[adamcm]

Hi all,

I've been doing a bit of searching the last little while and reading comments on large vs small sites but am still a bit confused about which way to go.  I had an EMD ranking #1 for the past year or so which dropped in position #6 about a month ago.  As far as I can tell nothing has changed link wise for me, and all of the sites that jumped ahead of me are authority sites.  This site has a main 500 word page, along with 5 product pages of 300 words each along with my links to buy.  Was it a huge revenue stream?  Nope, but I felt I was laser targeting a specific consumer need.  My authority sites based on a generic term first, followed by branches of keywords still remain in their same positions.

I've been looking at a couple of newer niches that in my opinion would not warrent building a full site as the competition for those keywords as you move across and above the chain are too competitive.  I feel that I can get into this niche quite easily, but worry about it looking too micro.

Fictional example: Let's say you thought there was a large consumer need for baseball team hats and the competition levels were low.  Would you create a site on this specific term, add articles related to baseball hats, and then add product pages?  Or would you step back and build a hats website and focus on other sports as well despite you feeling they would be harder to compete with.

Anyway, just curious what others thought.  

Thank you!

[Fixer]

For me it depends on the site?  If you are going to just essentially promote a single product then I would just do a relatively thin site.  If you were going to promote an array of products around a theme then always go with a larger site IMO.

In the example I would start out with info on caps/teams then from this grow to other products like gloves etc then this way you strengthen the site with links going to all pages then these pages interlinking and you also make the most of the traffic with people maybe wanting to buy more or if they change their mind they may look at something else.

[RideToHell]

I always go for "big" authority sites. They are more stable, and provide a long-term passive income. Yes, they require more work, but they are well worth all that.

[TerryKyle]

In 2011-2012, Google appears to be increasingly favouring bigger authority sites.

[RideToHell]

TerryKyle, on 18 February 2012 - 09:00, said:

In 2011-2012, Google appears to be increasingly favouring bigger authority sites.

I'll have to agree. The more relevant pages, the more informative content that your site has, the higher Google will keep you. Google is tracking everything; if users feel satisfied, Google earns!

[backlink lover]

yes,,i am more into bigger sites now..snipper type of sites are not going to last long in year of 2012

[ankur420420]

Hi

I think bigger authority sites are the ones you should go for since after the Panda update,Google is after small sites

Moreover,people dont prefer buying on small sites  

[Dan]

i would say it depends - will you be relying on blackhat/greyhat links? if yes - i think its better to spread your time across a few medium sized sites rather than one or two massive sites. The amount of slaps, manual reviews, and spam reports by competitors is on the up IMO so i would much rather have my income derived from several sites than one giant site. If you are focusing all your time on quality and hoping for natural links, than one larger site is fine..

[Ted]

TheMatrix, on 18 February 2012 - 08:58, said:

I always go for "big" authority sites. They are more stable, and provide a long-term passive income. Yes, they require more work, but they are well worth all that.

I also highly recommend building a larger authority site.

If you still want your site to be laser targeted to a very small number of products, then here is how I would build it:

Create your specific team baseball cap homepage with lots of content for your targeted keyword.   Link to each one of your most important baseball cap product landing pages from the homepage.

Build out the rest of the site with blog posts that talk about baseball.   Make sure every single blog post gets dofollow backlinks from other domains.  Use those blog posts to link to your handful of important landing pages with the appropriate anchor text.

That is the model that I follow for building out a larger sniper style site.  It has been working well for me.

[travman]

You guys who say large authority site, what do you mean by that? how many pages? indexed?
how many words per page?

[Ted]

travman, on 19 February 2012 - 07:10, said:

You guys who say large authority site, what do you mean by that? how many pages? indexed?
how many words per page?

For me it depends on the niche and the other sites in it.   I would consider a 30 page website to be an authority site in some really tiny specific niches.  In other niches I would consider a site of 100 + pages an authority site.  Take a look at the sites you are competing against.  How many pages do they have?

A typical money site of mine might have 1-10 landing pages that I am trying to get ranked.  Then 30-100 other unique relevant content pages that are somewhat useful but maybe not stellar content.

For every site I create, every single page gets indexed unless there is a specific reason not to allow it.  I juice every single page at least a little bit and funnel that juice to my landing pages through relevant anchor text links.

An unimportant page might have only 250 words on it.  Most pages have more than that.   (I find that Google really prefers long pages that are on-topic) The word count of each page is not strictly important to me except for the word count of the landing pages I want to rank in the search results.  For landing pages that I am specifically targeting with SEO, I will make the word count high and sometimes very high.   For example, if I want a "How-To" style article to rank well, then that article will usually have a bare minimum of 700 words.  More than likely it will go well above 1,000 and often times more than 2,000 words of highly targeted text.  Plus I always add in images to make that lengthy page more visually appealing.

That is how I do it and it works well for me.  Your mileage may vary.

[travman]

Ted, on 19 February 2012 - 07:38, said:

For me it depends on the niche and the other sites in it.   I would consider a 30 page website to be an authority site in some really tiny specific niches.  In other niches I would consider a site of 100 + pages an authority site.  Take a look at the sites you are competing against.  How many pages do they have?

A typical money site of mine might have 1-10 landing pages that I am trying to get ranked.  Then 30-100 other unique relevant content pages that are somewhat useful but maybe not stellar content.

For every site I create, every single page gets indexed unless there is a specific reason not to allow it.  I juice every single page at least a little bit and funnel that juice to my landing pages through relevant anchor text links.

An unimportant page might have only 250 words on it.  Most pages have more than that.   (I find that Google really prefers long pages that are on-topic) The word count of each page is not strictly important to me except for the word count of the landing pages I want to rank in the search results.  For landing pages that I am specifically targeting with SEO, I will make the word count high and sometimes very high.   For example, if I want a "How-To" style article to rank well, then that article will usually have a bare minimum of 700 words.  More than likely it will go well above 1,000 and often times more than 2,000 words of highly targeted text.  Plus I always add in images to make that lengthy page more visually appealing.

That is how I do it and it works well for me.  Your mileage may vary.

Hey great post thanks much
by the way do you Silo structure your authority sites?
I am now making a new one with about 5 to 7 silos perhaps 10 posts within each Silo.
If that hits number one for the main kw even within a year to 18 months, it will be making bank
since its 100k searches/month on the main kw and 135k searches/month on the other kw

Great advice you give

[AdamWB]

Also - don't get "large" or "big" confused with "authority." Just because you build a 1000 page site does not magically make it an authority site because it has more pages than a sniper site. Authority means just that, an authority on the topic/theme. Quality content, a 'go-to' source for good information. Build trust, authority, etc etc. A crappy 10,000 page site is still crappy.

[travman]

Thats the problem I have with my new authority site it burns me out each landing page for the Silos, takes me about a day is about 2000 words but they are very informative, great pages. I would not spend that much time normally but with 100k searches per month on the main kw i figure its worth it for those pages

[Ted]

travman, on 19 February 2012 - 07:42, said:

Hey great post thanks much
by the way do you Silo structure your authority sites?
I am now making a new one with about 5 to 7 silos perhaps 10 posts within each Silo.
If that hits number one for the main kw even within a year to 18 months, it will be making bank
since its 100k searches/month on the main kw and 135k searches/month on the other kw

Great advice you give

Glad to help Travman.

I would silo a site if it made sense to do so.  If the site is going to be 100+ pages then it would probably need to be categorized and/or separated into silos somehow.   But on a site that is only 30 pages, no I don't bother.  If the site is only 30 pages then every page is likely to fall within the same silo anyway.

To be honest, I really don't think too much in terms of silos anymore.   I think more about what I want the URL text to look like.  So if I was building a site to do reviews of certain products and I wanted the word review to show in the URL, then maybe I would create a Wordpress category called "reviews"  or "review" .  Then I would make my page hxxp://whatever.com/reviews/product-name/

Or, it is possible that I would skip the category altogether and just make the URL = hxxp://whatever.com/product-name-review/


If I am laying the foundation for a future mega-site (many hundreds or thousands of pages) then I would do it this way.

(By the way, I use Wordpress for the vast majority of my money sites)

I would install several separate Wordpress blogs on a site to silo them according to categories.

I would have one blog with its own database setup at  hxxp://whatever.com

Then I would install a completely separate blog into a folder on the site like hxxp://whatever.com/category1/

Then another into hxxp://whatever.com/category2/
Then another into hxxp://whatever.com/category3/

This allows you to customize the themes for each subcategory so that they are very specifically targeted for whatever audience you are trying to attract.  When you change settings for one category, you won't affect any other categories or the website's primary theme.

It also helps make it easy to keep things organized into silos because the separate Wordpress installs in those sub-folders don't even know the other categories exist.  They only care about the pages and posts in their own category.  That way you never get any inadvertent link leakage to the other categories unless you specifically plant a link somewhere.  Yet, at the same time, it is very easy to get the pages within each category to link to other pages within its category.

I have done this for more than one article directory style website that accepts content from other people.  It keeps the separate categories organized better instead of having two unrelated articles link together because of standard navigational links built into the theme.

Edited by Ted, 24 March 2012 - 05:10.

[travman]

Thats a very interesting concept, thanks for posting it

[RideToHell]

travman, on 19 February 2012 - 07:10, said:

You guys who say large authority site, what do you mean by that? how many pages? indexed?
how many words per page?

I start slow.. Install WP, post about 2-5 articles every week consistently. I make then very informative, intuitive and interactive!

I usually get a writer to write about 3000 words per week, turns out to be about 800-1000 words per post. My findings show that pages with huge content (not content blocks) are able to rank higher. (That's why article directories sank).

Parallely, I do my SEO for EACH of those pages. My aim is to rank at least 10 of my pages upwards of #3 every month. That way, I'm getting loads of high ranking pages for my site.

Hope this helps.

[travman]

TheMatrix, on 19 February 2012 - 18:23, said:

I start slow.. Install WP, post about 2-5 articles every week consistently. I make then very informative, intuitive and interactive!

I usually get a writer to write about 3000 words per week, turns out to be about 800-1000 words per post. My findings show that pages with huge content (not content blocks) are able to rank higher. (That's why article directories sank).

Parallely, I do my SEO for EACH of those pages. My aim is to rank at least 10 of my pages upwards of #3 every month. That way, I'm getting loads of high ranking pages for my site.

Hope this helps.

Hi how to make the pages very interactive?

[adamcm]

Ted, on 19 February 2012 - 06:20, said:

I also highly recommend building a larger authority site.

If you still want your site to be laser targeted to a very small number of products, then here is how I would build it:

Create your specific team baseball cap homepage with lots of content for your targeted keyword.   Link to each one of your most important baseball cap product landing pages from the homepage.

Build out the rest of the site with blog posts that talk about baseball.   Make sure every single blog post gets dofollow backlinks from other domains.  Use those blog posts to link to your handful of important landing pages with the appropriate anchor text.

That is the model that I follow for building out a larger sniper style site.  It has been working well for me.

This is a great idea, thank you!  I am so used to creating product based pages but mixing up some other content to make it more relevant sounds like a great idea.

[GeorgR.]

I am always going to make authority sites, their ranking power is out of this world.

There is no reason NOT to do it since there is not much more to it than having appropriate categories and then keep feeding GOOD content.
It's easy to do with wordpress. Also in terms of linking it will benefit IMMENSELY if you have plenty of good content and link back to your individual posts instead of always thinking you need to link to your "front page".

What categories do you want on your authority site?
EASY:! Because if you search on Google for your "main keyword" google will come up with related keywords which are usually the ones you should use as categories on your site. Then just feed them content and sooner or later you have a very powerful site which will rank for your "main keyword" (maybe on the front page) but also lots of other keywords on your posts.

Edited by GeorgR., 20 February 2012 - 07:09.