Creating multiple microsites to target different Salt Lake City neighborhoods may seem like a smart local SEO strategy, but it often weakens your overall online performance instead of improving it. Search engines evaluate the strength of your main domain over time, so every new microsite starts with no authority, no trust, and no ranking history. Rather than concentrating your content, backlinks, and SEO efforts in one place, microsites spread those resources thin and slow your progress. They can also create competition between your own pages when similar services or topics appear on both your main site and separate microsites. This makes it harder for search engines to determine which page should rank, potentially reducing visibility and leading to unnecessary duplication. On top of that, microsites demand extra maintenance, including separate hosting, security, updates, content creation, and promotion, all without the advantage of an existing audience. That means more time, more cost, and often less return. Link-building becomes less effective as well, because instead of sending authority to a single strong domain, backlinks are spread across several weaker properties. In most cases, businesses achieve better SEO results by strengthening a single primary website with dedicated local pages rather than managing several disconnected microsites.
source: https://www.seonational.com/the-downsides-of-microsites-in-seo/
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