I’ve been mailed by several budding bloggers on what to choose, ‘Micro Niche’ or ‘Authority’ blogs. Each one has its own pros and cons. Let us have a look at what they actually mean.
Authority Sites
An Authority Blog is one targeting a wider niche. It is frequently updated with latest news, updates regarding topics like Technology, Gadgets, Health, Auto etc.
In layman’s terms if you are targeting search engine traffic, if you receive more traffic to your blog posts than your homepage excluding few cases, your blog can be termed as an Authority Blog.
Pros
Google loves Authority sites, you can often find popular blogs like TechCrunch, PCWorld ranking for one of the most competitive terms like ‘Google’, ‘iPhone’, etc. It is never only restricted to seasonal keywords (keywords which lose traffic gradually with time). You can always work with new keywords and target several types of sub-niches within your niche
You can choose thousands and millions of keywords related to ‘Cooking’ and drive thousands of unique visitors daily.
Cons
However maintaining an authority site is no easy task. You need keep your site/blog updated daily with fresh content. With rankings for thousands of keywords, it would be difficult to keep track of your competitors. For example, if you wish to choose the ‘Cooking’ niche and target the keyword ‘Cooking itself’, then by performing a little analysis you would figure out how difficult it would be.
The general keyword ‘Cooking’ has several meanings. For the keyword “cooking” can be related to several different niches: recipes, kitchen design, the history of Chinese food, etc. An user searching for information on the history of Chinese cuisine will have no reason to browse your blog on general cooking. Which in turn lead to an increased bounce rate.
It would be darn difficult to compete with 74 million pages, unless you resort to target internal keywords like ‘Macroni Cheese recipe’ it would take literally years and thousands of dollars to get ranked for the keyword ‘Cooking’. Only vital factor to consider after these massive Google Panda and Google Penguin animal attacks. Once your authority blog gets hit, all your rankings will gradually fade leaving your 5 figure Business turns to nothing.
MicroNiche sites
While a Microniche site is limited to 2-3 keywords which is commonly run by blog networks or for Affiliate Marketing (Eg. Weight Loss in 8 Weeks blog, iPhone 5 accessories).
Unlike Authority blogs, these sites generally choose a single monetization platform like Affiliate Marketing, Adsense etc.
Pros
Creating a Microniche site and get it ranked for a fairly competitive keyword is easy as beans. Once you get ranked and monetize it, you can see Adsense earnings flowing in autopilot. You need not update the content very often too.
You can create like 100 microniche sites and ooze out the money with Adsense. They are also the platform for Affiliate marketing.
Cons
However Google hates microniche sites and targets them in each of their animal updates. But with fresh content, you may fight back. The traffic for your micro niche keywords fade with time. Most of such keywords don’t last more than 1-3 years on average.
Microniche blogs are common victims of very high bounce rate. You may not have any readership for your microniche blogs. However, making money is your sole purpose, Microniche sites are just great for this purpose.
What to Choose: Micro Niche vs Authority?
It entirely depends on what you wish to target. I always suggest to go with Authority sites if it was not for these unexpected Google updates. If you get hit on 1-2 sites of your microniche blog network, it would make much difference because you’ve got your backup blogs. But once your authority blog gets hit, there’s no way. The latest disavow tool does no good, you have to manually check every link and choose which one to disavow.
Nice article! I think that MicroNiche sites have more cons than pros.
I;m going with Micro niche blogs this time, I wanna try MN blogs with Affiliate marketing.
Both of the sites have there own importance. But working on MNS is quite easy as compared to authority sites. So if your MNS gets hit by Panda or Penguine, you can quickly switch over to other MNS, but that would not be the case with Authority sites.
Good article and I’m going for an authority site too, except I am using curation heavily. I am not going to go down the optimising for just one keyword route again after what just happened.
I have both kinds of sites, Authority sites are easily to update but difficult to get better rankings, and if you get good ranks in few topics then you will rock the earning..
Authority and domain age matters in ranking. Though some of them may not agree with me but it’s true. Take eHow and GSMArena. They have low quality content and similar content which is available on thousands of websites and Blogs. But still they got #1 in Google for High competitive keywords. Those site were established years back. Seeing all these,i think Google gives first priority to domain age & authority than content.
I am agreed here. Google loves the authority and domination. Therefore, they are completely revamping the search engine algorithms to make them more social friendly to get all the data from big networks like Facebook and Twitter.
Well, running microniche blogs are not big feat these days. One can easily achieve the height with minimum SEO skills.
I always prefer authority sites… only internet most of the people love information…and only authority site can fulfill there needs perfectly.
I don’t know in which category my blog belongs to but i updated it daily. Nice information Samanta.
One relevant aspect is that authority sites have much more ability to drive non-Google traffic. If you’re an authority on cooking, cooks will come back. If you rank #1 for “baking bran muffins” and that’s it, there’s no reason for anyone to return.
Great article Samantha, @Sameer, many micro niche sites doesn’t need frequent update, i’ve seen few with post frequency like 1post/month and still ranking, 1 authority blog gets hit, it’s like your life is over (joking)
I would like to say that it is not possible for any one to build and carry on 100 micro niche sites. With so many updated released by Google in a year, you need to be up on your toes to perform the changes at your end. As compared to 1 Authority blog, you can have no more than couple of micro niche blogs since it is quite difficult to maintain blogs these days.
You’re correct. I think we should select upon our interest. Both works well if we work well.