A frequently updated mixed bag blog OR several seldom updated niche sites?

Question

I am a member of a website where I have about a hundred articles (and I'm always writing more.)

Aside from temporary problems I would deal with when removing content from the and putting it on my own domain (duplicate content, etc) I have another problem.

Which would be the best for my articles? I have tons of articles in a wide variety of niches and would like to do what would help them perform the best. I'm not a huge niche writer and have received wide criticism from the HubPages community for my articles not performing as well as they could because I don't use enough keywords within the text of my articles. I prefer to write more naturally in a way that would appeal to an audience instead of keyword stuff. Anyway, this is aside the point.

My Question After removing my articles from the site, should I put them on one domain or spread them across multiple domains grouped sort of by topic. For example: a-bunch-of-articles.com OR travel-articles.com and financial-articles.com and knitting-articles.com

(I know those domains aren't available, but it's just kind of an example.)

Here are the pros and cons of each:

a mixed bag site like a-bunch-of-articles.com may not perform as well because of its mixed-bag nature

a mixed bag site would be updated far more frequently than several niche sites... some niche sites may be updated so infrequently that a year could pass before one sees a new article

a mixed bag site would be like putting all my eggs is one basket, where having several niche sites would spread out my portfolio, so to speak.

a mixed bag site wouldn't allow me to easily target keywords, but then again isn't HubPages pretty much a mixed bag site?

Answer 1

Although I'm not really an expert on SEO I believe that it's going to be easier to rank more focused niche sites. You would be able to build up a more consistent information architecture that Google should be able to interpret the meaning of easier via relevant internal linking.

Also, long standing reputable domains often appear to be favored by Google as they are less likely to be owned by people trying to game the system for short term gains. This means that they can get indexed faster and rank better. If you develop several domains over a few years then some of them could become real assets.

That said, the current way Google seems to rank sites places an emphasis on regular fresh content and I've found noticeable increases in the amount of traffic my site receives just by adding in a new article. My site doesn't have much content or traffic and I don't update it often so the effects are quite clear. It's not the new article that get the new traffic, the reputation boost goes across the board. This means that if you have many sites you only update a few times a year are going to be a challenge.

You should probably try and look at the your articles and organize them into categories so you can take a middle ground. You might find that there are several topics that you have a special interest in and could build out individual sites with. The rest you could put into a 'blog' style site with a mixture of topics. You could even break off categories from the mixed site later on if you find categories growing and getting reasonable amounts of traffic.

Answer 2

I'm not an SEO expert either so someone with more knowhow than me may say this is a bad idea, but what aboout using one domain with several subdomains? E.g. financial.melanie.com and travel.melanie.com. That way you'd only have to pay for one domain, but you could separate the content in a more meaningful way.

Also I'd just like to say bravo for sticking to your own writing style and not using lots of keywords. IME good clear writing is ultimately just as successful for SEO than writing that crowbars in keywords, and makes for a much much nicer reading experience for the user. Keep it up!

Answer 3

I think better if you use one domain, and for another subject you can use sub domain. to increase rank of your website, you must put your url address at another website that have a good rank.

Answer 4

Here is a question for you. Why would people want to come to a website like this? Why did Google penalize them? Why have sites like this received a bad reputation?

Why not concentrate on building a website that helps people in a certain niche. One thats provides tremendous value.