Are Micro Niches Dead from Penguin?

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Hey,
Sorry if this sounds ignorant, however any WSO's I've read in the past month or so have filled me with the idea that niche sites are dead, as they won't rank, or they get de-indexed, etc.
Everyone says authority sites are the best way to go.

Any information on this is appreciated!

Dylan.
#search engine optimization #dead #micro #niches #penguin
  • I've found several micro - niche sites with 5-6 pages on Flippa today that seem to be doing ok still...
  • They are dead. There are two problems, as you already touched on.

    1) Potential for de-indexing due to 'thin content.' In fact, a micro niche site by default is a 'thin website' since it's been designed for one purpose only.
    2) Networks of these sites using Adsense for monetization are vulnerable to removal from the Adsense program.

    Consider building a much more substantial website.
    • [3] replies
    • Or instead of relying on google, build you could build your mini-sites and run traffic to it yourself.. Much safer as google is pretty fickle..
      • [1] reply

    • I was going to respond that they weren't, but I am a bit confused.

      my definition of a micro-niche site is a site that is targeting a micro-niche. Basically a niche that is small in size but can still be very targeted.

      Is a micro-niche site considered just a small site will little content? And not a site that targets a small niche?

      Thanks for the clarification.
    • How does this have ANYTHING to do with Penguin? Penguin had nothing to do with "thin content". Plus, there are hundreds of thousands of micro niche sites that are still doing great.

      Penguin = off site
      Panda = on site

      What's with you IM doomsdayers always claiming things are dead? No offense, just the 10th thing I've seen today claiming something is dead.

      ALSO... a micro niche site doesn't mean that the content is always thin. As for using adsense.... I'm sure he could monetize in many different ways.
      • [ 7 ] Thanks
      • [1] reply
  • As long as there are people willing to buy the products shown on those micro-niche sites, the niches will never be dead.

    Google may try, but it could never stop anyone from buying a product or service they want to buy.
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
  • it was a good way to earn some money about 2 years ago, but this is very outdated
  • OK, listen up, micro niche sites are NOT dead! Here's what IS dead: Putting up 100 sites on a shared hosting account and tying everything together for Google by monetizing EVERY SITE with Adsense, using Google Analytics and getting links from already de-indexed link farms. OK?

    Now, if you create micro niche sites and put up a banner to your offer and don't use any of Google's tools, you can get the sites to rank and if you have a compelling offer, make sales.
    • [1] reply
    • Banned
      Does google analytics affect ranking? I've always read and thought that it doesn't. other than paranoia.
      • [1] reply
  • Micro niche sites are not dead anyway! Thin content sites with extremely bad link profile are though! I think many people are mistaking micro niche sites with thin content sites. Micro niche sites are meant to be laser targeted to a specific niche, that necessarily doesn't mean that you need to set up 4-5 pages only. Keep adding content on a regular basis, have an intelligent link profile, it should not be dead by any means.
  • Right now it is a lot easier to rank a website with plenty of content and authority High PR backlinks.
  • As you can see, the opinions tend to vary wildly on this topic.

    We make money with niche sites. It's not dead from where we're sitting.

    Is it dead for YOU? Maybe!?! The best way to find out would be to stop reading a bunch of WSO's every month and try building out some sites.
    • [ 3 ] Thanks
    • [3] replies
    • Banned
      The "Penguin update" had absolutely nothing to do with "thin content" or "microniche sites" at all.

      My microniche sites (and those of many others here) were helped by the Penguin update.

      The effective removal from the early pages of Google's SERP's of all the sites of "marketers" who had been buying spammy backlinks, and/or using cheap backlinking services, and/or using automated backlinking software (which was what the Penguin update was about!) has - for the most part - neatly and beneficially fulfilled its stated intention of clearing out of everyone's way a lot of the crappy "competition" previously based on link-spam, and has certainly made it easier for my microniche sites to rank.

      Either you're misjudging which WSO's to buy, or the overall quality of WSO's has deteriorated even more than I'd realised - because this premise is wildly inaccurate.

      However, it's still true (as it always has been) that authority sites are likely to rank better than microniche sites, because both their on-page and off-page SEO are likely to be better.

      This stuff really isn't difficult to understand, Dylan - but it often helps to look at things on Google's websites rather than believing widely regurgitated second-hand nonsense.

      This. Exactly.
    • Banned
      Hi Justin or Joe,
      I 've been looking how your micro sites are doing. I 've found that none of the websites you sold on this auction a year ago rank anywhere near the top.
      https://flippa.com/147768-95-last-30...e-1-no-reserve

      Will your new micro sites last longer than 6 months? I hope the buyer earned at least his/her investment back. I know you sell for about 20 times the monthly revenue, so the sites should last for almost 2 years to break even. Pretty risky for investors, esp. considering those net and org domains are rather worthless without the Adsense earnings. I think you are geniuses if you can sell those without getting in trouble with your buyers.

      Edit: I figured if you offer no guarantees you should be OK.
    • And yes, I have seen a many of your adsense sites sell on flippa. I admire your works.
  • Errr... yes and no.

    Thin sites with crappy spun content and suspect backlink profiles have all been whacked.

    But it is possible to bring these back by removing the poor content and replacing it with high quiality articles and some video to reduce bounce rate.

    In my tests I effectively turned some of my thin sites into what I consider to be authority sites, with at least 30 pages of good quality content. I added one page each day and let google pick these up naturally without pinging.

    Next I did some on-page SEO by creating silos, which basically involves creating categories for the articles and then doing some contextual linking with relevant keywords within the articles to other useful articles on the site.

    Finally I went to fiverr and had some of my URLs tweeted in 2 or 3 different accounts to add some social media into the mix.

    After doing this to 3 of my sites, all of them are now heading back in the right direction, with one back on page 1.

    I think that some more social media links could be the key to getting all the way to the top again.
  • That does not make sense. No, that will not happen !
  • Banned
    yes, it is true, nothing dead, all are working but you have to know how they work..
  • Ok, let me get this right.

    Google is looking for high quality information.
    This could be a single page on a big site, or a quality article on a single page site.
    It knows the site is quality because it have links to it from other quality site ( using different servers, and using different Google accounts for Analytics, Adsense and all).
    Social Media sites are just examples of other sites.
    If all this is true, then a single page site will do well if there are enough inbound quality links.

    The key phase to all this ( if I am right) is quality, and not quantity. So is I create a world class one page site on using left handed putters, and get the page well known, the we should have a good amount of traffic to convert in to left handed putter sale.

    Is that right?
    • [1] reply
    • In bold, that's where you went wrong. World class sites do not have only one page.
      • [ 1 ] Thanks
  • Micro-niche sites are not dead. It is more on saturated and heavily abused with poor content that's why Google is getting strict on such websites.
  • Still MNS works. But little bit hard to rank before few years.
  • Let's be clear. Google isn't against micro-niche sites. Google is against manufactured sites with low-quality content the only purpose of which is to drop adsense on them.

    Google's first priority is to make sure that when a user types in a search that the user finds something relevant and useful.

    Otherwise, people would use a different search engine, and if people do that, Google would lose money on their adwords.

    So provided that your niche is providing a valuable service and is relevant to the keywords you are targeting, these updates should mostly be meaningless unless you are using tactics that violate the Google Webmaster rules.

    Here is a simple way of thinking about this.

    Let's suppose we asked the user this:

    Dear User, given the search keywords you just typed in and the site you've just clicked on, would you be willing to recommend this site to others that were searching for the same thing you were?

    If the majority of users said no then there really are only a couple of conclusions:
    1) You are targeting the wrong market
    2) You aren't offering enough value to your target market.
    3) You are getting both #1 and #2 wrong.
  • Banned
    People who make this argument are clueless, and you should get a refund from anyone peddling this nonsense to you.

    Being a niche site or a micro niche site has nothing to do with the size of the site, or the authority of a site. It has to do with the subject of the site. Just because you're building a niche site around pork chop recipes doesn't mean it can't be an authority site with 1,000 pages of content.
    • [1] reply
    • I always assumed when people were talking about micro-niche sites, they were talking about sites that relied on free search traffic that were monetized with adsense/affiliate stuff. Those sites that are usually justified by saying "If the site makes $10/day and you can do 20 of them, that's $6K per month". To me, those are not worth the effort anymore.

      I'd much rather focus on a micro-niche that I can sell products to. Basically the type of product that aren't large enough to sustain a local market, but plenty large enough to sell online
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    Are Micro Niches Dead from Penguin?

    Hey, Sorry if this sounds ignorant, however any WSO's I've read in the past month or so have filled me with the idea that niche sites are dead, as they won't rank, or they get de-indexed, etc. Everyone says authority sites are the best way to go.