Between 2005 and 2010 microsites were a must for search engine optimization. A microsite is as it sounds, a smaller site specific to one of your keywords. For example, I do vacation rentals on the Big Island of Hawaii. I could have my main site to optimize for broader keywords and then have microsites for more specific keywords. What this looked like for me was a site that covered an entire resort and then microsites that covered each community within that resort. It worked great and I had top rankings in most of the keywords I was going for.
Then around 2015 Google began to give less weight to the microsites and more weight to sites that had more content, which pushed companies to move all their content to one website. They also gave less weight to the domain name itself. I used to run 6 microsites and 1 main website. Now I run 2 microsites and the 1 main website.
Since consolidating I did see a rise in the rankings for my main website and obviously and life was easier working with less sites. While I did keep the two microsites, I have put no effort in them to add content, etc. What is interesting is that within the last 6 months I have seen an increase in ranking for those two sites across multiple keywords and I have even seen one began to receive an authority listing from Google. In the image below, you can see my microsite, www.kolea.com, receiving authority for keywords related to Kolea. My main site, www.waikoloavacaitonrentals.com, is placing second with some authority.
I know this used to be a common occurrence, but I had not seen this in years. Is anyone else seeing a similar pattern?
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