Authority website or micro niche sites

SEO is a war and it's a long-term war. Authority sites do better than micro-niche sites, that's a fact. The more content you have on your site the better. The deeper your site is, the stronger positions it will gain in the SERPs.

Of course, it largely depends on the keywords you are after. If you target low-competition keywords, you may get by with just a few pages of content. On the other hand, more competitive keywords will need more content and an authority site.

I'd never build an authority site without first getting a few easy micro sites up and running. Don't go after a niche until you've tested (roughly) stuff like CTR's and CPC's, etc.

Authority sites are a big undertaking. If you're new or don't really know what you're doing (most people here) - start out small and then go big. And I'm not saying you should build 100's of mini sites. Nope. Build 1-3, see what's up and then build a large site.

You shouldn't try to run before you can walk. If you're only just starting out then play around with 2 or 3 small sites. It's much easier and quicker to get them ranking and earning a few Euros. You may get rich from it but you'll learn a lot in the process whilst you put that knowledge to good use when you come to build a larger site.

Practice makes perfect.

Micro niche sites are good for adsense sites. Because it is reduced your time.

I think that over the next 18 months its going to be harder and harder to rank micro niche sites that only offer a handful of pages of content.

Authority sites are slowly taking over the SERPS with minimal backlinking and I believe this is a shift that is going to continue in the future.

The other problem with MNS sites is they are very limiting, if you setup a site specifically for 'blue widget deals' but then wanted to go after 'red widget deals' you would have to start a completly new site from scratch.

Where as you could just have built a 'widget deals' website to start with which would have all of the benefits of a deeper more authorative site without all of the restrictions of limiting yourself to a specific micro niche.

The only problem with this is you do end up putting all your eggs in one basket, if you rely solely on 1 site and your Google rankings to bring in a steady source of income you could wake up one day to find all of those rankings, traffic and income gone!

Its a double edged sword but I believe bigger is better (as always )

Hi FirebirdKW,

You ask a very good question and it shows that your head is in the right place...

The best way to 'start' and 'finish' may not be the same answer. I have two thoughts.

1. A small hobby site with AdSense will be the easiest to rank, but it's not going to have the upside potential of an authority site.

2. A large authority site has to start somewhere.

If I had to start out today, fresh off the boat, I would pick a large niche and then zoom in on a little corner of that market.

The reason to start small, is that you're going to get some instant gratification and see some success much earlier than with a large site. As you build traffic, you build reputation with the users and also with Google(who is watching everything their searchers do), which is the start of building an Authority site... Build that site out, which builds more traffic, which builds more income.

That's what I would do.

One thing I think a lot of people here on Warrior Forum base their decisions on when choosing a micro. vs large site is, SERP traffic numbers, which can be very misleading sometimes.

One of my largest sources of non-stop free traffic is niche forum traffic & when I say non-stop traffic flow I'm talking years (5-6 years so far for my own sites).

Don't get me wrong, SEO & SERP traffic are good, but they are far from being the only/majority free traffic on the net.

With niche forums, you can literally go out & test traffic without even owning a site (yet). Test the forum traffic until your satisfied the sub-niche will get decent traffic, build the site.

As an example, I don't have to look at a keyword tool or any CPC data to know that these random niches below have massive buyer traffic:

• Woodworking
• Scrapbooking
• Automotive

Look at what your interested in, what do you like, what do you consider fun, that's your niche.

Building out a large authority site on a subject your not interested in would totally suck, IMO.

Building a large authority site in a niche you're personally interested in doesn't even feel like work, at least not to me.

For me i would prefer to build an authority website for the following reason
1. In the long term you would gain authority in search engine and your reader.
2. Managing some many websites can be stressful.
3. It can provide you more passive income compare to niche website