We touched on microsites in our Managed Sites post and sparked a flurry of questions. Attorneys are understandably confused because there’s an entire industry devoted to selling keyword-rich URL’s to law firms—along with the idea that adding more and more content is the goal. But that’s basically b.s., so buck up and prepare to let go of everything you’ve been told about microsites up to now.

Most attorneys don’t ask whether they should have them but how many. Microsites are like the technological chia pets of our time: Everyone thinks they need at least one, if not a flock and why not, they’re fun to propagate, a great conversation starter and fundamentally pragmatic, right?

Wrong. If you have multiple microsites, you’re compromising your main site’s potential by siphoning off the potency of external links and your brand (which, for Google, is your company name). If you want your primary site to attain—and sustain—high rankings, your external links need to be consistently well-fueled. But if some people link to the main site and some to microsites, each site competes against the entire web, which is a totally counter-productive equation.

It gets down to this: You want to support search goals for the main site, not for microsites. Look, if piling on more content was the answer, eventually people would be adding 1,000 pages a day. At best, that translates to a lot of noise on your channel and, at worst, Google will come down hard on you by burying your primary site; nobody will ever find you and ultimately it’ll erode your bottom line.

Tending to your main site is smart on every level: Less managing, lower overhead, anti-clutter and easier to configure with everything in one place. You’ll also be making your site far more memorable (remember branding?), propelling a more organic sort of growth via bookmarking and personal referrals. And that is pure gold.

The core reason not to launch a flotilla of microsites is this: Google is trying to protect their customers’ experience. Yeah, I know, one, two or no microsites isn’t as sexy as a chorus line of them but I guarantee it’ll amp up your ranking and your caseload.

For more info, here’s what Google’s Matt Cutt has to say about microsites.