The Future of niche sites and search engines

PeterM · #1 (**permalink**) 01-31-2008, 05:25 PM

I have been wondering lately about the future of niche sites and search engine traffic. Google seems to be giving a lot of priority to wikipedia and similar type sites. Knol might be on the horizon soon too. There is also google books and google news appearing in the serps more and more. All this is clearly leaving less and less room for our niche sites.

One of my keywords has 22 google books, 1 news, 2 wiki in the first 50 results. Mostly positioned high up too.

I'm wondering if we will soon be fighting for crumbs on all but the very uncompetitive terms.

We will have to see, the web changes all the time! Any views?

ssmorgan · #2 (**permalink**) 01-31-2008, 05:47 PM

PeterM,

I have not experienced the same thing, but this may be due to several reasons:

a) either there aren't many books on the niches I am targeting as of yet.

2) I typically go for very specific keywords within a niche, so maybe those books are triggered to show up in the search results for generic/general keywords. In the example you mentioned, what kind of keyword was it? General or very specific?

Certainly, the web changes over time, but I really don't think that the niche sites will be phasing out of the search results any time soon, if ever... but who knows

PeterM · #3 (**permalink**) 01-31-2008, 06:11 PM

The key is "single stock futures" I suppose its fairly targeted, but not ultra targeted.

MikeD · #4 (**permalink**) 02-01-2008, 01:14 AM

Got to this post

http://www.websitebabble.com/search-....html#post8390

watch the vids and see why. Traffic is moving away from search engine results pages to social media sites. No, it's not going to happen over nite but this is the internet and it will surprise us at how fast things change.

Wikipedia is defined as a Social Media Site.

I get about 20+ search hits from Google a day for BCP. The results center primarily around a few keywords with little variation. Good for Niche Marketing but bad for "loads of traffic"

People are using SM in the way "portals" were used 10 years ago--that's my opinion.
[edit not really 10 years a go...more like since" My this" and "My that" became the thing to do]

RSS is playing a bigger role. I have a lot of LIVE feeds and I look at them daily and use Google only when I have a specific need.

Also, I believe backlinks are playing a bigger role than is written about as well as publishing frequency. Add to that the fact that Google owns Blogger and YouTube and you can see SM sites are becoming "standard"

--Mike

foong · #5 (**permalink**) 02-01-2008, 06:02 AM

Agree with Mike, search engines are facing a challenge from social media network, blogs uses feeds to keep readers updated, youngster hang aroung myspace/youtube, professionals busy networking in facebook etc. who else is doing the searching, and what are they searching for ?

IMO, Yahoo has set a right focus on web 2.0 that still has a chance to become a leader again, instead of trying to compete with google in the search market, which does not seem to have much chances anymore in a near future, too much research and too much time has been spent on this area and there does not seem to generate any satisfying result.

In terms of site traffic building, diversify your traffic source and building community is the key for long term success, relying solely on search engines or even PPC, is just too risky.

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