Linking multiple small domains to main portal

[Lobo]

I wondered what peoples thoughts may be on the dilemma I've been playing with and if what I'm thinking is a valid solution?

I have a portal for festivals, along with that I bought up quite a few valid domain names for each of the festivals and was wondering what would be the best way of using these to drive traffic towards the main portal?

On the portal each seperate festival has it's own microsite, giving details, what's on etc ...

Therefore I thought perhaps I could use these domains on their own valid DNS just putting up the main home page for the microsite on it, yet if anyone clicks on a link it connects off site, external linking back to the main portal where that page is actually held ..

Basically, do you think that would work? Is that google valid? or would I be penalised in some way? I'm thinking that may be a decent way to mop up any type in traffic but as I've never tried it before I remain uncertain...

Love to hear peoples thoughts on it or indeed any other ideas to use these domains as a marketing tool..

[tedster]

If you're hoping to get each small domain to rank on it's own, you may have quite a challenge. I tried something like that a while back with many domains for local events and a central domain -- and I never got the smaller sites to really grab and hold in the SERPs. When we moved each locale into a subdirectory on the one, central domain, things started jumping.

Your mileage may vary, of course, and it's been a few years since my experiment -- my gut feeling on Google's evolution since that time is that things may be even more difficult today.

The key would be getting enough content for each microsite as well as a unique set of inbound links for each. Then giving each festival its own domain makes pretty good sense from a branding point of view for the local festivals. But if your purpose is to feed traffic to the main portal, that puprose can easily become clear to Google and my guess is you will struggle getting the microsites to rank.

[Lobo]

No I'm not so concerned about getting the microsites to rank, just looking for an effective way to redirect the type in traffic to the main portal which would be google friendly...

[tedster]

If you don't make any effort to "trick" Google into ranking the microsites, then what you describe makes plenty of sense and it doesn't go against Google's webmaster guidleines [google.com] in any way that I can see.