I hear SEO’s and SEO companies occasionally recommend micro-sites, landing sites, splash sites or some version of the same. They hope to create several geo-targeted or keyword-targeted sites that bring immediate success and high placements. I usually discourage such actions as I feel it’s an attempt of SEO companies to simply generate more work for themselves and create a bohemith array of sites that the client would never be able to manage themselves. We encourage clients to build pages on their website, that have the same geo/keyword focus, but keep them a part of the ‘mother ship’. This allows each new page to benefit from the established credibility, pagerank and longevity of the main site.
Rand from SEOmoz recently posting about link value, highlighted one of the principles of search engines that makes this a good idea:
“As you’ve likely noticed, search engines have become more and more dependent on metrics about an entire domain, rather than just an individual page. It’s why you’ll see new pages or those with very few links ranking highly, simply because they’re on an important, trusted, well-linked-to domain. In the ranking factors survey, we called this “domain authority” and it accounted for the single largest chunk of the Google algorithm (in the aggregate of the voters’ opinions).”
I couldn’t agree more. Higher results are gained by creating a new page on the main site, rather than a separate micro-site. Branding and financial issues aside, this is one of the biggest reasons we at TK cringe when we hear a client tell us a company wants to come in and create a bunch of micro-sites.