🐼 They Built The BIGGEST Niche Sites

A couple of weeks ago, I emailed you about Authority Nutrition's acquisition story and how it propelled Healthline's nutrition keywords rankings. I got a LOT of positive feedback on this, so today, I decided to share another SEO story that's both similar and completely different. Bear with me. Today we are talking about a website that was the king of the internet in the mid-2010s and slowly slipped in rankings from then.  That site is about.com. A site about… everything, as you can see per their categories page.   So you could find tips on making a healthy breakfast for weight loss Along with the review of the excellent Bioshock infinite on PS3 (reviewed by Brian). And at over 170 million peak monthly organic traffic, it clearly worked for them… for a time. Until a big Panda refresh triggered the downfall of their traffic all the way down to under 30 million monthly visitors towards the end of 2016. Relax, I’m getting there. The company behind about.com rebranded itself as dotdash and started spinning sections of about.com into their own stand-alone, niche specialized sites.   That’s right. One of the biggest sites on the internet decided to break itself up and niche down. Something that few SEO’s who hit a plateau ever consider. We are so adamant about protecting our domain authority that splitting link equity would probably be frowned upon by most pros in the industry. They took the relevant pages on [about.com]() and redirected them to their "niche" specialized redesigned domains. They then rebuilt their editorial per site and ran them as smaller, more efficient entities. They even doubled down on the website splitting. If you check the Techcrunch announcement from 2016, they put all their health and fitness content on the [verywell.com]() domain. Since then, they’ve actually broken down that domain into 4 more domains: - verywellfamily.com - verywellfit.com - verywellhealth.com - verywellmind.com And they have done the same for other franchises I'm sure you've noticed in the SERPs like The Spruce or The Balance. So that begs the question: A few years down the line, how well did this split to conquer strategy work out for Dotdash? Well, I'm going to save you the Maths. Still, If I look at all the outgoing redirects coming from About.com. In that case, their properties add up to a whopping 135 million monthly visitors as per Ahrefs. If you don't count this spike estimate in SEMRush, that looks like a mistake is more traffic total than about.com ever had. If you’ve worked in SEO for a time, you will agree that’s an impressive turnaround from a company that seemed destined to go under. And many of their properties are showing an excellent growth dynamic. How can you use this? Splitting stagnant domains up is something that rarely comes up as a solution. But you can't deny that Dotdash has proven it can be a viable growth path. With Google always trying to serve more relevant results, specialized domains often rank for their keywords with lower link metrics. That’s why building content hubs works. Because you’re building that specialization in the eyes of Google. But provided you have enough authority to spare, splitting up your stagnant domains is something you might want to explore if you went too broad with your current site. It's also viable for sites that got hit by, say, a core update. Wait until things settle down, see what still ranks, and spin-off a site on that topic. This is something I am experimenting with now, but it's too early to share anything. Anyway, as usual, I hope this newsletter made you think of better ways to grow your sites! I hope this has given you some ideas. Sometimes acquisitions of very niche sites can be very cheap and massively boost your traffic and valuation. If you enjoyed this email, make sure to drop it into your primary inbox. Have a good weekend! Gael Breton Co-Founder of Authority Hacker P.S: We have a new Authority Hacker show on our exact paid link building strategies coming out this Monday. [You can set a reminder here](. Sent to: {EMAIL} [Unsubscribe]( Authority Hacker, 20-22 Wenlock Road, London, N1 7GU, United Kingdom