I agree, get a great domain name that is short & user friendly and concentrate on building the brand. You can still SEO the site and as Elias mentioned, any benefit of exact match domains is being slowly chipped away so concentrate on your users.

I wish I had known what I know now when I registered my company and domain name!

Still laughing about the frames. Man, I am old, so frames were part of the web back in the day, whoever these people are that are doing this work, they need to put their slippers and reading glasses on and sit down in front of the fire with a glass of warm milk.

Frames, made my day I tells ya!

Hey, I can't see this approach working for long, it's exactly the kind of thing they are trying to cut down on. Like you say, it should not hurt the main page but it would be interesting to see if the mini sites have taken a hit as they are essentially low quality, cookie cutter garbage created just for the search engines.

I am unsure how google handles frames as it is not technically duplicate content, it is just a window to the main site itself but it is kind of manipulative to present one sites content in another one, especially when that other one is a page designed purely for search engine traffic and with identical content (bar the location keyword) to a bunch of others.

This whole approach is flawed.

It's hard to say without seeing the mini sites and just how mini they are but they could be classed as doorway pages if they have little or no original content and are just designed to feed traffic to the main site.

If they are useful little sites then linking back to the main site may help that site rank better but it's still not a whiter than white approach but again, real tough to comment in detail without seeing the sites in question.

On a personal snobbery level, Frames? Are they for real?