Registering a bunch of domains and pointing them at one massive site.

Google ramifications?

[skibum]

Let's say it is a company that owns playgrounds all across the US. They have one massive corporate site that has loads of information about all the playgrounds, other attractions nearby, operating hours, and the best swings and slide for the kids. Then they create separate sites on separate domains to represent each playground. They've done this for about 15% of their playgrounds. The sites are good enough and distinct enough to get listed in the major directories.

Then they decide to register domain names from all their playgrounds, develop sites on some, and simply point others to the main corporate site.

There is no problem and it is in fact beneficial to them to creat a 5-10 page site about each playground that provides regional information and info about the playground with a link back to the corporate site and links to other local attractions.

We would recomend they stay with that strategy, however, if they decide to cut some corners and just put up a splash page with a link to the related section of the corporate site on 100+ domains, that probably wouldn't cause any problems unless Google stumbled onto those domains.

If they link from corporate to each individual and back that's probably trouble and if they link all the playgrounds together that's probably trouble as well.

Any suggestions on the best way to guide them to stay out of trouble?

[korkus2000]

I would 301 redirect any domains that don't have good content enough to be consider stand alone. If you have a couple of pages on the site then just don't link back from the main domain. Make sure all of the domains don't link to each other.