Minisite Cross Linking Strategy?

[peteny]

I was reading a suggested tactic that says to create a mother site like...

http://www.ToyStore.com

Then create as many minisites as possible for every product in the mother site store...

http://www.EtchASketchSite.com
http://www.YoYoStore.org
http://www.BestMonopolySite.com
http://www.GetHulaHoop.com
etc...

Then interlink all the minsites, and link back to the mothersite, for one big boost in all their search engine rankings.

Something tells me Google is too smart for this. Is this an old tactic that doesn't work anymore? Is it a recommended strategy?

Is there any SEO advantage to having separate sites as opposed to just subpages like...

http://www.ToyStore.com/EtchaSketch
http://www.Toystore.com/YoYo
http://www.Toystore.com/Monopoly
http://www.Toystore.com/HulaHoop

I don't want to put massive effort into creating 40 minisites and a mother site just find that Google hates this and drops my sites. Although it may be worth doing if the sites will stay up and rank for a few months.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts,
Pete-NY

[billmcintosh]

If you can:

• Make sure to different contact info on every whois for each domain (or hide it which hurts your trust a bit)
• Make sure you put each site on a different "Class C" IP address
• Create good enough content to get indexed and stay indexed on that many sites
• Do a backlinking campaign for each site
• Make sure do do a complete backlinking campaign for your main "money" site so your mininet is hidden among all your links

Then it's worth it.

It's my experience that going through all that is only useful if you intend on re-using your mininet on multiple projects and not just a single money site.

[peteny]

Thanks for your response! Sounds like more than I can handle at this point. I'll concentrate on one main site/blog for now.

Thanks again, Pete

[tonyknuckles]

Also keep in mind that for every subfolder that you create, you will also have to re-SEO each individual folder. You are correct, this is a heck of a lot of work.