Lets say I run a site on the following domain: www.widgets.com Widgets.com has a forum, blogs, reviews, articles etc etc. The homepage of this site shows a summary of the most popular recent threads/blogs, latest reviews/articles etc. Standard stuff, nothing out of the ordinary there... However lets say I also own the following domains: www.mywidgets.com www.mywidgets.co.uk www.mywidgets.net www.widgetsonline.com www.widgets.co.uk www.widgets.net www.aboutwidgets.com www.thewidgetsite.com etc etc etc (I am sure you get the idea) Rather than 301 redirecting to these to widgets.com, would there be any SEO advantage to placing a "copy" of the homepage on these domains. With the links to articles etc pointing to the primary widgets.com domain? There would only be the homepage on these domains, no other content and they would all look the same. Like all good ideas I have, there is probably a fatal flaw here somewhere but I can't think what it might be, would search engines see this as duplicate content?
This is how I do it. You have a master website, with the best content on and optimised. Then on all the other domains, have unique content, as much as possible, and in the website content/articles, have natural links to your master site and a few of your other sites.
Choose 3 - 4 domains and put unique content, After that link them, thorugh navigation menu. Be very specific and nice targeting content on different domains. Results will come very quickly!
There is the thing, as I really don't want to maintain many sites with different content across them all there will be no "content" on the other domains rather an SEO optimised homepage that summarises the titles of the latest activity on the primary site. As an real world example, take this site and it's homepage (not one of mine and unrelated to me): www.advancedphysics.org Lets say they also have a load of other physics related domains, the idea would be to replicate the homepage to these domains and have the links on it point back to the main domain.