Analyzing the Impact of the Helpful Content Update on Publishers

Welcome back everybody, to another episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast! 

This week Jared and guest host Colin Ma tackle the most recent news in the SEO world affecting creators and entrepreneurs, they inspire with their successful side hustles, and they highlight some unique ideas being used by some weird niche sites.

The first item up for discussion is that Brandon Saltamacchia, the owner of Retro Dodo, whose website was crushed in the Helpful Content Update and he has been very vocal about it. 

He was invited to meet with Danny Sullivan at Google’s office in London, and although the Google Search Liaison couldn’t share any actionable advice, he was hopeful that website owners would see an improvement in the coming months.

Jared highlights a few important sentiments from the article. What did Google say? And what is Danny’s actual role? Tune in to hear what they are!

Moving along, Jared and Colin tackle an article on The Verge which details a complex but fascinating story involving fake authors, BestReviews, Sports Illustrated, and link schemes.

What’s the juxtaposition Jared points out? Should Google just reveal its ranking factors? How would it all play out? Listen to the full episode to hear their thoughts.

And lastly, they talk briefly about the impending Google Core Update. 

When is it coming? Will it bring with it a recovery to battered sites? And what has Danny Sullivan said about it?

In the Shiny Object Shenanigans portion of the podcast, Jared talks about his performance on Prime Day as part of the Amazon Influencer Program and how that affects his overall earnings.

Then he talks about the newsletter he recently acquired and the recent stats, which are very interesting. He also talks about working towards potential sponsors.

When it’s Colin’s turn, he talks about his inspiration from speakers in the Niche Pursuits Community inspired him to try out the side hustle, and he’s already earning money from it.

What are his initial thoughts about the program? What’s his ROI? What are his future plans? 

Tune in to hear a strategy he’s considering and some additional creative ideas from Jared.

Jared shared his weird niche first: Calculate Aspect Ratio, which allows users to check dimensions when resizing images. The DR58 site, which has been around since 2015, recently saw its traffic jump and ranks for 58,000 keywords even though it’s just 6 pages in total.

This simple site is monetized with ads and is probably making a couple of thousand dollars a month. What other simple ideas can you think of, using this site as inspiration?

It’s Colin’s turn next, and he shares a weird site called National Nail Fungus.

This DR20-something site has seen its traffic decline considerably, it hasn’t done much to improve its initial design from 2012, and the content is written by doctors and other experts.

Colin did some digging into the site and he made a surprising discovery. What was it? Is it something you could do for your own business? And what do they have to say about the site’s traffic over the years?

And that brings us to the end of another episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast.

We hope that you feel informed about some of the latest happenings in the SEO world, inspired to start your own side hustle, and curious about how you might replicate the strategies we identified among our weird niche sites.

Catch you next week!

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