I have been thinking for a while about this topic. Both solutions have both pros and cons. If we would choose hockey for an example. We could register one domain for each team and build a whole site for it and link them all together. Then we would stand there with 20-30 sites, each optimized for a specific keyword. But we also got a domainfee to pay and therefore we will lose some money. On the other hand we could create one big site with the latest news about hockey. Here we could create subpages domain.com/:team:/ about each team. With this method we would probably get more inlinks since everyone would link to one domain and not spread it. So, to sum it up. A lot of domains optimized for specific keywords or a big site with all the information? What do you prefer and why? Would you choose different if it was about, lets say cellphones?
I'd go with many domains, because: 1. Keywords in the domain name gives you higher ranking, there keywords in url - not that much 2. You may use these domains to put links to other resources 3. Submitting in directories for example (or any other resource where you can add domain only) can bring you links for each domain (but not to one big) Sure there are munises in this, like, as you said: some cost for domain names, more effort to build links and site support needed, etc. But I think it is worth this cost and time. I choose this way if domains count is not much (may be up to 10-20).
From experience, I would say go with 1 site. It is far too much extra work to have that many websites. With one website, all your work helps all of your pages.
Having lots of domains won't be difficult because domain and hosting is relatively cheap. However, optimizing them and branding them can be very costly. My decision would be affected by the budget for the whole project.
probably many that way you can build link juice off each other. how ever the problem will be doing seo work for each one to establish each.
Stick with the single domain. If for any reason you decide to spin off each of the team "sites" to an individual site, you can always 301 the old page URIs to their new destinations. Why? It'll cost less this way (domain and hosting fees). You won't have to spend as much time marketing the one domain as you wil with each individual site. If you properly inter-link each page within the site, you'll have a strong internal linking architecture set up that can get you a lot (depending on the size of the site of course) of targeted anchor links that have the keywords you want. Granted they won't be "as strong" as links from external sources, but every bit does help - especially when starting out.
If you have the time and effort involved in properly setting up a powerful network, that would be the best option. Few people, companies and organizations do. 1 site would be easier and more affordable. It could also do as much as a powerful network, if done right...yahoo.com