I am in charge of my companies website and one of my tasks is to improve SEO. Granted, I am new to this and have been researching for the past 6 months and had an idea. My plan is to build multiple websites and create a huge site using multiple domains. We offer different services and our main home page will have all of the services with links to the other websites which are the individual services so that I don't have to worry about duplicate page content.Example:www.companyname.com is the main sitewww.service#1.com is one of our serviceswww.service#2.com is another one of our services etc.Will this have an affect on our SEO in a positive way like I think or would it impact us negatively? and why?
Is having multiple websites a good idea or a bad one for SEO?
seo;multiple domains
Having different websites for different services wont affect you negatively but it wont give you any special SEO benefits. According to me its a waste of time. Having different websites will block your visitors to see your other services which will be a loss of advantage for your website and for your company. It will limit your visitors. If you have a single website with all your services as different pages it will give SEO weight to your website as Zistoloen said in his answer.  If someone searched your company name he/she can easily identify all your services at a single place which will be user friendly.