Hey y'all. I find myself at a business crossroads and was hoping for some feedback from portal and niche site developers out there. With some of the new scripts out there like newstopica, all of a sudden any information/content site can become so much more. Add some news rss feeds, add some property feeds, even classifieds sites. Suddenly you have a swack load of content without the uphill battle of getting those first gullible 50 users to get the ball rolling . You know what I mean? So my question then, is whether it's best to use my existing site which has been around for 5 years and does very well for some important keywords (less good for ones like property, classifieds, jobs, etc, those that the RSS would pump content for). It's out of the sandbox, has decent PR, about 1100 uniques/day, makes good Adsense money, etc etc. My decision thus, is whether to create individual microsites for, say Property or Jobs using something like newstopica to grab tons of organized content via RSS and promote the microsites using my original site then pull some of the top content from the microsite back to the original site via another RSS feed to supplement the original's content. Or Plugin all these RSS feeds into subdomains of the original site, thus becoming a pretty massive portal. This would avoid the sandboxes and the need to build up PR and links on the microsites, but makes the portal site design both difficult and complex, possibly alienating some of my original members who apreciated the simplicity of the original's content. I've heard it's much easier to target keywords at individual sites rather than having 50 keywords for one site (even if the individual pages are optimized to the hilt for each one). Hope to get your feedback soon peeps. I'm hoping to start the devs soon! EDIT: I guess, more specifically, if y'all could outline the advantages and disadvantages as you see them, beyond those listed above (and whether or not you agree with those listed above too of course). What would you do?
spainexpat ... definitely go for the large VERTICAL portal, but you probably new I would say so. Content rich verticals will be the way of the future.
This is just my tupence worth, but I think that the small single keyword site is best only for short term gain (the sprinter), the larger portal is the marathon runner, harder work, but worth it in the end.
Why not do both. I am building a large content site, but at the same time using around 10 smaller more specific sites to feed into it. If you put them all on different ip addresses you will make google very happy, and probably your wallet too.
I think the best strategy has to be having a number of sites of different sizes. Recent algorithm changes have tended increasingly to favour large sites, but that doesn't always have to be the case. With a mixture, you're always going to be in a good position no matter which type of site is in favour.
i think 1 big site with few smaller sites work. you can build the big site first get it going then start on the smaller sites... If you do multiple sites start on the bigger one first as immediate reward will be less but long term it will be greater!
It sounds like a lot of fence sitting jk hehe. But trying to do a portal AND the microsites isn't really realistic (from where I sit). I already have a big site, and the others would all be smaller sites... I guess the point is whether to leverage the existing site's PR and rep with Google or whether to leverage the specialization provided by smaller sites... Still thinking about it, but hanging towards the big ass mofo portal idea *nods to Sayles*