Reworking a site's niche

[Hanuman]

I have a website that is fairly horizontal and has articles on a wide variety of topics. It's doing moderately well. A few months back, I started a new domain that focused on a small sub-niche - it has around 3-4 articles now. The idea was to seed it with a few articles and let it age so I can pick it up maybe sometime at the end of the year.

This new domain has a generic name, so it can fit any niche.

Now, I have figured a new niche idea that is quite underserved and I really want to start a website on this. I'm wondering if I should move the handful of articles from the new domain to my larger website.

I could make a copy of the 4 articles on my older site and 301 redirect them from the new domain.

Do you see any harm with this strategy?

Or, do you think I'm better off starting the new topic on a brand new domain (which means that clock on sandbox starts from 0 again).

 

[Ryuzaki]

I'm not a fan of "general topic" sites. I don't think Google is either, and we saw a lot of evidence for that back in the "Farmer Update" era where huge sites suffered until they busted up into sub-topics on sub-domains. I'd say the logic behind this is that people who are creating content about everything and anything are jacks of all trades and masters of none, and Google wants to rank sites that have expertise, authority, and trust.

Your plan isn't harmful, though it could be annoying if you sell either site. I don't like to weave sites together with 301's like that. If you did want to do this, I'd just move the 3-4 articles over to the old domain and let them 404 on the new domain before I felt like I needed to maintain 301's for articles that likely get no traffic or links.

I don't really understand the dilemma here. Let me summarize my understanding: You have an old domain that's doing okay. You started a new site to let it age with 3-4 articles. You have a new niche idea. Somehow this leads to you wanting to move the 3-4 articles to the old site. Is this so you can use the newer domain name for the new niche and you just want the 3-4 articles off of the domain so you can start fresh but with age?

If so, sounds fine to me. Your new site is still a baby. It has room to do whatever you want with it. I can't imagine Google has decided that the domain is about the topic of the 3-4 articles and you can never stray from that now.

 

[Hanuman]

Thanks @Ryuzaki. Yeah I did consider not 301 and simply republishing it on my old site. But they are already crawled and I do not want to risk a duplicate content penalty at this stage. I don't intend to sell either for the next 2-3 years at least - so guess redirecting is the hygienic thing to do.

I'm not a fan of "general topic" sites. I don't think Google is either, and we saw a lot of evidence for that back in the "Farmer Update" era where huge sites suffered until they busted up into sub-topics on sub-domains.

It is not a general topic site, but just a fairly large horizontal topic. Think Tripadvisor instead of Mexicotravelblog.com