Publishing many web sites can be a very challenging process. There are times when organizations have a larger main site and decide to operate one or more smaller sites (aka microsites) as well. Other organizations publish a number of microsites without having a larger site at all.

Whether publishing microsites are in violation of the search engine webmaster guidelines depends on the details of the implementation and the reasons for doing it. Let’s look at a few of the reasons why people do it, and map out the likely search engine viewpoint on them:

SERP domination.. As most of our readers know, the search engines do not like to show more than 2 pages in the SERPs for a given web site. The main reason for this is that the search engines want to show their users a diverse set of results. After all, if a particular web site is not what a user is looking for, showing it to them multiple times in search results is not likely to result in a satisfied user.

Some organizations want to obtain more than 2 results and use microsites as a way to dominate the SERPs. This is done by publishing sites that chase the same sets of keywords, and therefore have similar content. As you might guess, this is against the search engine guidelines. If you choose to pursue this path, you need to do so with great care, and be prepared for the consequences if your group of sites are discovered and linked to you.

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