Authority site or micro niche sites ?

I'm looking forward to hearing the responses on this as well. Thanks for asking, OP!

Also, if I could add this: Which Warrior do you USE for micro niche or authority niche site building?

I hope you don't think I'm stealing the thread... if so, please PM me and I can delete.

I have attended a few webinars from Mark Ling and partners, I bought his course Affiloblueprint and am a premium member. Excellent training I might add, It was stated that now with all the google updates that you should have at least 30-40 pages and even those that you never stop posting to so like hundreds of pages, but for a long term success it is recommended at least 30 pages these days.

Micro-niche sites can be authority sites. They are not mutually exclusive. You can target a micro-niche and have more than 50 pages of good content.

If you structure your content right, you can also do well in fringe keywords that are related to your micro-niche.

I own many micro niche sites (MNS) and even though they give me a good income, I believe authority sites is the better option. This is why:

1) More Traffic - If social media is used correctly (Facebook fanpage, Twitter etc.), they can bring a constant stream of traffic. This is hard to do for MNS.

2) More Advertising Options - There are countless ways to monetize an authority site. In fact, Adsense may even be one of the least desirable option. Whereas for MNS, Adsense may be the only profitable option as others such as Adbrite, Bidvertiser etc. don't provide anywhere near the income for MNS. Also, if your Adsense account is disabled, the MNS practically loses its value for the same reason.

3) Higher Value - Authority sites take time to build and have greater potential for growth. This is especially true if it becomes an established brand. This gives a higher value for the site.

4) Hands-off - Authority sites, once established, can be practically hands-off and still maintain or even grow in revenue. Writers can be hired to continually add content or you can even rely mostly on guest and sponsored posts.

I will go for authority sites with sub niches. I believe this is the future as google maybe putting more weigh on sites that has constant updates.

It dedends what kind of keywords you are going for, with micro niche sites you really should target long tail low competition keywords using the keyword as the domain name this can boost your ranking for tha term. I personally prefer authority site, as it is a lot of work to keep track of all the small micro sites

Authority Sites are great for major keyword SEO - Eg: concreteideas.com is great because concrete is a part of many of the keywords trying to optimize for. Whereas Landscapeideas.com has keywords like irrigation and pool houses. so the Authority site name should be specific.

I think the answer could be both. You could have an authority site with a few feeder sites. You could use the feeder sites to rank for different keywords (or the same keywords).

This might be useful if you have an eCommerce site. Product pages can target product related keywords and the feeder sites can target arbitrary keywords via posts/pages.

There isn't necessarily a "better" route between micro niche and authority sites. It just depends on what you want to do. With authority sites you get some of the pros that DylanC mentioned. With micro niche sites you'll have the advantage of running many sites, which means you can run many different types of SEO campaigns. If you track everything as you should, you'll gain a lot of insight to practical working methods of ranking.

Overall, I would say go for both if you can. Build an authority site that you work on as a long term project, and also build/maintain a few micro niche sites on a short term basis. The short term projects can either be flipped, expanded into bigger websites, or put on autopilot if it's already making money.