Is it advisable to create network of sites??

Hello People,

I have been researching on this topic but I have not got a concrete answer.

Would like to know your suggestions on this.
Is it advisable to create network of sites to promote your main site.
I have seen many good sites do that and than give a link to their main site.

Many here will say to focus your efforts/time/money on your content and create a great and strong website. I am a bit bored of that story no matter how true it may be.

I have a network of sites and it works fine for me as I can save time that I would spend in link hunting and I still achieve great results.

Each of the sites in my network has a different structure and content and is hosted in a different IP address.

One of my competitors has a big network of sites - all heavily interlinked. I can't find him anymore in Google. Now we get his sales and ours. It works great.

Surely depends on your intent, the size of the network and quality of the sites involved. Sites with good content and meet a genuine need and drive traffic to a quality hub site are good for seo but a bit of a nightmare to maintain unless you have the resources.

For most, I'd imagine building one strong site with plenty of good content would be achieveable and more manageable.

That's what I say.

If you are creating a network of sites make sure that they are not on the same C Block IP address and make sure you don't do lots of recicprocol or triangular linking.

If you are going down this route they need to be feeder sites.

I wouldn't recomend it as a good SEO strategy.

Content is where its at!

I blasted out a network of sites just threw up several pages of content on each. It worked well for long tails but as I have grown as not only an optimizer but a true marketer for my material as well I have grown to see the great benefit of focusing your efforts on one excellent authoratative website. This way you get the hits from the two and three word phrases which convert well.

its better to get 1,000 visits and convert 10 than to get 100 visits and convert 1

Those old network sites are still out there and they bring me the occasional sale without doing anything to them. They haven't hurt me...

I would think that it's quite common both for webmasters to host several of their sites on the same server and also to interlink. Out of the two I'd say that only the linking has the potential to cause a problem but most likely they will just be ignored.

I think that Google are aware that this situation can easily come about for perfectly legitimate reasons and it's not a big worry for the webmaster, do you disagree?

You can do it but before you do ask yourself "why am I doing it" if your answer is to gain PR or for search engines then do not do it.

The attitude if you can't see the forest through the trees..One must become the forest does not work on the web.