This happened to me recently when I installed something, but I didn't notice the toolbar and it installed anyway.

Uninstalling the toolbar was easy enough, but it left behind all sorts of horrible things, setting itself as my favorite search engine and as my home page and various other things.I then had to search for hours to find the right steps to get rid of all of it! Grrrr.

The game is afoot and changing every few weeks it seems. Folks have been looking at services like synnd and tribepro to give some social signals to their sites, it seems to work from a recent fiverr test I did on some content. But only time will tell.

My link magnets I did a year ago are still there, but only because I hired the content written, and not spun or plr. Some of my sites went nuts after 3.3, and some stayed the same. It is a guessing game with the G as to what passes sniff tests and what does not. So much has changed yet again in the past few weeks, it's hard to know what will work long term except original content, and that's a given.

Pinterest seems to be the next frontier, and I went in there and began my account and pins, again, we will see what works for the future.

Jim

>Say, for instance, one builds a totally original site of 20 to 40 pages, in a tight niche that really does not offer any further opportunities for content.

They may work right now but not for very long. I had one such site with several subdomains and each subdomain hosting a micro niche site like u describe. Google de-indexed my website sometime ago and refused to index it back despite numerous reconsideration requests. They don't give you any reason though, just the vague 'your site still violates google guidelines' so after making some changes I thought would help, I gave up, purchased a new domain and mirrored that site.

I can only speculate, but seems like Google is favoring authority sites more and more.

On another note, sometime ago I got an email from someone asking me what to do now that "google is killing subdomains". I thought that was a joke!

Until last July, many of my mini-sites produced adsense clicks and revenue that averaged around $3 per day. Over the past 10 years my portfolio of 5 to 15 page sites has grown to nearly 200. Most of these simply presented the results of research on topics that were of significant personal interest and were published because I enjoyed making them and didn't want to see the research results wasted. This was mostly a hobby, but when I got emails from Google pointing out that I could/and should put adsense ads on them - I did, and started promoting them through twitter, emails to my lists, facebook, etc.
Then came Panda and my $3/day, or so has dropped to merely pennies per day. Organic directed traffic has also dropped, probably also a result of Panda.

Say, for instance, one builds a totally original site of 20 to 40 pages, in a tight niche that really does not offer any further opportunities for content.

Do you think it is still possible for such a site to produce an income? I see there are still those who promote such sites - or do they do it just to try and keep selling their IM products?