Niche or wider sites

[skydancer]

Hi all,
I'm curious to see your opinion on this. Is it better to have niche sites or "wider" ones with more articles. I am asking for a long time period.
Is it better to concentrate on for example "Super Mario" or "Nintendo 64 games"?
I hope you got what I mean.

 

[WordKey]

If you are thinking in a long term perspective and you decide to build an authority site, then in my opinion, you should go for the broader niche. But keep in mind that it is better to start with a smaller niche and expand it later on. You should buy your domain with expansion scope in mind.

 

[flexnds]

If you are thinking in a long term perspective and you decide to build an authority site, then in my opinion, you should go for the broader niche. But keep in mind that it is better to start with a smaller niche and expand it later on. You should buy your domain with expansion scope in mind.

Agreed.. There is only so much you can write about a type of "clothes hanger" or "coat hanger". There are definitely many levels of niche sites. Get something that you can expand on and that is atleast somewhat interesting or you'll go mad trying to build it..

 

[skydancer]

Okay, but then I guess I have to be careful when choosing a site name..

 

[Dang3r81]

Hi Skydancer,

i was in the same boat 4 month ago. I made a research for 3 bigger niches and decided me to build up 3 authorite sites.

Then i make a mistake, i bought 3 domain names with the exact name + a little phrase more, because the emd was not available.

I tooks me 3 months of linkbuilding, that i became 200-500 visitors a day for this sites. And the EMD for this authorite was by my meaning not important.

Better it is to buy a old expired domain, because by a authorite site with much content it is not important how the domain calls.

Look as example that you find a domain which calls by example for dating, datingprofi.com and you will be become success earlier then later Ofcourse buy not a domain like brandnameishereavailable.com

I have another page bought 8 years old and i uploaded 10 articles and i become visitors quicker as by my new domains which have now 180 unique articles.

Hope i could you help.

Cheers
Dang3r

 

[skydancer]

Yes, Dang3r81,
you are being very helpful, thank you very much.
If you have some more tips, please share.
But, my question was: Is it better to build smaller niche sites (5-10 posts - spin or no) or a bigger authority sites with general unique content but larger amount of articles.

 

[phpbuilt]

I haven't tried small niche sites so I couldn't tell you how successful they are. My opinion is that authority sites are worthwhile though.

If its a wordpress site and you want to do an authority site, make each micro niche a category and install YARPP (yet another related posts plugin) -- I have really good success with that strategy.

 

[benito]

the guys above me had a good point for a good reason.

see, as a newbie in IM right now what I do is creating both niche and authority. however, I can tell you that I'm struggling with the authority site as it's really demanding: you have to consistently add useful, original contents to it - not just scrape crappy articles and spin them around to a point you can't make sense of them.

here's what I read a couple of days ago about product niche sites that Google (Panda) loves: build a site promoting one particular product, get around 11 articles written - the last article should be the sticky one, where you put your affiliate links, optin, and so on. those article must be seo optimized with your main keyword(s) and original, if you find a hard time writing, get somebody here to write content for you. that should be a good place to start, don't you think? I wish i had read this sooner. right now i've decided to just focus on this type of site and see how it goes.
hope that gives you an idea.

 

[vasilicaciortan]

Keep in mind that if you go for a wide niche site it will be harder to rank for the keywords you want than if you go for a micro niche website type.
So what I want to tell you is if you go for a big site you have to have the skills, power and money to make it to the end.
Try to think it this way:

1) You want to build a big website to initially rank for 10 keywords. The kewywords must be somewhere related or very related, with a good amount of searches, low competition and so on. IMO very hard and expensive to find them. If you do not have this kind of kwds it will be very hard to rank. You will also need a lot of SEO to get your head up on to the forst page of google and that will cost you a lot of money IMO.

2)Let's think you want now to build 10 micro niche websites. You will need 10 kwds with a good number of searches and low competition. It is not very hard to find them since they will not have to be related. You will also rank for other long tail kwds as well since your websites will have more than 1 articles. With on-page SEO and effortless backlinks building you should rank in no time.

So you can go for whatever you want but take in consideration the initial cost, the ROI and the time you make that ROI.

Good luck!


Cheers!

 

[fimms]

I was just thinking of article directory, if I shoul use general or niche approach... does anyone know, how much google thinks of coherence and similarity of the content topic when they rank pages? I mean could you rank well for totally different short tail keywords on same site? So far I have used niche approach on my sites, but with plenty of sites, there is increased cost of doing SEO and content creation work for all of them.

 

[phpbuilt]

There are benefits to micro niche sites and benefits to authority sites.

Though I haven't tried making the micro niche sites on a massive scale, I've read enough to know these are some of the benefits:

- Find an EMD and you get a ranking bonus on your keyword
- (this is a big one for adsense) Google actually knows what your site is about, so if you selected your niche properly you will receive more money per click because your ads are more targeted
- You have multiple websites to create a network with, so that you can gain backlinks to your sites simply by interlinking your network

There are also bad things about EMDs ...

- You have to be more careful about appearing to be MFA
- You have to buy a new domain every time you start a new keyword
- You are starting from scratch every single time you start a SEO campaign
- New domains can be sandboxed and will take time to rank properly

There may be more or less on micro niche sites, feel free to add or correct me, I'm not an expert on them.

Now -- what I love about having an authority site.

- I'm not starting over on SEO every time. I can make a post and expect it will start to rank within a week or two on its own.
- My pages can rank under the weight of my own internal backlinks.
- No fear of sandbox.
- Lower domain costs.
- I would say lower risk for appearing MFA ... but my authority sites are affiliate sales, not adsene. But if you're making adsense sites it would be a benefit.
- If your authority site has good content and even a small amount of whitehat backlinks, it will steadily increase in traffic as pages age and rise in the serps practically by themselves. Throw backlinking in the mix only makes it better.

Bad:

- all eggs in one basket can be a problem. I haven't had an issue with around 50% blackhat and 50% whitehat.

Other than that I'm not sure what is bad. More time to make an authority site, but honestly its not any more time than if you were making micro sites.

I'm not against micro niche sites, I've picked up some domains I'm going to start putting together for some to try them out more. The only statement that I'm trying to make is that authority sites take time but are profitable if you are consistent with posts and only do a small amount of whitehat quality article directory backlinks.

 

[teapear]

I am also have a headache at first about this thing.

But i am doing it like this:

1) Find my main broad niche.
2) Identify all my targeted keywords and related keywords.
3) Buying broad niche domain (.com)
4) Buying all emd domain for my targeted keywords and related keywords (.com if available).
5) Pointing my broad domain to my main server.
6) Pointing all my emd domain to my secondary server.
7) Write unique articles for both my broad domain and emd domain.
8) Make same url in broad with emd

www.breadhouse.com/cheap-bread-online-delivery | www.cheapbreadonlinedelivery.com

9) Backlinking and promoting both. (make sure no footprint at first)
10) HOPEFULLY, both of your site will be on the google 1st page of targeting keywords.
11) Twist it a little bit to conquer all the results in 1st page to be your own

 

[skydancer]

Great tips guys, thanks..

 

[thedon23]

I agree with others are saying. For someone like myself, who has very low capital..as in, I only have a couple hundreds back I can invest, I'm going for smaller niche sites (between 1000-2500 exact match searches). I buy an EMD, and generally rank on Page 1 (bottom) or Page 2 (top) JUST with on site SEO alone.

The reason I target these smaller niches is because they are easy to rank for, and I can then flip these sites. My plan is to do this with a number of small niches, build up the capital I need, then start targeting a few broader niches in the long run. I mean, there is no way I could compete with others in broad niches, with only a couple hundred dollars. You gotta be realistic.

 

[jon_xx_x]

I'd go with wider sites, even though I'm doing 100 EMD websites right now.
I think over the last year Google devalued EMDs quite a bit, and putting more weight on authority sites with a lot of content. So I'm kinda doing both. As I make my EMD sites, I also add content to my money site.

This may sound weird, but I think old EMDs keep their rank, but I think new EMDs don't rank as well.

I have six sites that I'm about to sell, which I mentioned in another thread. They are a year old, competition is pretty high. I put up one page websites, interlinked them, and pretty much left them, because I didn't care to put much time in them. Well I get an email from someone wanting to buy one of them. And turns out, it was #2 for a 8,800 exact search per month $9CPC. While over the last few months I've put up several EMDs and they aren't ranking nearly as well, with very very low competition.

 

[fimms]

One shouldn't forget that micro site can become authority site after all, if you put more effort on it. Infact, I think most of us want micro site succeed and give indication its worth of investing more money and time. They are not exclusive so to say.

 

[VIC SEO]

It all depends on the time, see the more narrow the niche is the more easily it fades away with the passage of time. The more broader the niche is the better chances it has of making it longer. so if you are looking to go for a longer time period it would be better to go for the wider niche.

 

[dowser]

Wide niche or authority sites require way more planning as once you create a structure and get it ranking - it's very difficult to make major changes to it.
I'm facing the same dilemma now having lots of exact keyword domains in a few clusters - how should I interlink them to get the most juice, which one should be the designated money site, etc.

 

[phuningenji]

I'm more of a fan of broad sites than niche sites. I've found that some of my niche sites became useless after a matter of time due to the changing of a service's name or of the product that I'm promoting. With a broader site, I can make it become an authority website and I can adapt much more easily than if I were operating a niche website. I also get to target a larger number of keywords, which is a benefit.

 

[Silverion]

Well I would suggest you to go with limited niche stuff as you can concentrate more on the quality of the product rather than the quantity.Super Mario game is a good game to go with.I would definitely suggest you to do it