#103 – The Death and Rebirth of Micro-Niche Sites

What you will learn

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Why micro-niche sites went out of fashion
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How a micro-niche site can beat a big site in the SERPs
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Why site builders who hate link building might launch a micro-niche site
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Our favorite micro-niche sites and what we love about them

As some older listeners may remember, before we were building authority sites, most people were creating micro-niche sites.

It used to be the predominant business model.

People would build tens or even hundreds of these sites, make a little bit of money from each of them and this would form their income.

Then, as conditions changed, people transitioned towards building fewer, larger sites - authority sites.

In this week’s episode, I’m joined by Gael and Perrin to discuss micro-niche sites, their demise and their resurgence in a new, improved form.
What is a Micro-Niche Site?
It’s hard to pin down. We’re going to have a few goes at it from different perspectives.

Perrin thinks a common characteristic of micro-niche sites is they are small and make a small amount of money.

But, this doesn’t capture the essence of a micro-niche site. The key component of a micro-niche site is it’s only about one thing. In the eyes of Google, this gives the site extremely high relevance.

Gael comes at things from a slightly different angle. In his eyes, an authority site is something you continually work on, improve and grow.

Whereas, a micro-niche site is so focused it’s easy to establish yourself as an expert on that single topic.

As such, a micro-niche site can cover a narrow topic, be left for two years collecting passive income and, when the owner comes back to it at that point, the income will probably have grown instead of declined.

That is unless a larger site has been actively targeting those keywords and growing over the period the site has been dormant.

From my point of view, there is no stick-on definition. The lines are blurred between the types of sites.

Traditionally, micro-niche sites have been ‘set it and forget it’ style sites.

Usually, lower quality content that’s not maintained after being posted initially. However, recently we’ve seen some micro-niche sites take an authority site approach to the quality of the content.
Can You Really Distinguish Between Niche Sites, Micro-Niche Sites and Authority Sites?
Yes and no.

There are points in time where a site is clearly a micro-niche site or clearly an authority site. Anything in between can be considered a gray area.

Think of sites evolving the same way as humans have. There was ancient man who walked upright and had similar characteristics as modern man.

Ancient man did not all of a sudden become modern man.

It was a slow evolution over time. There was a crossover period where they were both and neither at the same time.

This is how we can view the evolution of niche sites into authority sites. In turn, this is why it’s so difficult to clearly differentiate between different types of site - they share similar characteristics.
Why Were Niche Sites So Popular around 2010/ 2011?
To understand this, you need to understand the SEO landscape.

There was no such thing as Google Panda so sh*t content ruled the SERPs.

There was no such thing as Google Penguin,