Many internet marketers don’t appreciate the differences between mini sites and authority sites in terms of strategies and results. People just starting out with online businesses may not know how to decide which kind of website to create. Aside from your own business model, you also have to take into consideration how the search engines treat different types of websites.

What it really comes down to, however, is your own personality and your long term goals for your business. Authority sites and mini sites both have certain features to recommend them, and we’ll be looking at some of these below. For example, if you’re targeting a niche like pst file recovery then creating mini sites about that topic will help you dominate it.

Sometimes people want to really refine their focus into a tight, well defined niche. This can be a great choice for many marketers. Perhaps you only want to target one very thin slice of a market; a micro-niche market. For these very targeted marketers, mini sites perform much better than authority sites. Mini sites are an excellent tool for taking over the top search engine spots for one or two highly focused keywords. Assuming of course that the competition for these two keywords isn’t too fierce. However, it is possible to target these micro-niches within authority sites. But if you have no interest to do so, then the mini site is the best choice.

As you know, maybe, Google changes their algorithm to reward things they like and penalize what they do not like. Mini sites, or sites without much content, are definitely going down in popularity with Google, which, in 2010, has been favoring authority sites. Just like with pay per click advertising, you will incur a lower quality score if your site is deemed, thin. In other words, it will take more work now to rank well with a mini site or effectively optimize it. Even then, you will not get the same amount of traffic that you could earlier in 2010 with an SEO’d mini site. We can’t change how Google ranks sites, so we have to live with it. For instance, if you would rather create an authority site about say, PST file location, it would have a better stick rate.

Authority sites can give you the benefit of ranking for keywords and phrases you might not have expected. Eventually you may learn that your site is ranking for synonyms of your original keywords. When you see this happening, you have the option of exploring those possibilities for even better rankings. Spend some time analyzing those synonyms and see if you can locate other keywords or phrases based on these to focus on. That is a distinct possibility that happens with more established websites. However, this phenomenon does take time to appear.

When looking at mini sites and authority sites, it isn’t really a question of one being better than the other. These two types of sites are meant to accomplish different objectives, so you can only really ask, which is better for what goal. True, there are overlapping qualities with the two, but the differences outweigh the overlap.

In other words, you have to figure out which type of site will work better for your own personality. Also, what are your preferences with regard to business building? With a mini site, you can market an extremely targeted niche, whereas an authority site can help you brand yourself in the long run. For instance, if you go for a mini site rather than PST file location authority site, you’ll be able to gain quicker rankings in Google.