How about just 1 - 3 sites that you rotate, with "quality content" your favorite word and build quality links? I always look at different search results, and from everything I've seen, the large websites that have been around for ages, seem to be doing just fine.

I would turn to quality content, and solid SEO practices that do not involve using automated mass submission practices.

Seems to work fine for me.

Where to go from here - build the kind of sites that won't need
Google to succeed. That's part of my plan for 2012!

Yes, I am talking about real POWER sites that people absolutely
love and keep coming back to, again and again... and keep referring
other people to.

We, with YEARS of experience in IM, more than everyone else,
know how to create such sites and make them flourish. The problem
is that we (myself included) have spent too much time on micro
niche sites! At one time I had nearly 2,000 domain names and have
spent over $40,000 just buying and renewing domain names, ouch,

Imagine if I spent the whole time on just one or few sites?

Kingsley

Try quality content. That's the direction everyone is going.

Looks like you're unwilling to provide quality content for your sites.

Honestly, you're not going to get very far without it, friend.

Perhaps if everyone is saying the same thing it might actually be the solution? Just a thought.

Lucky for me, I like to write, so when I got shut out of Google it spurred me to go back to my writing service. I'll probably stay here for a while. It's actually the only way I reckon is sustainable at the moment.

Providing a service.

Some of the biggest dogs in the IM game have been building strong "niche" sites for years and don't seem to have been penalized by Google thus far.

There seems to be a distinct difference between niche site and micro niche site, the latter being one that has 5 pages that are usually made for adsense with a long exact match domain. Essentially it seems that these sites were gaming the system, and did so successfully for quite a period of time, until now. Now it seems that the niche sites, the ones that were still centered around a narrow topic, but had more content and fostered greater engagement and involvement from users seem to be still here.

It therefore seems that if it is a battle between

10 niche sites built lovingly with lots of good content, vs 100 niche sitess built less lovingly with less content and a concentration on adsense revenue, the former would win and has done.

There also seems to be a very large advantage of having fewer niche sites from many perspectives, you have less sites to manage, less domains to renew, can concentrate on quality more easily, and so on.

Personally, I am quite surprised it has taken this long for Google to start penalising sites that are not helping users and growing the internet in the right way.

It seems therefore that this isnt just a lesson about adsense and google, it is a life lesson.

Which is that the best way to a sustainable business and long term riches is to always provide quality and serve users problems properly amongst everything else. If you make the users the priority and the revenue the afterthought you will be in a better position to make some serious money in the long term.

Facebook wasnt built to support ads, facebook was built to serve a purpose and provide some serious value to people, the revenue and profit generation was its second purpose, and because it was helping so many people, in the process it became very very profitable.

I hope this helps people, just writing it helped me realise things and put things in to perspective.

Cashtree, What is your situation. Has Google banned your adsense account and/or de-indexed your sites.

From reading that last section...

It looks like your reading a lot of the stuff that's out to scaremonger folks. To me that's what top marketers do. Form a circle, bombard the net with fear marketing messages and then release a product to satisfy the needs of the people they've scared into believing there's a problem.

If your sites aren't affected, then you won't have anything to worry about. I just see that your original post only refers to reading about this problem and you don't mention you have personally experienced it.

Amazon and Authority sites are going to be my focus

I don't understand why everyone is telling you "quality content" when you definitely said "please don't tell me quality content" - ha ha

What about offering a service OR work up some ecommerce sites - for now google still loves them and most of them just seem to have the manufacturers descriptions on them as far as content is concerned.

Sam England (a warrior on the forum) has a great WSO on setting up and running E-Commerce sites - do a search for him

You've picked apart both big methods.

1 - Quality content. Yes, you don't want to hear it, but Google does. Post high quality content, and you'll do fine. Anyone who claims to be posting high quality content and gets hit by Google either doesn't know what high quality content is, or stole it from somewhere else.

2 - Don't rely on Google. No high quality content, which should please you, but you'll need to drive your own traffic. What methods are you using at the moment? Do you have a big social media following?

If you don't have time, effort or money, you don't have a business.
Easy doesn't equal success. Ever. And when it does, its very short term, and you should use it to make money while focusing on something long term.

1. Mobile Marketing
2. Social Marketing (Especially Pinterest)
3. Apps --> iPhone, Android, Etc.
4. Niche sites that you can market on platforms that are not Google, such as via:
A) Forum Marketing
B) Solo Ads
C) PPC/PPV
D) JV Adswaps
E) Paid Marketplaces (Like the WSO forum, but in other niches)
F) Social Networks

I could go on and on... However, what is your REAL goal? Nobody ever said that Micro Niche sites were the only way to generate an income online... So whether they're dead or not... if you never got in on the action, perhaps you should feel happy because now all your sites aren't getting slapped, your businesses aren't crashing into the ground so you can seize the NEW opportunities that are up and coming.

Focus on the positive stuff that you can do TODAY, not yesterday. I feel bad for anyone who had quality content and was "slapped" by Google for no reason other than "luck" as you put it... But if you weren't one of those unfortunate people, why not take advantage of the stuff that you know IS available and that works?

Best,
Shane

Micro niche is not dead. Stop believing this BS.

I use sites with republished article content. They do well, and earn adsense money too.

Test for yourself, instead of reading stuff and believing them.

And, for heaven's sake, redefine quality content and get a clarity in your mind. What is quality? How is it measured? How does a software measure quality?

It is all about relevance. Nothing else.

There are plenty of quality blogs that no one can find, and there are plenty of thin blogs and general articles, that (still) dominate some searches.

There is also a lot of quality content that can hardly get 1-2 comments or tweets, and a lot of content-about-nothing, that gets shared like crazy.

Quality is only a part of the whole equation, and it's not even the most dominant one.

After all, Google cannot really recognize quality from a total BS. If I post 5000 word article with ton of facts, dates, data and footnotes, it looks like a quality content.

Except, I can have all those facts, dates and data made up, thus actually having a completely useless content. It would be completely obvious to any reader, but not to Google.

Yet I can have a simple 500 word article, with the real facts and data that the reader can use right away, yet Google can consider it thin content.

Quality is in the eye of the user, Google can only deal with relevancy that it offers for each search term.

Just do what you used to do with each site but under one domain. Treat each blog post as a different "site."

MNS are not dead. You need to add quality content to give a value for the visitor. I still earn with adsense.

Hi,

There's certainly more than 1 way to make money online beside just "quality content" Well since you hate "quality content" and "google" (i guess) so much, why not start a site that doesn't rely on quality content and google..

Like create a squeeze page and start building a list.. <-- you still need to provide your list w good quality content though, but not the kind of content that google will slap.

Alternatively, you could also do a product launch? That's also another way to make money without having to rely on google.

I know it's easier said than done.. But all of us in the business arena, so please don't expect it to be easy, every business requires hard work, determination, effort, time etc..

Hope this help,
Jeremiah

P.S. When the going gets tough, only the tough gets going

Hi

How many of your micro niche sites were de-indexed?

Mine are all still ranking very high. They are in low competition niches so what web site will Google put on top?

They are also all EMD which is also supposed to be 'dead' but they are #1 for k1k2k3, but page 2 for k2k3k1. Clearly the EMD helps rank for the exact phrase.

Mahlon

My Micro Niche sites are doing well.. I keep them between 5-10 pages

You know what you need... Quality content !

James Scholes

yeah it's getting more harder. The definition for quality content itself is now not rewrite good quality article from another source but something new, fenomenal, important, well research and well written.Many of rewrite article(well written) MFA adsense site can't stand google manual review.

Micro Niche sites aren't dead. Crappy sites and poor link building is dead.

Actually I was reading around and it seems that those banned guys had coupons sites with their adsense on. This could be the reason as google is banning many of this. The best advice is to keep those MNS separated, I mean if you have 50+ MNS keep 25 on one account and 25 on another. Also if adsense bans you that's not the end of world. You still get your traffic and there's many way to monetize it.

Where's OP's proof? My Hostgator niche sites are doing OK.

Microniche sites are only dead if you rely exclusively on Google to drive traffic to your site.

Micro-niches are far from dead. With all the paid media and advertising sources out there trying to dump their inventory I would say there's never been a better time to get started!

RoD

It is not that they are targeting micro-niche sites and wiping them out, the point you are missing is why things are being wiped out. Granted, I do not have all the answers, but the fact that sites both big and small have been hit should tell you something. I get the feeling that G has just had enough of the bull and is getting really serious about trying to clean up the serps, with some of the time the effects not making a ton of sense.

Reasons why I think people are getting dinged:

Crappy content that provides no real purpose - If Microsoft word can pick up on spelling, grammar and formatting of content, what makes you think G doesn't do the same. If your on site content is sub-par, there is not much you can do right. I know you don't want to hear it, but follow the trends, content is king now more so than ever.

Sites using blog networks - We all know the blog networks got nailed, but what is the direct result? It is links being de-valued and de-indexed, and a 30-90 day trust penalty. Notice it is not a rank penalty, but a trust penalty, the fact that rankings dropped should be a good indicator of how much G values trust as a part of their algorithm. The other side of this is...you guessed it, crappy content. When crappy spun content is used, it is fairly easy for me to unravel an entire blog network or at least a good chunk of it, and I am no google engineer. A lot of people made claims that their sites took a nasty hit lately, but they didnt tell you that they took a sky is falling approach, removing links, making changes, and worst case scenario, responding to the un-natural links notice. None of these helped their case.

Over optimization - I think that they are cracking down big time on this. As someone said earlier in the thread, PR was all the rage for a while and people started building links like crazy, G patches it and makes PR less of a weighted item in the algorithm. People go crazy with anchor text, and G is patching it, and those who were doing it are getting slapped bad.

Commercial anchor text spam - This is similar to over optimization, but plays more to the type of words one is using for their anchor text. If it is a link with an anchor that is not natural to the content, and then is hammered with over optimization, big daddy g is going to slap you for it.

There is more floating around in my pea brain, but I don't have time to explain it all. What I can tell you is that I have no issues with my niche sites or my adsense account. I had 3 sites pop into the top 5 this week and guess what? I, a native English speaker who knows how to do a little research wrote the content. Make it valuable, link to real resources etc. I am not doing anything crazy other than quality and diversity.

As far as adsense getting banned, I think if you have 100 sites on one account, you are begging for a manual review, and if that review comes, and they see that your sites are MFA, then you are donezo, they will say invalid clicks is the issue, but that is just a "we don't have to explain anything" answer

Google may or may not be genuine in their desire to improve the search results.

But the way they are going about it is shocking. Too many good sites are being harmed.

They harp on about needing good content.

Well, explain this:

One of my 10 year old authority sites which has been on page 1 for years for its main phrase is now on page 2.

Another site of mine which I intended building (an EMD) but never got round to doing it, now ranks on page 1 and there is ZERO (I mean ZERO) content on it. It only has the initial install screen after installing drupal and ZERO backlinks.

How on God's earth can google rank a site with nothing on it higher than an established (white hat) rich content site that is full of unique content.

Google = Hypocrital unethical profit mongers that say one thing and mean something else

Sam

Micro niche sites will never die and get wiped out... You just need to do it the right way!!