I still believe Microsite Strategy has no risks (and is worthwhile to try) if proper care and love is taken to create and maintain small websites with relevant and fresh Content (for both Commercial & Non-commercial use).

With the summary first,  lets start this topic now…

Why Microsites Exists?

• Microsites are a part of guerrilla marketing tactics or demographic specific campaigns which are used for highly focused product promotions. These mini Web sites work on a different level than the parent site and can reach audiences in new ways.
• A Microsite is a group of web pages bound together which we use for promoting a specific product or a concept carries its own URL. That’s why we need regularly updated Microsites to promote the services / products and existing brand.
• The main role of a Microsite is to create a positive impact about a brand and a product, engaging users to deliver tangible results. The message behind is that Microsites are basically used for direct interaction with consumers, superior experience and, at the end information gathering, traffic redirection are key aspects of a Microsite.
• It is perceived that Microsites are better engagement tools than landing pages.

Microsites: Exceptional Design Opportunities
Always Remember – One Size Doesn’t Fit All

• The look and feel of a Microsite can be tailored to appeal directly to its target audience. By contrast, one-size-fit-all websites are broadly designed to appeal to every possible stakeholder group that might visit; the end result is a site that speaks to everybody, but to nobody in particular. This focus means we can experiment with different designs, layouts and test how they appeal to the audience.
• Unique designs, different layouts (Can also try with disruptive) for each Microsite as per their theme.
• Positioning of Booking Engine, Contact Form, colours on the pages (+ of Buttons), different persuasion elements/workings can also be experimented.

Domain Name Strategy: Microsites
Need to have Keyword Rich Domain Names

• Microsites should be assigned keyword rich domain names in line with their marketplace positioning. Search engines used to place weight on the keywords within a website’s URL when serving results for specific keyword queries. Normally, domain name strategies they can be a great part of an overall SEO.

Localization Strategy: Microsites
Think Local

• Search engines tend to serve localized websites over internationally based ones; search engines determine ‘local’ by looking at a website’s domain name country suffix, (e.g. ‘.in’ for India), and which country the website is hosted in. Focusing Microsites on geographic regions can be a great way to localize offering and improve conversions. These Microsites should be designed specifically to perform well for search engine queries that can include city names. Microsites can also focus on geography exclusively.
• When Google spiders a website, it looks for “theme” of each page.  Once, Google has determined the theme for all of the pages it determines a theme for the entire site.

SERP Domination through Microsites

• Search engines do not like to show more than 4 webpages in the SERPs for a given web site. The main reason for this is that the search engines want to show their users a diverse set of results.
• As we want to obtain more than 4 results in SERPs, we should use Microsites as a way to dominate the search resultant pages. This is done by creating sites that target same sets of keywords, and therefore have similar content but not same.

Online Reputation Management by Microsites

• We need to dominate the SERPs for our brand name. We should be much focused on protecting our online reputation and strategize Microsites for dominating the SERPs for brand.

SEO Research and Experimentation

The filter gives heavy weightage to identify similar content, which the algo takes as the antithesis of original, unique content. That gets the scrapers but it also can get quite a few well-intentioned innocents.

As per my understanding, Google’s farmer update could be segregated into 3 parts. They are as follows:

1.       Google’s infatuation with QDF : Is the end, a new beginning

2.       Second-Class Index – Supplemental results might comeback

3.       Site-wide effect – Not to identify/promote better content

Google – QDF

We have two relatively less known concepts which Google which applies to ranking Algo for quality and relevancy – QDF (Quality Deserves Freshness) and (QDD – Quality deserves Diversity). Of-late, Google started giving more onuses to QDF as engineers working on algo got infatuated to it.
(This resulted in creating zeitgeist, Google trends, integration of real time searches into SERPS – Google Instant)
“Query Deserves Diversity” (QDD) algorithm does exist, at least to some degree. It’s used less frequently and applies to small set of results within SERPs especially in company names, product searches, and News & political searches.

IMO, Google’s farmer update applies to QDF part of the Algo.

My guess is that Google has spent a lot of time working to identify very similar pages such that they can avoid presenting multiple pages in the top results. The top results can be more different (applying QDD) in this respect, essentially leading to better results and crushing sites that copy content or don’t add much new to a given topic though they all are recent.

Indexation:

Other observation is on indexed pages.  I see that “site:us.makemytrip.com” page count has shrunk drastically post-algo-change (by almost 73%). Same case with our competitors.

Once again, supplemental results could come back. So it almost seems like they’ve started indexing site into Main index and Second-class index based on theme/uniqueness of the pages.

If this were the case, the results would now be being generated from some hierarchy of indices, and if, for a given search, you didn’t make it into one of the top indices relevant to that search, you won’t show up in the top results. You might have great content on a certain topic but if some other site has it covered better than you — or has equivalent content — you could be low in the results.

Site-wide Effect – not just Low Quality link pages

Point to note about the Google’s farmer update is the idea that search quality would improve if low quality content sites were demoted. It’s not that other content has been considered better. This was not an update that sought to identify and promote better content. Instead, Google seems to believe that by demoting sites with these qualities that search quality would improve.

This new Farm update seems to be executed site-wide, and not page-wise.
The Google Farmer Update treats great content the same way as lousy content. A content site composed of thousands of independent authors may have a varying degree of content quality. Applying a site wide demotion applies the same standard to all content regardless of individual quality.

List of  factors to be changed/modified in 2011 for website optimization and achieving higher rankings in SERPs (Search Engine Resultant Pages)

On-page modifications required after Google’s farmer updation:

• Our content on pages has to be original and of high quality to beat other competitors similar content on SERPs
• We should have unique content on all pages possible to make them crawled and indexed.
• One sites sections errors can penalize the whole site. We should make sure that all pages, content, site aspects are running perfectly all the time.

Off-page changes needed after Google’s farmer update:

• Look for new sources of guest blogging to create back links.
• Focus on creating only high quality content to be published on website
• Social acceptance and voting become more important for content/pages.

If you have other thoughts, pls share them in comments.