owner and nothing else.
- Every property reports separately. Clicks, impressions, rate and position exist per project, so the export catalogue is never averaged with a domain kept alive purely to redirect old codes.
- Cross-property views remain available. A ranking score and a global position across the whole domain portfolio sit alongside the per-site figures, with a twenty-eight-day trend curve, for when a summary genuinely is what you need.
- Sharing is per site and reversible. A named address can be given one property and nothing else, and the grant taken back when a contract ends — the fix for that agency still holding 2019 access.
- Dashboards keep themselves current. Background workers synchronise continuously, so nobody has to press refresh before a Monday meeting.
Seats deserve thought rather than generosity. The German distributor is a partner, not a colleague; the .de project alone is both a courtesy and a boundary. The recruiter needs nothing. The commercial director wants the .com and would only be confused by the rest.
Tags cut across the estate; folders would not
An estate assembled by accident does not sort into a tree. The .com is export, English and mature; the .de is export, German and neglected; the legacy domain is dead but not gone. Ask a filing system to put each property in one box and you will spend a fortnight arguing about which box.
Tags avoid the argument: a property carries several labels at once, and because a site tag filters the entire workspace, choosing one reshapes every view rather than opening a folder. The distinction sounds pedantic until you want all German-language properties in one figure and all export properties in another, knowing one property belongs to both.
Language
What the pages are written in, which decides who can read them and which rivals they meet.
- da, en, de
- Two properties carry two labels
Market
Domestic against export, which is the split that actually separates comfortable numbers from difficult ones.
- home, export, partner-led
- Filter here before any board review
Stage of life
Growing, maintained, or being wound down. Very different questions are worth asking of each.
- active, dormant, retiring
- Stops dead domains skewing a trend
Who controls it
Yours outright, shared with a partner, or hosted by somebody else entirely. Governance, not marketing.
- owned, partner, third-party
- Flags what you cannot fix yourself
Keep the vocabulary short and write it somewhere a new colleague will find it. Thirty labels is a second mess layered on the first, and the fourth axis is the one people skip and later wish they had kept.
The indexing budget is shared, so it has to be rationed
Here an estate stops being an organisational matter and becomes an arithmetical one. Submission capacity in the indexing tools is an account-level allowance, not a per-site entitlement. Five properties do not each receive a quota; they compete for the same one.
One allowance for the whole account
For estates where several properties all have URLs waiting to be found.
- The ceiling is the account's, not the site's. Adding a sixth property does not raise it. Every URL you push for the legacy domain is one the export catalogue does not get that day.
- Batches are large, the day is not. A single submission carries up to 10,000 URLs, which means a queue drains over several days rather than arriving at once.
- Sitemaps are parsed, not merely accepted. Upload a file or point at an address; nesting is followed three levels deep, and a job takes in as many as 1,000 sitemaps.
- Jobs run two at a time. Two sitemap jobs process concurrently with up to twenty waiting, so the order you start them in is a decision, not a detail.
Rationing it is a commercial decision dressed as a technical one, so make it deliberately. A plausible split for the ingredients maker, in a month when the English catalogue is expanding, might look like this.
| Property | Share of the day | URLs a day | Why it gets that |
|---|---|---|---|
| .com export catalogue | 50 % | 500 | New English pages are the growth plan |
| .dk domestic site | 20 % | 200 | Steady, already discovered, changes slowly |
| .de partner site | 15 % | 150 | Six pages plus whatever the distributor adds |
| Legacy domain | 15 % | 150 | Old codes need their redirects fetched once |
| Careers page | — | 0 | Not yours to submit |
| Total | 100 % | 1,000 | — |
Check the column: 500 and 200 make 700, plus 150 is 850, plus another 150 is 1,000. Over a thirty-day month that is 30,000 URLs across the estate, the export catalogue's half being 15,000 — more than a catalogue of this kind contains, which tells you the constraint is not volume but sequencing. Front-load the legacy redirects into one short campaign, get them fetched, then hand that capacity back to the .com.
A report per property, and an audience per report
Separating projects is not tidiness for its own sake. Four different people want four different documents, and until now all four have received the same one with the same misleading total at the top.
The export line only
Three months of the .com against the same quarter last year, with the domestic figures deliberately excluded.
- PDF, comfortably inside the 250-row limit
- Band movement, not click totals
The German property alone
What the partner's own site does, sent to the partner, with your logo and colours on it.
- Shared as a seat, not as an attachment
- Withdrawable when the contract changes
The legacy redirect list
Every old code, where it lands now, and whether a crawler has been back since the rule was written.
- CSV, because somebody will sort it
- Up to 10,000 rows per export
One question, once a quarter
Whether candidates searching the company name reach your jobs page or the recruiter's.
- A single query, not a report
- Decide whether you mind the answer
Know the export limits before promising anybody anything: tabular formats run to 10,000 rows, while the server-rendered PDF stops at 250. Send the PDF to whoever needs the conclusion and the spreadsheet to whoever intends to argue with it, and let the report builder put your own logo and colours on anything a partner will see.
Each project carries its own running feed, which is where an estate finally gets a memory. New placements arrive with the donor's rating and traffic attached, reports appear as they generate, and to-dos sit alongside them in three honest states: active, deferred, discarded. Filters narrow the stream to links, files or tasks, and full-text search reaches back over everything said in it.
Where an estate holds genuinely different technical states — a live catalogue, a neglected partner site, a domain existing only to redirect — the reporting question and the engineering question stop being separable, which is where technical work on the estate begins.
Common questions
We only have two real websites. Is a workspace overkill?
Count again, including domains you pay for but do not think of as sites. Most Danish exporters reach four or five once redirect domains and partner registrations are added. Even at two, the value is not the dashboard — it is that separating the domestic property from the export one stops you reading a blended average that describes neither.
Should we just shut the old domain down?
Not while customers hold specification sheets citing its URLs. Those documents get consulted during audits years after printing. Redirect every old code to its current equivalent, submit those URLs once so the redirects are actually fetched, and keep the registration renewing. Cheap insurance against a phone call you would rather not receive.
Can we add the careers page on the recruiter's domain as a project?
Not as a property you control, because you cannot verify what you do not own. You can watch it as you watch any other domain in your keyword space — something appearing in results for your own name — and decide whether that is acceptable. Many companies conclude it is, since two routes to one vacancy is not a problem. Just do not mistake it for a page you can fix.
Does the German distributor need a seat, or should we email reports?
A seat scoped to that one property is usually better. The partner sees current figures without waiting for you, sees nothing of your other markets, and the arrangement ends cleanly when the contract does, because per-site sharing can be withdrawn. An emailed PDF lives forever on somebody's laptop.
Does one subscription cover the whole estate?
Organising properties in a workspace is one thing; running campaigns on them is another. Campaign automation is priced per domain, so five properties would be five subscriptions if you genuinely wanted campaigns on all five — which you almost certainly do not. The costing side of that decision is worked through in an earlier piece on this blog. Analysis and indexing are not where the per-domain cost sits.
Where to start with an estate like this
Begin with a list, not a login. Write down every domain the company renews, including those nobody thinks of as websites, and against each put the language, the market, the stage of life and — the column people skip — who can currently get into it. That table is week one's deliverable, and producing it will surface at least one property somebody had forgotten.
Week two is the uncomfortable one: the former colleague, the agency whose access outlived its contract, the distributor holding a domain with your product on it. Re-verify what you can, ask for what you cannot, remove what should have gone years ago. Only then set up projects, apply a short tag vocabulary, and give people seats matching what they need to see.
After that the work becomes ordinary. Analytics, rank tracking and indexing in one panel means the estate is described in one place rather than five, and per-property reports reach the people who asked for them. Expect four to eight weeks before anything you start now shows measurable movement, and expect the German property to move last.
If your own list has more rows than you expected, put the properties somewhere they can be seen side by side and still read separately. Sign in and set up one project per domain, starting with the export property, and add the others as their access questions get answered rather than waiting for every one to be resolved. An estate half organised and honestly labelled already beats five browser tabs and a spreadsheet nobody trusts.
