question Are minisites dead?

[Blues Brother]

Hi everyone, I know this is a domaining forum and not an seo forum but I have a question about traffic. I've been reading up on SEO for building traffic to my website and the general consensus seems to be that I need to create a 100 page authority site. This is also known as creating topical authority site. Google likes seeing these types of sites. According the SEO article I've been reading, if I have a 100 page site about auto insurance, Google will see that my site is about auto insurance and will likely rank me for long tail keywords.

But creating 100 pages takes time and can be expensive.

Enter the minisite...

These sites are 5-10 pages long and center around a specific small niche.

Can these types of sites rank well for an uncompetitive keyword? The competitors for the keyword that I'm trying to rank for have DAs of 6-10. According the Ubersuggest, this is easy to beat.

Thanks

 

[Recons.Com]

Hi everyone, I know this is a domaining forum and not an seo forum but I have a question about traffic. I've been reading up on SEO for building traffic to my website and the general consensus seems to be that I need to create a 100 page authority site. This is also known as creating topical authority site. Google likes seeing these types of sites. According the SEO article I've been reading, if I have a 100 page site about auto insurance, Google will see that my site is about auto insurance and will likely rank me for long tail keywords.

But creating 100 pages takes time and can be expensive.

Enter the minisite...

These sites are 5-10 pages long and center around a specific small niche.

Can these types of sites rank well for an uncompetitive keyword? The competitors for the keyword that I'm trying to rank for have DAs of 6-10. According the Ubersuggest, this is easy to beat.

Thanks

Why don't you start with 5-10 page mini-site and test your theory?

I'd expect it to work for the lesser competition keywords and combos because for some keywords even simple dumb (or intentional?) landers by afternic with the header "there is no info. find out why" rank on the first page.

 

[JB Lions]

Hi everyone, I know this is a domaining forum and not an seo forum but I have a question about traffic. I've been reading up on SEO for building traffic to my website and the general consensus seems to be that I need to create a 100 page authority site. This is also known as creating topical authority site. Google likes seeing these types of sites. According the SEO article I've been reading, if I have a 100 page site about auto insurance, Google will see that my site is about auto insurance and will likely rank me for long tail keywords.

But creating 100 pages takes time and can be expensive.

Enter the minisite...

These sites are 5-10 pages long and center around a specific small niche.

Can these types of sites rank well for an uncompetitive keyword? The competitors for the keyword that I'm trying to rank for have DAs of 6-10. According the Ubersuggest, this is easy to beat.

Thanks

Niche minisites, for low competition keywords, easy.

I just checked one of mine, haven't updated it in 10 years. It's still http not https

it's keywordkeyword.com the keywords being what the site is about, the main keyword I want to rank for

Google
wikipedia
my site
etsy

MSN/Yahoo
etsy
my site
wikipedia

These are sites I can make in 1 day, sites that don't have any real competition but get some searches, make a little money.

The site I"m using as an example, I can honestly say there was 1 site that was better, that's it. But they didn't have a clue about SEO, so they were easy to beat.

 

[AEProgram]

i would suggest you focus on creating niche video contact vs websites.

 

[okaydomains]

But creating 100 pages takes time and can be expensive.

Not anymore, you can generate a 1000 page site with ChatGPT in 15 minutes. There's even WordPress plugins you can use.

I expect this is already happening en masse. If I had free time I would certainly be experimenting with ChatGPT manufactured MFA sites.

 

[JB Lions]

Not anymore, you can generate a 1000 page site with ChatGPT in 15 minutes. There's even WordPress plugins you can use.

I expect this is already happening en masse. If I had free time I would certainly be experimenting with ChatGPT manufactured MFA sites.

Wouldn't that just make it easy for Google to mass ban sites, just looking at the source code for those using that plugin.

 

[Blues Brother]

Wouldn't that just make it easy for Google to mass ban sites, just looking at the source code for those using that plugin.

Thanks for the reply. Google previously said they didn't like AI generated content for websites. They said using ChatGPT and other AI tools to write content went against their content guidelines. But more recently, they said it's "ok". But who knows what future holds. One algorithm update and my site could get wiped out.

Search Engine Land has an interesting article on this topic. Here's an excerpt from March 21 2023:

"If you use AI as part of your toolset to provide valuable content, Google won't ding you.

The problem is that it's enticing to use these tools the wrong way. Google is not giving you the green light to have ChatGPT write for you and call it a day.

Like any tool, ChatGPT and its competitors are just that – tools that require humans to leverage them.

Otherwise, it will take and regurgitate what you feed it, delivering no value beyond aggregation. You're giving users nothing new."

 

[okaydomains]

Wouldn't that just make it easy for Google to mass ban sites, just looking at the source code for those using that plugin.

No, the source code of a plugin like that is not revealed to Googlebot. It's PHP code thats inserting posts into a database, which would then be rendered just as any other HTML page would.

To be honest, if you hire a writer online at this point you should expect the content to be written by GPT-4.

I am sure Google would like to / is working on detecting GPT-4 generated content. I think that is going to be a challenge, however.

 

[JB Lions]

No, the source code of a plugin like that is not revealed. It's PHP code that's inserting posts into a database, which would then be rendered just as any other HTML page would.

I am sure Google would like to / is working on detecting GPT-4 generated content. I think that is going to be a challenge, however.

Usually the plug-ins used, themes etc are in the source code. I’m always checking what Wordpress theme is being used on sites I like. Lots of tools out there where you can just input a url and it will spit all that info out.

Will try to find a site using these plugins to see

 

[noneisnone]

AI generated content is a big no no you will land in google sandbox for a while before you get indexed

 

[okaydomains]

Usually the plug-ins used, themes etc are in the source code. I’m always checking what Wordpress theme is being used on sites I like. Lots of tools out there where you can just input a url and it will spit all that info out.

Will try to find a site using these plugins to see

You're referring to fingerprints. That would be a telltale meta tag, JavaScript file, CSS file, HTML pattern, or something else included on the front end of a website. You can detect some other information via the server headers too. Googlebot generally will not ask for files that aren't included in the pages source code just to see if you're using a certain tech (and you can block those requests anyway).

However, the plugins I'm referring to run on the backend, to generate content. They have no need to include CSS or JS files or headers that would be visible to Googlebot. They run "server side."

The websites you're referring to can thus detect some of the plugins you're using, but not all. They would probably not be able to detect these.

This plugin thing is a red herring though. Regardless of what automation tools you do or don't use to manage the content, I'm just saying it's very easy to generate 1000 pages on a topic using GPT-4, and I bet a ton of people are doing that already.

And of course Google won't like it or encourage it. But I don't really think it matters because GPT-4 content is ridiculously good and I haven't heard any evidence that text generated by GPT-4 can be reliably detected. Would love to hear otherwise.

If you haven't played with GPT-4 I'd encourage anyone to do so. It has to be seen to be believed. Go ask it to generate an article or white paper on a topic of your choice, and then compare that to what you could get for $50 on Upwork. Give it any guidance at all and the results get even better.

 

[Daniel Owens]

Hi everyone, I know this is a domaining forum and not an seo forum but I have a question about traffic. I've been reading up on SEO for building traffic to my website and the general consensus seems to be that I need to create a 100 page authority site. This is also known as creating topical authority site. Google likes seeing these types of sites. According the SEO article I've been reading, if I have a 100 page site about auto insurance, Google will see that my site is about auto insurance and will likely rank me for long tail keywords.

But creating 100 pages takes time and can be expensive.

Enter the minisite...

These sites are 5-10 pages long and center around a specific small niche.

Can these types of sites rank well for an uncompetitive keyword? The competitors for the keyword that I'm trying to rank for have DAs of 6-10. According the Ubersuggest, this is easy to beat.

Thanks

Make sure you either hire a writer or write the articles yourself as AI generated or articles that are used on other sites will sandbox you in google and kill your ranking.

 

[Fayaz Ahmed]

But creating 100 pages takes time and can be expensive.

As others have already mentioned, using AI (ChatGPT, GPT4, Midjourney, DALL·E 2 etc.) you can actually create a 100 page website far more easily now than before. However, if you just auto-generate the articles and post them all at once, it's more likely than not that Google will consider these articles as low value articles and not rank them well.

So, even though it became easier using AI, there will have to be some manual human input, scheduling over a longer period (e.g. no more than 3-4 articles a day), social media engagement etc. to make it valuable to your users.

If the content is interesting to real humans, it'll be interesting to Google as well.

Enter the minisite...

These sites are 5-10 pages long and center around a specific small niche.

Can these types of sites rank well for an uncompetitive keyword? The competitors for the keyword that I'm trying to rank for have DAs of 6-10. According the Ubersuggest, this is easy to beat.

Yes, mini sites can still rank. It's easier to rank well with bigger sites, but with good content, you can still rank with smaller sites. My personal sites and client sites do rank well for some long tail keywords. Regular social media activity will help as well.

Not anymore, you can generate a 1000 page site with ChatGPT in 15 minutes. There's even WordPress plugins you can use.

Yes, it's possible. However, as others have said before, these sort of auto generated content can be easily detected by Google. You'll need at least some human input to add value to those articles. Then you'll have to make social media engagements around those posts. Only then they'll rank, but rank they will if you can do it right.

One of the most prominent SEO ranking factor is Click Through Rate (CTR). Google often experiments with new articles on different sites and see how it does on CTR and bounce rate. If you add value to real users in your content, whether it's using AI or otherwise, you'll most likely get ranking on Google.

I am sure Google would like to / is working on detecting GPT-4 generated content. I think that is going to be a challenge, however.

There are already services available that can detect AI generated text and image content. I have tested some myself. They can detect even GPT-4 generated TEXT most of the time. You'll have to give some good input to ChatGPT and do some prompt engineering to avoid detection.

Example: https://copyleaks.com/ai-content-detector

I'm sure Google internally uses better tools than these to detect AI generated content.
Google even heavily used ChatGPT API to train its own AI, as evident from OpenAI's CEO in this tweet:

So I'm certain that Google can detect ChatGPT (even GPT-4) output already, and they'll only get better at it.

Having said that, GPT by definition means Generative, and what it generates depends directly on user input. It can't generate by itself.

So, if someone can generate much better content than average people, and then put those content on small sites and if those sites become useful to at least some people - I don't see why Google will not rank them, even if they can detect them to be AI generated.

Why don't you start with 5-10 page mini-site and test your theory?

Yes absolutely, this is the best advice IMHO.

Don't depend on my opinion or anyone else's - do it yourself for a month or two.
Then you'll know for sure what works and what doesn't.

Happy domaining & content creation
Fayaz.

 

[scithe]

Whether 5 pages or 500 pages, it is really going to come down to useful content.

I hate going to a blog post to have a question answered and first I have to scroll through 300-500 words to learn the history or backstory of whatever it is I already know about. But I guess this is necessary for SEO manipulation or people seem to think so...since I am finding these pages through Google then probably so.

But generic content even in niche categories probably won't go viral. Useful content will.

 

[AEProgram]

A lot of misinformation in this thread.

1. 1000's of videos by gurus are talking about how you could make money using AI to write articles and sell "your" writing service to businesses.

If you ask somebody if it's ok to use AI to write articles, and they tell you "no, go hire a writer to do it," in most cases they do not know anything at all (zero, 0,
nul) about what is going on now.

The writer you hire in 2023 to avoid using AI, is probably using AI to write your stuff!

So next they will tell you, hire, known, trusted, writers that share their screen and have a team of witnesses as they write. I am sure those people are everywhere looking to take your 5 dollar job and dedicate a month to write you an article.

But to be fair, the people with the bad advice assume they know what these AI products are.

2. Here is how the products work.

You give it some information, an outline, and it gives you an articles. Or you give it some other articles and you ask it to add or remove certain things and reword the whole thing.

The people bashing modern AI think that AI goes to other websites, takes the content, modifies it and gives you an article. That is not even close. If you were to write an article now from your brain you are more likely to use content you saw somewhere else (without knowing) than an AI like GPT! If you don't understand what I just wrote, please avoid giving advice on this topic. I am not about to write a book here about how GPT works.

3. I took articles that I wrote and articles I know some friends wrote and ran it through AI detection systems like Originality AI and others. The ones we wrote had higher scores (bad) than the AI generated content. I tested it with articles that didn't even quote others at all, real original articles.

The AI writers of today do such a good job that if you have a small amount of skill, you can guide it to generate articles that will not be detected as AI generated.

The big problem is that a lot of AI detection tools, are giving original material a bad grade!

Google probably ran some tests, and so did Amazon and I assume they realized if they are going to go after AI content, a lot of innocent people will get banned.

Thanks to AI I have some extra time so I will give you advice about minisites.

If you really found a nice that you have a chance at ranking on the first page with popular keywords for that niche, you can create WP blog and use AI content, just ensure the content grades well with AI checkers. You can also use AI to generate great tags, keywords, descriptions or anything else you need.

They key with google is consistency. You want to add new content every day but different types. Some should be a short article, some just an image with caption (everything from alt tags to image name should be optimized). Some articles have no images, some have 1 some have 5.

You have to find a way to get people linking to your site. This should not be buying an SEO pack unless you want to live in a sandbox.

If you are consistent and gradually get related sites linking to you (you don't need many if you are in a small niche without much competition) within 6 months you will start getting good organic traffic.

One way to to get people linking to your site is to have a free tool for that industry that you pay someone (or AI) to build. This is not always possible, but when it is, it is great. You might find that someone offers some tools for that industry but their tools are outdated or they make it hard to use, upgrade the tools and offer it.

Create accounts on youtube, tiktok, etc. and post content there using AI and link back to your site. This adds little value to SEO (don't try telling this to the SEO service sellers) but it is better than nothing.

 

[NickB]

Google is NOT penalising Ai content

Seen numerous case studies where people have used Ai content on brand new sites and have ranked well - some people went extreme and posted 1000s of posts within days, using various API's to generate content, linking, auto posting etc and not only ranked well, but got accepted with AdSense - I personally don't recommend this unless you seriously know what you are doing, but it is possible......you can even auto upload the images

You still need to add the basics - Images with Alt tags, title tags, internal/external links, meta description et etc - most of this can be automated, but always worth manually checking

I have personally used Ai on DA 37 site - long form word article and it is ranking on the first page last time I checked - used GPT and AIPRM plugin ($5 premium version) I'll be monitoring it for a few weeks and then I will add another one - will probably do 1 or 2 per month alongside my other content

Am working on a new site which will be purely Ai content as a test and will see how that goes......

I do think it helps if you use an expired domain with some authority, does not have to be a lot, but aged and some backlinks will help get out of the sandbox much quicker.....

 

[marijuanadomain]

Mini site works!! for me
here are great examples- I own GardenIgloos.com and RippleRugs.com
I got so much traffic from the other sites that don't have the plural
and got $$$$$$ from Amazon links

 

[Blues Brother]

Mini site works!! for me
here are great examples- I own GardenIgloos.com and RippleRugs.com
I got so much traffic from the other sites that don't have the plural
and got $$$$$$ from Amazon links

Thanks for sharing. Sorry, are you saying that you also own the sites that don't have the plural? If so, good job. They look awesome. If you don't mind my asking, how did you get so many backlinks? Did you do an email outreach campaign?

 

[marijuanadomain]

Thanks for sharing. Sorry, are you saying that you also own the sites that don't have the plural? If so, good job. They look awesome. If you don't mind my asking, how did you get so many backlinks? Did you do an email outreach campaign?

Yes I own the plural websites
I just installed the yeost seo plugin and

 

[Bob Hawkes]

Really appreciate the various viewpoints expressed here – I have learned a lot, about AI-generated content and Google in particular.

This is one of those things I have always wanted to try, creating some minisites, even picked up a few names I saw primarily for that, but never get around to actually creating some. So this is based on perception, not personal experience, but....

I suspect the sites that work best are ones where if you simply Google or Wikipedia the term, the answer is not very comprehensive. That is your minisite, even if short, adds significantly to the content. The issue, of course, is that quickly Google will access your site, and maybe hard to stay unique. Anyway, it seems to me that rather niche topics might work best.

No matter how much you use AI to assist, I think the site needs a personal touch. So write about something you know and feel you have something to say.

I suspect it is like startups, most fail but a few succeed beyond any expectations. So route is probably to try 10 or so minisites, then after 6 months, narrow to the 1 or 2 that seem promising.

Thanks again for all the information in this discussion.

-Bob

 

[biggie]

Hi

minisites are still good to go, depending on what content is

i put this one up (reusableconstructionmaterials.com) several years ago and it's still ranked in yahoo on page 2 for terms in quotes.

https://search.yahoo.com/search;_yl...-t&fr2=sb-top&fp=1&b=11&pz=10&bct=0&pstart=10

imo....

 

[marijuanadomain]

Mini site works!! for me
here are great examples- I own GardenIgloos.com and RippleRugs.com
I got so much traffic from the other sites that don't have the plural
and got $$$$$$ from Amazon links

I also have wineryconcert.com and gets tons of traffic from the plural site ..oh yeaaaaaaaa--free advertising

 

[Bname.com]

The content of the website is crucial,
It's not that as long as the website is created, it will be included in Google

 

[Blues Brother]

The content of the website is crucial,
It's not that as long as the website is created, it will be included in Google

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Can you please elaborate? What if my minisite had 100% unique content. The articles were 2000 words longs but the site only had 10 pages (plus an About Us, Contact Us, Privacy Policy). Could it rank for an uncompetitive keyword?

 

[pablohc86]

Hi

minisites are still good to go, depending on what content is

i put this one up (reusableconstructionmaterials.com) several years ago and it's still ranked in yahoo on page 2 for terms in quotes.

https://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=AwrNY9gFvjJkZ8A1tX5XNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3BhZ2luYXRpb24-?p="reusable+construction+materials"&fr=yfp-t&fr2=sb-top&fp=1&b=11&pz=10&bct=0&pstart=10

imo....

to me it is not ranking in any page on yahoo.. probably because i search from EU?