Today's question comes
from [? Gommflow. ?]
[? Commflow ?]
is asking, what's your opinion
about microsites who target
specific topics?
Let's say, a key word like spy
cam for nanny and the domain
name, spycamfornanny.
Is it bad?
I think if I had to express my
ideas, I would go with the
recent post that Vanessa
Fox did.
The title of her post
was, Microsites--
A Bad Idea Most of The Time.
And I think she explained
it very well.
It was very long post. I
encourage you to go read it.
But essentially she said, look,
the amount of time that
you're putting into individual
microsites is probably
relatively low.
So you're not giving a lot of
love, a lot of care, a lot of
attention, and as a result that
sometimes comes through.
If you're developing, you know,
500 different sites, you
don't really have the time to
put loving polish on each
individual site.
What I would recommend instead
is typically to build up one
site that can be known as an
authority or can be known as
the brand name in that
particular area.
You can certainly try
microsites, but a lot of times
they don't necessarily
rank all that well.
They can be a little harder to
build up the reputation for,
people don't always want
to link to them.
So there's a lot
of reasons why.
Sometimes you forget to
renew the domain name.
If you're a large company and
maybe you're doing, like, a
Super Bowl promotion, do you
want those links going to that
other domain or do you
want those links
going to your own domain?
Most of the time you
probably want it
coming to your own domain.
So it's a lot less overhead
in terms of managing.
Everything's all in one spot so
you can configure things a
little more easily.
So for me, personally,
based on the
experience that I've had--
seen a lot of spammy sites
over the last 10 years--
whenever people are putting a
little more attention into a
smaller set of sites, in my
experience it tends to do
better and stand the test of
time a little more than if
somebody's just churning out
a ton of these so-called
microsites.
So my advice, personally, would
be lean a little more
towards developing a site that
people can remember or
bookmark or tell their friends
about rather than just some
site that exactly fills the
two key words that you're
trying to optimize for.