I was wondering if it would hurt my ranking if I develop other sites and link them to my site? For Example I work for an education company and we have a main site that is ranking well. So I wanted to develop a site on Photoshop and link that site to the courses on the main site. Will my main site loose ranking because it has the same content? Or is this the same thing as having doorway pages? Any advise would be greatly appreciated.

Correct me if im wrong, but i guess that if different web pages have the exact same content is considered spam.

But linking your main site to your courses site is a good thing (but watch out you dont make a LOT of links).

My plan is to load the micro site with content and link them the to courses on the main site. It to many links to the main site not good? What concided a lot of links.

Why not place the content you would place on micro sites within your main site and make it better? If you are looking for quality links then you are going to have make the micro sites quality sites with good content and good links pointing to them. Seems like this effort would be better spent working on your main site as oppossed to starting new ones.

Thanks! Would you think putting a new link called "Articles" Then place all my content under that link? I just did not want to clutter my main site.

My plan is to load the micro site with content and link them the to courses on the main site. It to many links to the main site not good? What concided a lot of links.

Hi Mocgiit,

Please allow me to add my observations regarding the point of this thread. When taking on this project, are you focusing on the end-user (visitor) or the search engine rankings you desire? To me it seems fairly transparent that the latter is your goal. Your idea has been tried many times and rarely works, with the exception of huge sites that span different enough topics that they end up benefiting from "huge" sub-sites, as David wisely points out.

I personally would focus on making your site easily navigated by humans and spiders alike, and thus compelling others to want to link to you. Break down your content by subject matter and dedicate a page to each major area, and try to increase your traffic through means such as PPC and other marketing. As the quality of your traffic increases, so will the inbound links, and further qualified traffic. Your idea of an "Articles" folder on the website that serves as a "More information" page would probably work, but make sure you provide an introduction to the deeper content, and capitalize on your internal linking and anchor text to help establish relevancy.

Good luck!

If you do go ahead with this I would suggest using different hosts for your different sites. By interlinking sites that are on the same IP block/host might give you a negative result in the SERPs.

Take care,

Brian

would hurt my ranking if I develop other sites and link them to my site
If you're willing to remain "under the radar" then it could end up helping your site. However, you must remain "under the radar", which means that you need different ownership information on the domains (different whois), different web hosts, different class c blocks, etc. There's a lot of trouble you have to go through to make sure that you remain "under the radar" so to speak.

Like previously mentioned, you're probably going to be better off adding that content to your existing site and working on getting deep links to that content.

thanks everyone. I think i will just keep building my current site. this sounds like the most logial thing to do. I just didnt know if that other tactic worked at all. Now i know it doesnt then ill just do what I have to do with the current site.

I just didnt know if that other tactic worked at all.
I didn't mean to give you the impression that that "tactic" doesn't work. In fact, there are a lot of people out there that use these sorts of tactics and are very very successful with it.

If you truly believe that you can create enough content to warrant another site then you should do it. Just don't use the same web host.

Build lots of good content, promote that content, and people will link to it naturally--and the search engines will reward you with good search engine rankings.

Think of your visitors first, though. If there's enough content for a separate site and your potential visitors would expect a separate site then fine. Otherwise, keep the content on your current site. If you keep the content on your current site then stay away from subdomains--use directories instead.