Forum Moderators: martinibuster
My plan WAS to build a huge mega site for mainly adsense and a bit of Amazon plus another affilite program. I am going into a HUGE niche, well it's not even a niche, it's a multi billion $ industry, BUT contains several hundered niches within it. I was planing to have one domain, and slowly build the site up, one little section/niche at a time until it's huge.
But i read recently that it's better to have tons of little sites all linked together. Or, even, NOT linked together (to reduce options to not click on the ads). I wonder whether this route is cost effective though, because it involves buying many more domains and hosting accounts, which surely would make my costs higher?
So my question is, should i make one mega site, or about 200 reasonable size ones, or even both? And see which does best? What are the pros and cons of each?
Thanks, Mark
Mark
Bajsapa, good morning to you, I can see you are already in a good mood this early;-)
Mark, your question is legit. I think Baj is trying to tell you that content is what matters. The choice between making one big site or many little ones is second to that. I prefer to make one site per topic, mostly to sort of spread the risk. And also because there is not much sense to add pages about for example computers to www.travel-related-url.com.
I know there are some very experienced WW members who indeed have 100+ sites for good reasons. Perhaps some of them care to respond...
One part of your post worries me:
within each of these 200 sub-niches a website could 1000 or more pages EACH
Does this mean you are planning to write 200.000 pages?
[edited by: humblebeginnings at 11:37 am (utc) on May 1, 2006]
Take a random example:
www.instrumentpages.com/guitars or
www.instrumentpages-guitars.com
Also, one advantage i could in spreading the sites out is that you could have multiple adsense accounts, which wouls help if one of the accounts got banned for some reason. It'd mean you wouldn't lose ALL your revenue.
Also, one advantage i could in spreading the sites out is that you could have multiple adsense accounts, which wouls help if one of the accounts got banned for some reason.
Oh-oh! Mistake. You can have only one account, regardless of the number of websites. All sites are put in one account!
Anyway, am i planing to write 200,000 pages? erm, well i have many years on this planet, so lets just say i'm future proofing myself with a subject that has a lot of scope! Of course i can't hope to do this all by myself, but at least i'll never run out of stuff to write about :)
Also, one advantage i could in spreading the sites out is that you could have multiple adsense accounts, which wouls help if one of the accounts got banned for some reason.
Mark, maybe you should start by reading the AdSense Terms & Conditions before any further planning
oh right. Well that's the offical line! ;)
You mean you don't care too much about them silly Adsense TOS?
Is it better to have smaller, more targeted sites than one big one?
Back to the point: I would say group some of the topics you would like to write about and make 50 mini mega sites.
For my topic can either have 1, 5 or about 200. It doesn't make sense to do it any other way really.
hmm this is a point. i think i may well do the 200 sites thing but have a main portal page linking to all my other ones, so it "feels" like one site.
200 sites all based around the same subject, or at least closely related? Sounds like a candidate for subdomains. Treated as separate websites by the SEs, but easier to maintain and brand/market than having 200 unique domains.
for example, a series of
www.instruments-guitars, www.instruments-trumpets, is very much a risk. You really need to purchase these domains all at once because else you might find out later on that one of "your" domains has been taken.
Therefore working with subdomains, for example
guitars.instruments.com and trumpets.instruments.com is a more safe way of accomplishing this.
Also cheaper and more easy to handle...
I think Adsense doesn't deal with subdomains other than it would deal with topdomains...
Duplicate content is always a concern where loads of different URL's are used. Running one URL or maybe a few is as much as most of us can absorb.
How on earth can one run hundreds of URL's and expect them all to be of quality, rather than mere quantity?
What I am trying to say is that you seem to be making everything sound so simple. Trust me, the guys who are getting a ton of traffic, be it through a few domains or a huge number of subdomains, started their sites a long, long time ago.
Trust me, the guys who are getting a ton of traffic, be it through a few domains or a huge number of subdomains, started their sites a long, long time ago.
... in a galaxy far far away?
anyway, of course they started long ago. I am going into this with a long term view. It's a subject which holds my interest, and i plan to grow it slowly over years, so i want to make sure i don't make things hard for myself by starting with the wrong foundation. I want to do it right 1st time. I guess i will make mistakes, but if i do my prep/foundations properly, it should be 10 times easier in a few years.
Thanks for all you opinions, i think i am almost ready to get going now! :)
BTW, we've been having a discussion of a similar scheme in the thread at:
[webmasterworld.com...]
But i read recently that it's better to have tons of little sites all linked together.
There is a lot of information available on crosslinking and crosslinking penalties. Before you publish multiple little sites and link them all together, you might want to do some searching for the current best practices concerning crosslinking.
FarmBoy
This is partly because niches inevitably overlap, and as the site grows it gets harder and harder not to have links jumping all over the place, which is confusing to visitors. Even geographic subdomains, which at first glance you'd think would be easy to keep separate, are surprisingly blurry in my experience.
Also, as a scheme to increase your Google rankings, this is an extremely tired idea. It was one of the first complex spam filters Google implemented, back in 2003 or so.
I am getting the impression that one big site is best overall, i just hope google doesn't find a reason to ban my site, or the WHOLE thing goes down. That is my biggest fear. At least if i had separate sites with different webhosts then i wouldn't be putting all my eggs in one basket so to speak.
Mark
I wasn't really thinking of cross linking as such, more having a portal site linking to lots of my sites, and in turn, each of my sites would have a link back to the portal site...
Based on my understanding, you've just described crosslinking.
As far as i see it, this isn't a link farm (correct me if i'm wrong).
I don't think the terms "link farm" and "crosslinking" refer to the same thing.
FarmBoy
is cross linking bad?
In my experience, 100+ sites, no, so long as the page information for each site URL is unique.
There are advantages with having multiple domains and especially so if one has a selection of instantly recognisable trade/well-known terminologies, HOWEVER to do it successfully one needs to create a bomb-proof directory structure that visitors can understand immediately when crossing from one domain to another.
Needless to say that it also needs to be constructed in CSS so that any site wide update requires only one .inc to be uploaded to each site or have a central repository from which ALL the domains source their includes.
It is not as easy as many may believe however if the site(s) is/are going to container evergreen information, if you have instantly recognisable URLs, if you have the patience for the search engines to come along and spider you, if you can wait for the sites to be ranked and if you are confident that you can achieve the idea successfully, then consider it.
Do remember that launching brand new URLs may take some time to climb up the rankings compared to the many established sites, no matter how bad you consider their information may be.
I will give you an easier alternative though.
Commence construction under one URL but making sure that the directory structure is such that if you want to break the site down into smaller sections under their own URLs later on, then it would be easy to do so.
For example:
example1.com/usa/widget/subwidget/whatever.html
example1.com/uk/widget/subwidget/whatever.html
could very easily be broken into:
example2.com/usa/widget/subwidget/whatever.html
example3.com/uk/widget/subwidget/whatever.html
leaving intact:
example1.com/othercountries/widget/subwidget/whatever.html
My guess is that your biggest problem may be obtaining the actual recognisable domain names.
Incidentally, your hosting costs would not be that high, maybe USD 50.00 per month, there are plenty of excellent offers available for such deals.
I hope that helps.
