This week we'll look at an all too common misconception: the idea that building out a microsite to target a particular keyword, and then using that site's strength to link to your primary site is a worthwhile strategy.
In the video Rand discusses issues such as link pop, domain diversity, and strategy while looking at how and why microsites are frequently used ineffectively.
SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - The Microsite Mistake from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.
UPDATE FROM RAND: I've written a bit more about this topic here - Root Domains, Subdomains vs. Subfolders & The Microsite Debate
The advice in this video makes a major assumption that you are using maximum rank as your goal, rather than coverage of results.
Use of multiple mini-sites can be a valid strategy to capture more than one spot in organic search by creating a greater diversity in your content. Especially in searches where the amount of optimization falls greatly through the top 10 sites.
Even in the hypothetical that Rand gives the likelihood that re-directing JoeWsBlog is going to significantly improve the rank of JoeW.comis dubious, particularly when you are going from 2 entries to 1 entry for JoeW.
Thanks Rand, great post.
I am right in saying that you are advising to use a subdomain to target specific keywords?
I work in the kitchen appliances sector and if I were looking to target a particular product e.g. WMD960G, would creating a landing page with rich targetted content with a URL of wmd960g.appliancesonline.co.uk be the best approach?
Also are you saying that use of microsites not to be used? If I had say 4000 microsites each targetting the specific productand then pass a appliance type link to the main site, would this create enough diversity?
I am right in saying that you are advising to use a subdomain to target specific keywords?
No. Subdomains are not the best approach either. Google will see wmd960g.appliancesonline.co.uk and www.appliancesonline.co.uk as two separate domains. It's not quite as bad as a completely different domains, as google does recognize the root domain and there is some value there, but your best options is: www.appliancesonline.co.uk/wmd960g
Also are you saying that use of microsites not to be used?
Yeah. That's exactly what he's saying.
If I had say 4000 microsites each targetting the specific productand then pass a appliance type link to the main site, would this create enough diversity?
What? This is exactly the practice he is saying not to do. Put all those products on your main site. No microsites!
Thanks for the info much appreciated.
I understand where you are coming from regarding the use of sub domains. Interestingly a SEO company that provide ad-hoc SEO advice called Big Mouth Media suggest when creating targeted landing pages to use sub-domains as the best approach.....hummm.
Any other people had experience with the use of sub-domains?
wow. i'm surprised that a company with such a reputation as a "leading seo company" would advise something like that. Look at the BBC - when they brought out iplayer did they go for iPlayer.com or even iplayer.bbc.co.uk? No, they went for bbc.co.uk/iplayer which was the right thing to do from an SEO point of view coz all the millions of links their videos get pass strength to the domain as a whole.
Not that the frickin BBC need any more strength! LOL
We've used sub-domains effectively for PPC landing pages as we don't expect/want to these pages to rank in organic - much different purpose. However agree with Rand on the fact that sub-domains are a negative for building content and domain authority.
This has to do with Big Mouth's business model. They tend to stay 'off-site' in that they build directories themselves, or on the sites of the big media companies that they work with (newspapers, cable, etc.) and grow results for those single destination points. It's a much more efficient and profitable exercise if you can get a high authority newspaper to stick businesses on their site in a directory, rank locally and pass that traffic then to try to delve into each site individually.
No microsites!
Rand didn't exactly say that, he just said, 'No microsites that attract lots of links.' Actually, that's one thing I wish he would have addressed better. When is it appropriate to use micro sites, and for what purpose? This is a rhetorical question for me, but I think there is a time and place for microsites that is not mentioned in the video, and thereby leads people to think that microsites are altogether bad.
I think that the point that Rand is making is not to view microsites as a link building tool for your main site. They will not pass the link juice on to your main site that the original links provide the microsite itself. However, a microsite could be a reasonable venture if it is developed as a stand alone entity, built around a niche that your main site is, say too large to target effectivly. I have not tried this approach, but I would love to hear from anybody who has.
Andrew - steer clear of sub domains theyre not what they used to be with respect to rankings. sure theyre cheap (even free) however their seo benefit is limited.
Hi Rand et al.
I completely agree with the strategy here with the exception of one massive point. Commercial sites cant be resource based and as a result wouldnt naturally generate inbound links from external sources.
this is a problem i come across time after time and is the reason why micro sites give site owners the freedom to be less formal in their marketing (especially on blogs) which in turn encourages people to link in... an issue that you simply cant replicate on a commercial site.
Totally agree here - e-commerce sites can be problematic to make 'link worthy' whereas the informality of a blog can.
I agree that for a linking strategy this is a bad idea, however with the right subdomain and page title (www.blog.joestoasters/stainless_steel_toaster) that is frequently updated with only stainless steel toaster content, odds are this page will gain all the benifits that Rand pointed out on the left side of the whiteboard. So what if you are not passing that link juce to your main site?
I think the issue is that many people think you can't convert from this page. This just isn't true, the conversion ratio may not be as high, but it's made up by increased traffic.
In our company we have 500 or so such pages that beat our site by a factor of 5x. Our site draws traffic from a few hundred keywords and about 50% are branded search terms. Our blogs drive traffic from a few thousand keywords and only 5% of them are branded.
If you want people to go to your site and view more toasters...that's where you just have to follow basic conversion rules...test test test.
(we are a B2B company and don't sell toasters) :-)
I'm delighted somebdody as respected as Rand has finally knocked this on the head ; something many of us have probably been saying to clients/employers etc for a long time.
While there are many good reasons for microsites, I feel they can all be countered by a good long term on-site strategy.
Even if you run a pure e-commerce site there's ways to get respect. you can reach out to your web community through social channels, get on people's side by adding some genuine value to the conversion, give more things away for free etc,
The problem with doing this for many of our clients is that they are either too conservative or bound by laws and can't create creative link bait on their main blog. So doing micro-sites is a good strategy once you've done all the rest of the necessary work on the domain. It certainly shouldn't be a main strategy but it is a tool in the arsenal none the less.
For main content type stuff, I completely agree with Rand. It's a waste to start a blog on a separate domain. But for risky link bait or less conservative content, the micro-site is often the only option.
I agree here with Rand's theory...you're much better off putting the blog on your main domain and making it look different than the rest of the site (or less commercial). Then any links you get benefit the entire domain...and improve all of your pages rankings. it's hands down the best short and long term approach.
sure but then you run the risk of your non commercial blog content being listed before you commercial pages. im sure clients really dont waht that to happen.
Rand addressed that issue a while back when he talked about not having your blog cannibalize your main site keywords.
Here's that link: https://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-corporate-blogging-tips
edit: nevermind, it's been mentioned...
Chiming in way late here, but: that depends in part on content strategy and what terms you're targeting.
Very interesting Rand. I would like to hear more about the right way to use Microsites to generate traffic.
Generally, most benefits of microsites are even more beneficial through the root domain. And it is a lot easier to build links to one site than multipe sites, and the mass of those links will carry far more value in aggregate.
One popular use of microsites has been for offline marketing with catchy or cleaner URLs... often easier to remember a single domain name than a URL path. But those can just as easily be 301'd from the start to the destination on the main site.
When it may make sense is when looking at it from a thematic or topical point of view. A company with lots of diverse products or services that aren't related might be better off with multiple sites, but that is less about microsite and just general business...placing toasters and paperweights on the same site might be a disconnect, unless you are a discounter/department store or general retailer with lots of categories.
While some people may not link out to a particular site b/c of the commercial implications... plenty of people link off to all kinds of commercial sites everyday without hesitation, and those who are savvy enough not to or to take in these kinds of considerations, are often savvy enough to connect the dots between your sites as well.
Completely agree. This could be plus one reason to use microsites for promotion of a standalone product
I can't believe I'm just now seeing this video. Great answer to a HUGE question. This comes up almost daily in our SEO agency. I've heard both things, I've seen other SEO companies use this, but never really knew which stance to take. Thanks for the input.
It's very hard to get deeplinks into an ecommerce site so the micro sites are a good solution to that. Microsites are also a great tool to rank with different (micro) sites for a keyword (not the very high competitive ones) on G's first page :o
We often hear of a PageRank damping factor used in G's algorithm. Why would we want to pass our incoming juice through two damping equations? That's like choosing 81% of the link juice over 90%.
Rand hits the nail on the head by mentioning trust and authority on the domain level, along with the importance of a natural and diverse link profile. I guess the tradeoff is between the linkability of a standalone website, and the synergetic properties of the single-domain approach.
The use of microsites is very popular for communicating promotions, timely products etc. in traditional media - they should simply register a catchy, memorable domain name and 301 it to the content hosted on their main website (something Rebecca covered last year with movie microsites I seem to remember)!
Hi Rand,
Good edition of WBF as usual!
I would agree that attracting a tonne of links to 1 different URL then linking to your "money maker" from that doesn't make much sense. However I found myself a little confused if this was all you were saying or if all microsites are bad.
I have worked in one particular industry for a long time and the "unbeatables" all have obvious microsite networks with each microsite attracting numerous high quality links themselves. So a microsite strategy does work if you have the resources and $$ to implement no matter how 2001 it might sound lol
My $0.02
From my experience, using microsites can help you acquire links that you will never get to your main site.
In general, people tend to be more generous in linking to a non-commercial websites.
Guy
Looking for the other side of the story? - Like when Microsites are good?
Rand answers it Here
Rand nail it again. I think the point isn't to never use other domain than your main domain but when you want to drive specific keyword related traffic to one page it's better to do it on the main domain. I have seen a lot of company use a domain by product and this can be very harmfull when you have 20-50 products/microsite of like 10 pages each...
Great advice Rand,
I often see clients making with similar problems...
I like to advise clients also, by not receiving links to your core site, you potentially de-value your original page on the original domain, as in theory your pages compete against one another....
I would say -- it depends.
What you miss here is the attitude of the masses. Let me give you an example.If you have 10 great tools that are also on your website, what I'd do is buy 10 domains like great-tool-1.com, great-tool-2.com etc, and spread the word about them. Then of course they will all link to my money making domain with the relevant anchor.
At this point you would slap me right? I'd tell you why I'd rather do that then what you suggest:
People that link to web pages are techy enough to know that if they put link to this tool in a forum, their blog etc the domain is earning PR as well as traffic, and it fills someone's pocket. The chances are many people won't do it for that particular reason. The forum admins will remove the link, the blog owner will remove the link, etc etc. I am not talking this would pass all the time, but the link building chances are increased.
But at the end -- as I said it depends. In some cases what you advise is the better option, sometimes it's not.
Really? You think forum admins and blog owners are going to be less likely to remove a link because the domain name looks less commercial or something? Are you actually going to put in the time to create quaility sites at all those great-tool-#.com websites? To me, this seems even more spammy then just linking to the main domain.Fundamentally though, your problem is that you're going after forum and blog comment links. Don't waste your time with that. Invest your time in aquiring authoritative quality links. Here's a good starting point: SeoMoz Link Building
Blogs & forums sounds reasonable for the tool example. And I don't think you got it right -- I won't look for the links myself, but I think it's quite natural for tools to spread on the blogs and forums before hitting the CNN homepage ;-)
great idea, then once they rank high 301 those bad buys to the mainsite versions :)
Mark: bait-and-switch? Really? Black-Hat techniques like that will be picked up by the algorithms eventually. Not a wise long-term solution, but sure, go ahead for a short term gain on your casino sites.
Edit: Wait, maybe you were kidding. Yes. You were probably kidding. My bad. :)
lol bait and switch a black hat tactic? Are you having a laugh? Black hat tactics are far more sophisticated than that - it's incredibly nieve to compare the two.
It's not "nieve", and the correct spelling is naive Many experts in the field refer to it as black-hat. Here are some sources:
Rand calls it a black-hat "spam tactic" in this post.
Jane Copland describes it as "unethical" in this post.
Search Engine Watch has an article on "Search Engine Spam" and has it listed as a spammy technique.
I write more on the topic in a comment below...
black hat technique, really? I think in this case, Rand should reconsider the Re-writing of the Beginner Guide in its link building aspect.
If you haven't heard quite white head colleagues use this technique especially when a competiotion or a "donation campaign" is over
so what else should you do if say you have a microsite thats a time senstitive offer thats expired?
301 is the only way to go - its hardly black hat, its just comon sense.
Great! I like the discussion and it has definitely inspired me to do a bit more research on the topic. Ok, black hat is potentially a bit of a severe term for this practice. We can definitely call it grey-hat though. Anything that is intentionally deceptive in order to influence PR is going to fall into a grey area.
I'm certainly not the first one to call bait-and-switch blackhat. Rand calls it a black-hat "spam tactic" in this post.
Jane Copland describes it as "unethical" in this post.
Search Engine Watch has an article on "Search Engine Spam" and has it listed as a spammy technique.
All I am saying is that it fairly well known in the industry that bait and switch can be a shady practice, and I believe that shady techniques won't stand the test of time. I suspect the engines may one day be able to pick up on these and devalue the 301s.
But! Yes, I can agree that there are some cases where you need to 301 an entire domain back to your original site. How will the engines be able to determine which are legitimate, and which are spammy 301s? I'm not sure. So, perhaps this is one that they will never be able to tackle.
In ecommerce, I have little choice but to go this route - like dtodorova says, if I had huge calls to action for people to buy from a microsite hosted on a subdomain (for example), I'd imagine the number of potential, willing linkers would seriously drop.
On the previous 3 or 4 microsites I've created, taking a soft sell approach whilst providing them with plenty of in-depth content is actually converting into sales, and as the sites look a little more impartial, links aswell.
Also, a site I created for one niche product (it was never built for links or sales initially, it was to demonstrate being more pro-active than our competitors) - the UK part of this corporation really liked it. The result? The Australian arm of the company want to use the site content, with a full credit link coming back to our site.
Though I guess that one is once in a blue moon ;)
Hmm, why not drop the huge calls to action, take a soft-cell approach, and add all that valuable in-depth content to your main site? If that content is generating links, then wouldn't it be better for you to have those links feeding your key e-commerce site?
I would have to say that I agree & disagree with this.
Although maybe not always the perfect SEO tactic, Microsites are still a very important part of online marketing.
If I'm looking for paperweights, and I see two websites:
officesuppliesonline . com/paperweights and paperweightsonline . com
Which one am I more likely to click on? They could both be from the same company.
Like Data Services said, I would like to also see a post on the right way to use microsites.
(BTW I have no websites related to office supplies or paperweights)
I would love to see micro sites for linkbait or even for optimum PPC practices type video tutorial.
One of our new sites did a microsite strategy and from what I can tell the issue (in my opinion) came when they did them on huge networks build on subdomains, and subdomains of subdomains. So in my opinion I would not suggest putting them on subdomains as it seems like recently (2 months ago) Google went through and slapped the subdomains from a PR1-3 to gray bar. This resulted in a significant drop in reported inbound links and indexed pages. But as Rand points out, if they are done properly they can be beneficial for certain types of sites.
you can blame ebay for that, a few months back (maybe a year or so) they dominated by having thousands of sub domains on just about every subject.
I think it all depends on how you go about doing it. Subdomains have many benefits, although I wouldn't create dozens of them to target different niches within a niche.
And from my understanding and conversations with Googlers (and Rand awhile back) links into sub domains do count to some extent toward the link equity of the primary parent domain as a whole.
Excellent breakdown. Fishkin is obviously pointing to the fact of having done a 50-100+ link building campaign to the mini site and loosing the pass through link juice to the main site.
He is suggesting that, instead you add on new pages to the main domain.
IE: mainsite.com/WHATEVER.html to keep the juice focus on the overall mainsite contained.
You guys are talking to whitespark like he didn't watch the video. Keep it simple. Don't put work into a minisite, put it into your mainsite and add more links to the new main site pages.
One could create a minisite for networking back to the main, but wouldn't be easier to just create better inbound links the main in the first place? Yes.
That was a good session. Here is what I have seen and the question it gives me. If you have a large site that is well optimized with say a page rank 5 for California real estate and then the underlying page for San Diego real estate has a 3 page rank you will come up lower on google than a web site called www.sandeigohomes.com with a rank 2. That is just an example. With me seeing this it leads me to believe that it is better to have a ton of microsites soley from an optimization standpoint. There are other reasons why one large site would be better to the consumers. Can you give me any thoughts as to why I may be wrong or what I am doing wrong.
The xyz.com site has a Google Webmaster account which is fully functional with a sitemap integrated analytics and good organic rankings. We would like the micro site to help increase those rankings and get it own rankings as well.Would you recommend integrating the Micro site into the same webmaster account?
HELP PLEASE - How will this effect us???The site is due to change over in 2 days. I NEED ADVICE QUICK.
I need someone to talk to about my sub domain delemma. I have a site I have had for 15 years. The organic is great with the domain expecially the root domain www.mobileation.com the trouble is I have hosted the sub domain for the catalog pages at shop.mobileation.com for years. I am moving the site and am about to change to hosting the whole site as www.mobileation.com. I thought I could do 301 re-directs to solve the issue of changing links to products adn categories but I just found out I do not have access to the root directory of the new host location. It is also asp pages on a windows platform so I guess it is hard to make 301 redirects? Anyhow, I have to decide now if we should stay shop.mobileation.com and host the index files for www. elsewhere like we use to or do I just let it all go to www.mobileation.com and allow it to sort itself out? How will this effect us???
An oldie but a goodie. Adding this simple explanation to my armoury for when I'm next hauled into battle with some pretty fierce and opinionated non-web/non-tech colleagues.
Great post - really valuable advice. I liked it so much that we quoted it as a resource when writing about SEO and microsites in our recent guide on microsites. ( https://microsites.readz.com ) So thank you for the valuable info! I’d love to see you folks publish some updated views on microsites, since this is still such a popular tool and is being more and more used in a 'proper' white-hat way to promote brands.
Really nice post, thanks.
Best,
Bart De Pelsmaeker
CEO @Readz
Certainly the video is correct. But in my experience, building a microsite is much more effective to rank high when the site is severely focused on a theme.
I have a medium site that never could get ranked high for anything because I blogged about many different things and got links naturally, when I have a competitor with only 5 pages that is number 1 consistently.
Currently I have little sites with less than 10 pages that are outranking sites with pagerank 8 like download.com (as I remember) for the themed keyphrase.
I think, Google add some sort of "theme trust" to the links they see, so the exact same link is worth different when done to two different sites and that is something completely logical because why should be relevant a link with anchor "buy viagra" to your themed site based on children?, so the closest the link reflects to the theme of the site, the more weight it carries, this is only a supposition.
I can't tell you how many times I hear clients say "can't I just set up a Blogger/(fill in your favorite free blogging platform here)" account and then link to my main site. I've told them for years exactly what you suggested. I think this problem stems from the "blogging" craze that happened back in 2004/2005 and wrote about it back in 2005 in Blogging - A new way of doing the same old thing.
There is nothing like building good, unique, solid content into your main domain name. Trust and authority is much easier to come by when you get it from multiple authoritative sites and lead that juice back to your domain name.
If a site is large enough and knows that it can rank highly for the terms on the microsite then it's worth doing from a commercial point of view. This is Michael's point.
But Rand's example did mention a blog, or non-commercial content in microsites and why it's a bad idea. Because ranking well for terms in such sites don't bring sales and you're better off benefiting from the link juice.
We made this mistake years ago with a separate site for support related stuff. And the forum grew to over 100,000 posts and gets a huge amount of long tail traffic. If we had the forum on our main site we'd get alot more click-thrus to our commerical pages - plus the obvious gains in links.
We are about to relaunch our site and I'm moving the forum back onto our main domain with other content. I intend to 301 the old domain and hope Google won't penalise us for that as we really have no choice.
Where was thie whiteboard 8 months ago? I learned this lesson the hard way when I built a microsite for my blog services. Several weeks ago, I finally caved and folded up the microsite into the main site. Now its less of a hassle to maintain everything instead of having to remember 2 gazillion different logins, as well as the SEO benefits too.
I can see where mini-sites creation solely for the purpose of feeding links to your main site is counter-productive under most circumstances.
But if the mico-sites are targeting specific keyword phrases that are in the keyword rich domain name then it is easy to pick off "keywords" by ranking well for that particular batch of keywords. And then linking to your main site to create "authority" in the field at large.
I will buy all the existing .com domain keyword phrases that have a decent keyword phrase popularity that are available to register and monitor the drop names. It is amazing how many 300-600 keyword phrases (occassionaly a few thousand) you can still get through keyword research and monitoring drops.
Here is what i am talking about
Main site- FruitsGalore.com sells lots of fruitilious fruity fruit
BuyApples.com, RedApples.com, GreenApples.com, MailorderApples.com etc etc
BuyOranges.com, FloridaOranges.com etc etc
FruityFruitBaskets.com FruitGiftBaskets.com etc, etc
Each of the above will be able to rank very easily for their respective keyword domains, especially when they are in the lower competition keyword phrases. (and it blocks your competitors from the domain names)
So you are picking up easy search engine traffic and as a bonus you are getting highly targeted relevant keywords rich links back to your main site. And yes it is then possible to occupy a few positions in the top 10.
And no, no one is going to link to your stupid blog on buying fruit baskets so you aren't going to get those massive links, and if you do, they won't be relevant.
I don't sell or codone the selling of fruti.
thanks
Scott (greater) in my own mind
This is what I was getting at in my comment above. I would love to see an seomoz post on this type of micro site usage!
I think Rand also illustrated something that I see quite often, the "2001" ideology of SEO. I have found that these types of people are harder to influence (but not impossible) to the newer ways of search strategy than someone with no SEO knowledge or experience.
Oh, and nice new intro!
nice post rand! here is an idea i have avoided how about the client trying to pass the linkjuice from joew.com to joeblog.com because then they will have more visitors to their blog... and well thats important.
I have found with some clients that the only way to attract links that were valuable was to have a blog rather than a commercial site. There are many good sites who will not link to a commercial site because they do not want to appear to be endorsing a particular product or company. I have far more success generating valuable links by offering a blog which is used as an intermediary to the main site.
If the only object is link juice or PR or domain diversity, than eliminating the microsite is necessary. But if you are trying to attract good links and you need to do it with a blog (or other info site) than this is probably a better experience for the user. For me it's getting the right traffic that trumps my SE rank.
There's an answer that is always right to this (and many other) question: It depends. I think that many made that point already. The point that I'd like to make is why not delving a bit deeper and trying to define precisely when building satellite websites make sense? For instance; local search engine optimization & franchises are cases where geo-targeted micro-sites make obvious sense. Some other examples can be found here: https://www.seosamba.com/seoblog/?p=6
Another consideration, more of a strategic nature, is missing here I think; the need to build redundancy and continuity of traffic for on-line properties relying on natural searches.
I agree with the overall message of this WBF but if you scale this scenario up so you have many microsites and each microsite becomes one of those unique domains linking to your own site, then this quickly becomes a greyhat technique that works. Particularly the microsites are distributed across 100's of domains, IPs and Class C's each of which can also utilize orphaned subdomains to mascarade as parasite hosting and generate a huge number of links. Microsites are effectively what the BHs out there build all day long!
Easy to understand, and wonderfully helpful. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.
I have quite a few sites that are using some of the methods you describe, and I can see that the diluting is bad.
Microsites have never been a good SEO strategy. As a marketing strategy I've always seen the merit in microsites. That said I mostly agree with Micheal's general statement about link buildings place in SEO, or rather, it not really even being SEO... it is web promotion. To think that link building is part of SEO is to think Chevron is an automobile company because oil is needed for a car to run. I also have a probem with using absolutes for implementing SEO because it is turning out SEO's who have quit thinking and are just cookie cutter versions of their Guru teacher. Rand, has some good ideas but.... beyond spam nothing is absolutely right or wrong our job is always to weigh the pros and cons after listening to the client.
Hi,
Subdomain is not the best choice.Google see the keyword,back links and rankthe website.I think if you get back link to your main <a href="https://www.cyberdesignz.com/">website</a>.It will be better.
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