small niche sites vs. larger portal sites

September 24, 2005

Hi there,

I am new to posting here, but I am not new to web dev - have been self-employed for 7 years. Forgive me in advance if this question has been explicitly answered in the past. I did do a search and didn’t find a many answers though, aside from a general trend to favour larger sites.

I have over the years made a few small sites for purely informational purposes (how-to sites less than 30 pages in size). They share the same theme (how to make certain kinds of food) and are self-contained. All have some page rank but I have never promoted them. They pull some modest traffic. It recently dawned on me to put Adsense on them, and hence the nature of this question.

Is it “better” to have several small sites that are easier to rank and are niche targetted or create a larger site that has better potentials for content growth?

Right now, it would be challenging for me to expand my small sites and put new content on them because their focus is narrow (for example, how many ways can you cook food XYZ?) I could of course expand them a bit but there’s only so far one can go.

A large site offers better content growth potential but may be harder to rank. And I’d be starting from scratch. (hehe I just re-read that, no pun intended)!

So, may I ask your opinions? Large vs. small - what are the pluses and minuses of either strategy that I have missed?

Thanks,
Desi

* I have two niche sites and they aren’t making me rich but there are always plenty of well matched ads for them and I earn some nice spending money. In terms of adsense it doesn’t really matter as you can put adsense ads on all your sites with the one account.

Where it might help to to have a bigger site is that you will have more internal links back to your homepage which helps PR and affects how well you do in search engine results.

Better yet get more links to your sites from other sites on the same topic. The more visitors you have the better you will do and inbound links help.

If your small sites already have some good inbound links you may not want to move that info to another domain.

I love having one of my homepages ranking 5th on a general one word key word like “widgeting” as it gives my ego a boost. But in truth far more people come through dozens of two to three word phrases on specific topics within my niche. In other words even if you could rank well on “do it yourself” you will do better from specific searches like “widget recipies”.

There is no reason to not try out adsense and see how it does. You can always make adjustments later.

* Niche sites with original content can perform well with AdSense. We always say (and I’m sure many smaller publishers will testify) that it’s more about the quality of content than the size of the site, so I recommend trying it out on the websites you’ve been building for a while.

Something that always helps AdSense performance is optimizing your site right from the start. When you decide to put the AdSense code on your pages, check out:

http://www.google.com/adsense/tips

The AdSense heat map is particularly useful. I also recommend the information about using custom channels. Custom channels can help you see which ad formats, locations, and color schemes perform well so that you can apply these lessons throughout your site and experiment until you find the most effective implementation methods.

Another feature you should try out right away are link units, which are popular with many publishers. More information can be found at:

http://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/topic.py?topic=294

Good luck!

ASA

* I have a site thaat’s 1,400+ pages. It could just as well be divided into 25 - 30 smaller sites.

Actually, if I were to start over, I’d probably go for the smaller sites. A large site brings with it design and content issues that having a bunch of smaller sites instead would illiminate.

I suspect that one of the benefits of a single site is more internal linking options. Another benefit is name recognition, the bigger the site, the bigger the potential pool (maybe) of folks telling their friends that the place to find everything they need to know about (whatever) can be found at example.com.

I guess these things are always a trade off to some degree. Each style has it’s own pluses and minuses.

Posted By: designgal