Why Building Small Sites for Google Makes No Sense: Domain Link Authority. I Was Deeply Mistaken.
I used to think you needed to create 5–10 sites on expired domains (drops) and see how they responded in Google. Some would go up, while others wouldn’t show any results at all. I was wrong. It was a big mistake that cost me time.
Now it makes sense to build 1 site right away with 100 articles and focus on it completely. Here is why.
1. Sites need link equity
The most important point. Very few expired domains rank immediately without a link boost. Even in low-competition niches.
Here is an expired domain with 400 authoritative referring domains on board, but it’s not performing as I planned. The «best» commercial articles aren’t ranking, only low-volume keywords and informational queries are. If your goal is to gather low-volume traffic, drops will do. Otherwise, mid-volume keywords require additional links.
From what I see in the top search results, everyone builds links to dropped domains afterward. They build links just like for a brand-new website.
It takes time and effort, but it’s worth it.
Expired domains are not a silver bullet and not a quick fix for link building. Drops have authoritative links that are very hard to build yourself, but they rarely have sufficient link power—unlike, for example, Indian PBNs linking from homepage networks.
Added 40 PBN links here, and the site took off immediately.
Bought a decent expired domain with links here, and there was zero effect
Built 30 PBN links here, and the site is coming to life
No movement here—no PBNs, no traffic:
The site was launched in May and keywords were appearing, but traffic only started flowing after adding 20 PBNs:
2. Maintaining focus on one site is easier than on ten.
An equally important point. Your focus gets diluted, and somehow all sites lose importance. When you dedicate attention to just one, it’s easier to stay focused. Managing multiple sites is tough.
3. The overall link authority of the entire domain improves better. Namely: DR by Ahrefs, CF by Majestic, DA by MOZ.
Ahrefs has a metric called KD (Keyword Difficulty) for evaluating keyword competition. It’s useful, but it doesn’t reflect the main factor without which you won’t reach the top.
Namely: overall domain link authority. Specifically, DR from Ahrefs, CF from Majestic, DA from MOZ. A keyword might happily show a KD of 0, but it hides how powerful a domain you actually need for a site to break into the top results.
And here is the top SERP itself:
So simply building a site for a KD 0 keyword won’t get you to the top of Google for one simple reason: your domain lacks authority. As in the example above, where the domains have a DR of no less than 40. DR can be inflated, but that’s beside the point. I just wanted to say that domain link authority matters, and you need to boost your domain with backlinks.
And this threshold varies from niche to niche. In the hosting niche, the barrier is extremely high—say, you need 1,000 referring domains to rank at all, whereas a narrow e-commerce product niche might only need 100 links for the site to start moving.
You can rank in the top without a single page-level link if your domain’s overall authority is boosted. It’s tricky to quantify precisely, but let me give an arbitrary example of 300 built links: 100 crowd links, 100 outreach, 100 PBN. Just to keep the picture simple.
Here a page is reaching the top without a single link:
Just one small detail—a page without links might never have made it to the top either)
Another example:
Conclusion: I explained very briefly why you need to build links to the domain itself and why a KD 0 keyword might never rank without a strong domain authority. And different niches require different amounts of this link power.
4. Faster return.
When you have 1 site with 100 articles receiving all the backlinks directly, the return comes much faster than with 10 sites of 10 pages each where you have to boost all of them with links. Your focus and budget get fragmented across content and links. Here, I pour all link equity directly into 1 site, and it gets all the juice.
Conclusion
I’ve decided for myself that I’ll build roughly 1 site per month, focus on it completely, boost it with backlinks, and only then move on to the next one. Spreading myself thin in Google never leads to anything good for me.
This is an experience that cost me a significant amount of time.
In my view, a single focused site yields more revenue than 10 sites with 10 pages each. That’s because some of them won’t make it to the top. Some won’t have sufficient domain link power. Pumping all links into 1 site provides the necessary domain authority, making all the content perform better.
Questions
Why not launch 10 sites with 10 articles each, see which one ranks best after a month or two, and then 301 redirect all the others into it and keep working on that one?
I don’t believe in some hidden trust inside Google. Google loves links and content most of all. Looking at the examples above—I built links, and only then did growth happen, even though before that Google supposedly «didn’t trust» the domain. Where that line of hidden trust lies and how to measure it remains unclear. There was a domain with no trust, I added links, and it reached 4k traffic/month. Does that make it a trusted domain now?
