Single Web Site or Multiple Web Sites

[superstart]

Hello All, Long time looker first time poster! I have a question and hoping some experianced people can assist me in making a layout decision? I have concluded on a business plan in which I will have allot of various information to build pages or sites out of, this information comes down to one main keyword with lots of smaller keywords associated off of the main. Now my question.

To maximize adsense revenue from this information. Is it better to have one-site lots of pages or lots of site specific to one keyword? For instance, lets say the main keyword is WIGET. Should I build www.wigetred.com, www.wigetblue.com, www.wigetpurple.com and so fourth OR one main site with www.wiget.com/wigetred.html, www.wiget.com/wigetblue.html.

Each different widget definitely has enough information pertaining to it to build it own site so I am thinking this may be the way to go since a search engine may look at the site and see it only applies to this one block of information WIGETRED?

Again I want to use adsense on all the pages or sites to maximize revenue, any thoughts or suggestions?

[howiejs]

This is an ongoing battle / discussion

Each site needs to watch the TOS

The main thing is "white hat" - don't interlink your mini-sites heavily

[ncw164x]

This has been an ongoing battle and discussion for a long time.

IMHO One large main site with www.wiget.com/wiget-red.html www.wiget.com/wiget-blue.html

(note the hyphen between the directory name)
Personally I have always used underscore and it does work very well, other says hyphen is the way forward, that's up to you to decide.

For long term maintenance it is easier to maintain one larger site than to have a network of smaller one's, you have got more of a chance getting your network of sites banned from google than having a large site removed as long as you keep within the guidelines.

Having adsense on multiple sites is not a problem, but you will still get targeted ads on your larger site which match the keywords, text or phrase you have optimised the page for.

[diamondgrl]

i can't say out of personal experience, but i would think that one site is a safer strategy. while you may appear at one level to be spreading risk with multiple sites, you're increasing risk by being seen as doing something that doesn't make a lot of sense from a user perspective.

as for hyphen vs. underscore, again, no hard data on any difference, but underscore is inherently flawed: an underlined hyperlink is much more legible with a hyphen than an underscore

[FromRocky]

One thing I'm sure is to save some money initially from buying domain names if you use a single site.