Mall web site services can be a real trap sometimes. I just visited some forums that are for the site owners over at www.tias.com, which is a mall hosting service. The users are upset over the fact that the Google traffic has dropped off the past few months. The problems seem to be related to the fact that all of the shops are under the tias.com domain, and the amount of optimization available to the owners is limited.

This is not as bad as some companies that offer a catalog of products and a site you can customize somewhat, but all the sites have pretty much the same content and the ability to optimize the sites is very limited. Those people, and I have talked to two in the past year on completely different systems, have real problems.

So if you are considering a mall site of some kind, find out what kind of traffic they are getting, and if you can "brand" your site with your own domain. A good mall site hosing company wll help you as much as possible.

(hristian