Minisites - 301 Redirect or Links to Main site

[OzDave]

Not sure whether this is considered black hat or not but I know it is done and I would like to know which is the most effectrive method.

If you were to acquire multiple sites in the same niche to your main site (either by buying existing sites or perhaps registering expired domains) which already had strong aged backlinks, is it better to either:

a) 301 the new domain to the main site (or a subpage perhaps)

b) create 'minisites' on the new domains (trying to mirror the URL structure of the previous incarnation if possible to scoop up and remaining inbound backlink juice, on seperate IPs to the main site as well) and then place several links to the main site & subpages.

Would the decay of link juice through 301's mean you lose benefit that way or is it the same as a normal link?  Would the 301 method mean any IBL's into URL's other than the homepage be lost?  The homepage of the minisite will likely have 4 or 5 internal links so will this dilure the effect of the links to the main site?

Thanks in advance!

[AlanBleiweiss]

The amount of effort required to maintain several mini sites is not, in the long-run, usually worth the effort.  Sure, you might get an initial bump in value for those inbound links, however it's nothing like it used to be.  And over time, unless you continue to add new content to those sites, and build new unique inbound links to those, their initial value will fall off over time.

Better to try and get that content on the main site, and redirect page-to-page topical relevance with 301 redirects.  Much more efficient use of time and energy.  That way moving forward, you only need to focus on adding new content to one site, and building new inbound links to that one site.  All the inbound links benefit the entire site, not just one mini-site's worth of one-off link value passing.

[OzDave]

Thanks for the quick reply.  Agree with you entirely reagrding time and effort however, just for the sake of the exercise, if we take that out of consideration which do you think would have a greater effect.

Say 2 weeks after doing one or the other, which would have a better impact?

Thanks again

[AlanBleiweiss]

Impossible to say.  Every site in every market is unique.  Every topic within every site is even further unique.  That's why the best practice is to go with the known quantity value.  One site, laser focused effort all on that one domain.

[RyanPurkey]

If time isn't a factor, and you're able to create similar content on your own site, you could 301 all the old pages that had existing links into new, applicable pages on your site.  This would probably grab you the most link juice in this scenario because you'd be attempting to address the most links and pages as possible.

Creating all those mini-sites wouldn't just be tedious from a time perspective, but also in terms of user experience and brand.

[OzDave]

Thank Ryan,

Does that mean registering 100's of expired domains with backlinks and 301-ing them all to the main site would be a viable link building strategy?  It shouldn't in theory because the original 'votes' were to the expired site not the new site.

But how would Google algorithmically work this out other than just devaluing heavily a 301 redirect from one domain to another.  And if they did that surely the minisiste would be the best option?

Thanks again

David