Niche sites or 1 authority site?

So I feel like this is an age old question now that I’ve been kicking it around for a month…I want to start affiliate marketing, and my niche has lots of sub-niches. I’m torn between starting 4-5 sites or just 1 massive authority site.

Please if all that you have is an opinion keep it lite and simple, I want to hear from the people who have done it.

Which way did you do it (1 or 10), and do you still feel it was the right way?

On personal projects, I did it both ways, and now I stick to authority sites. Small sites have a much harder time getting off the ground these days.

Somewhat related (not an affiliate site and already a rather large property!) but SitePoint used to be made up of several niche sites, which we merged in 2013 (that was fun…). Search traffic rocketed and our MozScore keeps rising.

3 Likes

Thanks for the reply, that’s pretty inspiring =) I didn’t know that! I think I’m leaning towards 1 authority site…I think it would be easier to work with from an seo standpoint…

Yeah, much easier. Back in the day, you’d have your niche sites all link to each other, and you’d build link equity that way. Google doesn’t really work that way anymore, but a lot of SEO info is outdated and will still recommend that.

1 Like

Are you aware that www.yoursite.tld, yoursite.tld, sub1.yoursite.tld, sub2.yoursite.tld are all separate entities that will fragment any SEO efforts?

SitePoint moved their popular forum from a sub-domain to a sub-directory which I believe has considerably enhanced the overall Moz rankings.

1 Like

Yeah I agree sub-directories are better than sub-domains, but on the topic of authority sites vs, sub-niches, I would go for several sub niches. They are always easier to rank in my opinion, especially if your hypertargeting. Write great optimized content, make use of schema, geo-targeting (if its a location specific product), have a great internal linking structure and a good silo architecture.

This topic was automatically closed 91 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.