small static sites to promote full-blown e-commerce sites

[ryanfritz]

Please advise - Our business has a successful web site named chandelierparts.com. We show up well in the search engines for many of our product names and keywords. Some of the items we sell have to do with "crystals", "swarovski". "prisms" etc, etc.

So my boss wants to create all these sites such as swarovskicrystals.com, crystalprisms.com (basically a domain for every product we sell). He wants to point all these domains to our main site---not a redirect, but a basic page that is on topic and a link saying something like "see all the products here" that links to www.chandelierparts.com. Part of me thinks all these small domains are a waste of time when we should be focusing those efforts on the www.chandelierparts.com domain....???

[SemAdvance]

Hi

Single pages will typically not rank very well in Google and other engines unless the keywords are long tail.

The other issue is Google will see all of your self linking and possibly think your playing a game which you aren't.

Focus on the core site because in my eyes no business that exists is perfected....there is always room for improvement.

You could suggest increasing sales conversions by 2 or 3% as this would definitely have a much better ROI than the multiple pages idea.

[ryanfritz]

Thanks,
I agree, Im simply trying to gather enough third party opinion to disuade my boss from having me create all these sites that may end up actually harming our Flagship site...Im with you, I'd rather spend time on the main site

[incrediblehelp]

Not a good idea long term. Creating this "mini-network" of website is frowned upon in most of the major search engines and really will not gain you much at all as far as IBL's are concerned.. In fact in some engines like Yahoo it can get you demoted.

[nashville]

I did that once and it was the worst mistake of my life. I am back to one site and things are so good.

[ryanfritz]

thank you guys for reiterrating my opnion on this matter (whats an IBL again?)

[timmathews.com]

IBL is an "In Bound Link"

[incrediblehelp]

thank you guys for reiterrating my opnion on this matter (whats an IBL again?)

In Bound Link

[ryanfritz]

along the sames lines as a "mini-network" I feel a redirect is also a bad idea, but some mention a 301 redirect is ok and possibly good. Can you offer advice on the idea of redirects and search engine response...I mean a redirect with all these mini domains. (we show up in the top 3 for all these mini domain names, so Im not sure why my employer would want to risk the idea of hurting these rankings) but I want to hear what others have to say...

[janeth]

While i agree with spending time on conversion I am not so sure that creating the many sites is a bad idea.

What if someone should different types of jewelery and created a site that talked about nothing but diamonds. It could be a site with 30 or 50 pages about diamonds and then it linked back to the mains site.

The mini-site would be like the diamond expert with many pages about diamonds. It would rank for keywords the main site could not rank for.