Decided by Annette, August 8, 2026. Binding for all five Boulder sites. Any session building a page on any of them reads this first.

Source: the keyword gap audit of 2026-08-08, which found eight topics where two or more of these sites would have competed against each other. Full working at annettethompson.com/hub/keyword-gap-audit-2026-08.

Why this exists. boulderdowntown.com and bouldercoloradousa.com show up as competitors for both boulderthingstodo.com and tasteboulder.com, because those publishers keep things-to-do and dining on one domain. Ours are split, so each carries a fraction of the authority and they surface on each other's keywords. All five sites currently rank for essentially nothing, which is exactly why the boundary is cheap to set today and expensive to retrofit once there are rankings to protect.

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The one-line rule per site

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The eight contested topics, settled

1. Chautauqua Park (40,500 group, difficulty 31). The most likely collision in the portfolio, because the park is legitimately both things. outdoorboulder takes trail intent (trailhead, parking, shuttle, Royal Arch, dog rules). boulderthingstodo takes visitor and events intent (concerts, the dining hall, the historic site). They cross-link. Neither publishes a general "Chautauqua Park guide".

2. Hiking (14,800 group, difficulty 1 to 5). outdoorboulder owns it outright. It surfaced in boulderthingstodo's and newtoboulder's lists too, but it is one shared prize, not three. Currently held at positions 11 to 27 by a home-services company, which is why it keeps appearing everywhere.

3. Dining (27,100 and 12,100 groups). tasteboulder owns it outright. It surfaced for boulderthingstodo, outdoorboulder and newtoboulder purely because the competing publishers run dining sections. The others link to tasteboulder rather than publishing a roundup.

4. Coffee (4,400 group, plus boulder coffee 2,900 and the best-coffee pair at 1,600 each). tasteboulder owns it. This is the easiest one to breach, because a relocation guide has an obvious editorial reason to write "where to get coffee when you move here". Do not. Note the four 4,400 variants are one synonym group, not four opportunities.

5. Downtown and Pearl Street (49,500 group, difficulty 4 to 34). boulderthingstodo owns it. tasteboulder's only legitimate slice is "restaurants downtown boulder" (difficulty 15).

6. Altitude and elevation (9,900 group, difficulty 1). outdoorboulder builds the page (acclimatizing before a hike). newtoboulder links to it and covers only the long-term-resident angle. Do not publish two elevation pages on the same easy SERP.

7. Boulder Reservoir and Boulder Beach (14,800, difficulty 3 and 7). Genuinely contested, since the intent is summer swimming rather than trails. outdoorboulder takes it as outdoor recreation, boulderthingstodo links to it. Either answer was defensible; this one is now recorded so it is not decided twice.

8. Gold Hill (2,400, difficulty 26). Both a place to live and a day trip. newtoboulder keeps the living-there page, boulderthingstodo runs a separately titled visit page, and they cross-link.

Plus two standing rules

• Weather (135,000 group, difficulty 14). No site chases the head term. That result page belongs to weather.com and the NWS, and the low difficulty score hides the intent mismatch. The winnable versions are different queries on different pages: trail conditions and seasonal access on outdoorboulder, "what winter is actually like in Boulder" inside the newtoboulder relocation guide, and "best time to visit" on boulderthingstodo.

• Medical versus leisure spa. medspasboulder owns everything under medical supervision; boulderthingstodo owns non-medical spa-day and massage as a leisure activity, and links across for the medical side. "boulder skin bar" (1,900, difficulty 4) sits exactly on that line and is medspasboulder's most reachable keyword: it should claim it with a dedicated clinic page before boulderthingstodo touches the spa topic at all.

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How to apply this

• Before writing any page, check whether its target keyword belongs to another site above. If it does, link there instead of writing it.
• Cross-link, do not duplicate. Where two sites both have a legitimate angle (Chautauqua, altitude, Gold Hill, spa), each writes only its own angle and links to the sibling.
• A shared keyword group is one prize, not two. If the same search volume figure appears in two sites' plans, only one of them gets to count it.
• When a genuinely new conflict appears, decide it once, add it here, and say so in the commit message. Do not decide it twice in two sessions.

Still open, deliberately

Whether boulderthingstodo.com and tasteboulder.com should be one domain rather than two. The audit's structural finding is that our competitors consolidate exactly these two topics, and two thin sites fighting a consolidated competitor is materially harder than one strong site. The boundaries above make the split workable. They do not make it optimal. That is a portfolio decision for Annette, not a keyword-mapping decision, and it is not made yet.