A frequently updated mixed bag blog OR several seldom updated niche sites?
- by Melanie
Background
I am a member of the website HubPages where I have about a hundred articles (and I'm always writing more.)
Anyway, HubPages revenue model is 40% ad-share for them and 60% ad share for users.
While the userbase there is really friendly, the site is REALLY slow, buggy and there is a ton of content on HubPages that is copied from other sources. Upon flagging these articles it takes a ton of time for mods to remove it and it's just generally dragging down my stuff.
Furthermore, HubPages was hit really hard by Google's Panda Update:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1B3GGLL_enUS426US426&tbm=nws&q=google+panda&
Aside from the temporary problems I would deal with when removing content from HubPages 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 HubPages, 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 would be cheaper, $14 (two year registration) to start out with and hosting and I'm good to go.
a mixed bag site wouldn't allow me to easily target keywords, but then again isn't HubPages pretty much a mixed bag site?