Going Nova: How Websites Become Networks

The Microsite Debate addresses the artificial aspect of when brand-strength Web sites spawn child sites, microsites. The debate does not, however, really look at the natural evolution of sites that evolve into networks.

Having gone through this process more than once, I have to admit that it has never struck me as a major force in Web marketing. And the fact that so few people have studied or commented on the phenomenon leads me to conclude that it is probably undervalued; at the very least the process is not well understood.

A Website naturally spawns newer, smaller sites for a variety of reasons. For example, if you’re reorganizing content in an effort to provide greater focus on your site’s primary brand or theme, you may decide that PiggyBack Content that has accreted over the years deserves a home of its own. Some businesses also sell off some of their revenue streams, thus forcing them to purge their sites of relevant content (that will be replaced by another site from the new owner of the revenue stream).

In rare situations I have seen large sites (including my own) become lopsided, inducing performance issues. For example, suppose you offer a very popular Web tool in addition to a blog, forums, articles, etc. Traffic to the tool may impact your server’s performance, so spinning off the tool to its own server (and site, even if it’s only a sub-domain) may be less expensive than upgrading your server.

I don’t recall ever seeing a site spin off relevant content. That is, I haven’t seen anyone split their content down the middle and say, “Articles starting with A through M will go here and articles starting with N through Z will go there.” Maybe it has happened. I would be interested in learning more about such a sub-division.

In the science fiction fandom communities I have seen sites spin off news sections, forums, blogs, image galleries, and fansite directories. I have also seen sites that were hosting content spin it out to third-party services (almost never with long-term success). More often popular sites hosted through third-party services consolidate content into one account under a custom domain.

In business communities I have seen sites spin off forums, merchandising, and newsletters or discussion lists. I have also seen businesses launch new sub-brands (new services and products divisions). Site-spawning doesn’t always reflect business growth — it may only represent a need to reorganize content and manage it better. It might also represent a fiscal initiative (such as Yahoo!’s recent sell-off of popular assets).

Why Should A Sub-brand Site Be Created?

The decision to spawn sub-brand sites should be made very carefully. Every new site — as most people in our industry understand — requires its own marketing and link building. Ideally the sites should have their own visual identity, in terms of design. Admittedly, Visible Technologies has been experimenting with site-spawning for the past several years. I don’t actually know how many sites we operate. There is always chatter around the office of spinning off something or consolidating something.

The larger a company becomes, the more diversified its revenue streams, the more likely that it will create sub-sites and sub-brands. These microsites may be sub-domains or they may be freestanding domains. Some corporations own hundreds, sometimes thousands of domains — many with their own unique content and designs. Superlarge companies maintain multiple Web design and marketing groups that may or may not collaborate with each other and a central SEO team.

Corporate Brand Networks Are Not Link Building Playgrounds

Inexperienced SEOs are often tempted to fight for tight interlinkage between all these sites. Although I have often advised people that it is okay for a small business to interlink its handful of sites, when you have a mega corporation that operates dozens or hundreds of brands, interlinkage is a different story.

The sub-sites should be used to promote mother brands. The core corporate brand always counts as a “mother” brand but it may in reality be a grand-mother, great-grandmother, or distant ancestor. Does it make sense for all the leaf-node brand sites to point back to the corporate site that really acts as a brochure for investors? Each company has to make that decision — there is really no SEO reason to do this or not do this.

Conversely, does it make sense for the corporate brochure site to point to 300 sub-brand sites? Although there are ways to do this (for example, creating a series of feature articles about each sub-brand or just publishing an HTML Brand Map), not every corporation chooses to acknowledge the descendant brands. These are decisions that must be made at the marketing level. The SEO professional should not seek to interfere with that process for the sake of link building.

How To Leverage Multi-Brand Value Into Linking Content

Does that mean we should say nothing? Absolutely not. We explore relevant possibilities with our clients and let them make the final, informed decision about where to place links within their network. My experience has been that a client will never place as many links as the link specialists want. That’s just the way it is. You take what you can get and move on.

When a brand family is large enough, it may make sense to create a brand news hub. Most if not all large brand families set up internal reporting processes where dozens, sometimes hundreds of people receive daily news updates that mention members of the brand family or corporate community employees. These news distributions may summarize news stories, blog posts, and social media trend figures.

In their raw forms these daily reports would be inappropriate for publication on the Web (Intranet publication would be fine). However, a dedicated staff person is probably responsible for these reports. It may make sense to hire 1-3 more people to set up and maintain a public-facing site that encapsulates all the brand family news for consumers, media, and investors.

Such a hub would attract links and it would provide a logical place for brand families to engage in the kind of systemic linking that many SEO specialists long for. The brand sites themselves would not be drawn into the linking process, so marketing teams would be able to integrate corporate linking into their Internet strategies with little to no internal resistance.

Here are a few examples of corporate news hubs.

• Eli Lilly corporate news hub
• The Walt Disney Company and Affiliated Companies corporate news hub
• Google Blog
• GE News

Each organization takes a slightly different approach and you can find many examples among smaller and similar-sized companies. I find that the General Electric news section — while not a separate site — is one of the least conservative models. Many brand families do not want to publish references to third-party news on their sites.

We have found that if a client has a separate news hub (either sub-domain or domain) they are more likely to include links to third-party news. The farther removed from the corporate brand the news links are, the better. But each client has their own comfort level.

Corporate news hubs are an underutilized Web marketing structure. They are certainly resource-intensive but I feel they provide an invaluable contribution to Web marketing when handled properly. They can be as simple as a blog or they can be very complex categorized news link, press release, and feature article archives.

Some companies have gone so far as to create standalone press release sites for themselves. These sites make great resources for companies that engage with the media on a regular basis. They can also give those companies the freedom to engage with the Web by encouraging people to reproduce or link to those press releases more freely. That is, you usually encounter fewer intellectual property rights concerns with press releases, and that helps companies build value into all their brands.

Things To Consider When Building Corporate Resource Hubs

I dwelt on the corporate news hub model at some length to illustrate the core reason for spinning off content: it can serve a unique but vital purpose in the overall marketing strategy. I would not advise someone to create a site that won’t grow. I would not advise someone to create a site that cannot be properly maintained. You look like you’ve lost business momentum if you create a special site and then never update it.

But how often should a sub-brand site be updated? That really depends on the nature of the content. For example, let’s say that a large corporation is bringing a new line of products/services to market that are tied to new scientific initiatives and discoveries. A good branding strategy would include a special Website that explores that scientific progress at the consumer level. Imagine adding 5-15 feature articles, some image galleries, and a few discrete but helpful links to the new brand site. This kind of information should be freshened up on a quarterly, semi-annual, or annual basis — depending on how rapidly scientific and industrial knowledge increases.

How Marketing And Science Can Coexist Within A Brand Family

A brand site should not usually attempt to be an authoritative voice in science unless the brand or brand family is closely related to the science. For example, people would be more likely to trust commercially formatted scientific literature from Johnson and Johnson or DuPont than from, say, a company that distributes its products through television infomercials and Web affiliate marketers.

On the other hand, creating a faux science resource in order to strengthen an unknown brand or sub-brand is a risky proposition. It might elicit scathing rebukes from skeptical bloggers and consumers. A secondary, brand-supporting resource like that has to be as honest, impartial, and accountable to the consumer as possible. Some idiot will inevitably dream up a conspiracy theory but the more transparent the resource is, the more likely people are to ignore the conspiracy theorist.

Some technology companies have created experimental sub-sites that became brands on their own. One well-known example from the world of search was Altavista, which DEC created in the early years of the Web because that is the kind of thing that a company full of computer engineers would do. Altavista eventually became a major search engine and a standalone brand (although Yahoo! now owns Altavista).

Allowing the employees to play on the Web in a structured environment encourages innovation and may open up previously unexplored revenue streams. The risk-to-benefit ratio may be too high for some companies, but in the technology field some companies (including Google and Yahoo!) have developed significant brand sites or sub-sites by allowing their employees to explore their strengths and imaginations.

Some years ago I hosted a discussion list for Robert E. Howard scholars. The world-wide community of REH scholars is not very large but they generated a prolific number of intense discussions. Although that community went on to host its own discussion list elsewhere, I often received requests from list members for copies of old discussions. Several people asked me to put that content on the Web.

For several reasons I never created the archive, but I’ve found that some old academic communities and informal engineering groups did archive their ancient discussions (or members of the lists did, perhaps without other members’ permission). These ancient archives may provide still useful, relevant information. They may or may not develop brand value. But a company that generates a lot of research information may find it useful to create such a publicly accessible archive.

Here are a few examples of corporate research hubs:

• Yahoo! Research
• Google Research
• HP Labs
• GE Global Research
• IBM Research
• DuPont.com: Central Research & Development

Research hubs may be completely open to the public or they may combine public and restricted-access content. It doesn’t matter. Don’t confuse a corporate research hub with a consumer science microsite such as the model I described above. The consumer science research site should help clarify the science behind a brand’s products or services; a corporate research hub should be less focused, more comprehensive.

Things To Consider When Building Corporate Research Hubs

Of course some research-intensive companies may only focus on science for a specific brand. In that case their research hub can serve the dual purpose of clarifying the science behind the brand, but as the companies grow they may expand their research hubs to include more topics and become less brand-supportive. Corporate research hubs should put professional and scientific credibility first and brand-building second.

These kinds of Websites are sensitive and complicated. A rational SEO specialist should tread very carefully when exploring linking possibilities. I would, in fact, first ask what the corporate policy is regarding links from research hubs to marketing resources. In some environments you may find there is a very solid policy wall between the two environments. Don’t argue with it. Don’t contest it. Don’t try to sneak through it. Just acknowledge that it’s there and exclude the research hub from your linking strategy.

If you’re working with a company that is about to launch a research hub, you should have a very critical, in-depth ethical discussion with the client. What is their objective? Why do they want a research hub? SEO for a research hub needs to take non-commercial query language into consideration. A client may really want to use a research hub for marketing purposes — that is a risky proposition, in my opinion. The scientific community may not appreciate a marketing site disguised as a research hub. No responsible SEO technician should propose or support such a strategy, but if you are asked to implement it you may want to get the client to release you from liability in writing — just in case.

In Conclusion

To sum up, we can say that growth drives the expansion of Websites into networks. The growth may occur both in Web content and provider functions, or it may only occur on one side. When the Web content is not growing as fast as the provider functions, an SEO technician must work with the provider to create appropriate new content. In my opinion it would be counter-productive to simply replicate content (even by shifting paragraphs of text around and using new images) across multiple sites. You’re not really creating new value for the consumer.

There is so much more that can and should be said on this topic. But as I mentioned above, no one (including me) seems to have studied it much. I’m only just now beginning to put my thoughts together in an organized fashion. And I have to admit that’s surprising to me, because I have engaged in this process numerous times through the years. I think there must be an underlying science to it that is just waiting to be discovered and articulated.

Disclaimer: Some of the companies mentioned in this article may be current or former clients of Visible Technologies. The information presented here is not based in any way upon any relationship between Visible Technologies and any of the companies mentioned above.