Analysis of Niche Websites: Cuddling and Sunglasses

Welcome back to another episode of the Niche Pursuits News podcast. This week Josh Blackburn fills in for Spencer, and he and Jared sit down to discuss the most relevant news in SEO, digital marketing, website creation, and beyond.

The first order of business is the 2 additional updates Google recently launched following the Helpful Content Update that essentially left the niche website community battered. Jared and Josh weigh in on what they think will happen. Is this Google’s way of “tweaking” the results of the HCU? What should website owners do with their sites during these updates? Tune in to hear what they think.

They talk about a series of things website owners can do to improve their rankings in the wake of the HCU, touching on topics like ad density, usability, pop-ups, and article word count. They also share their observations about the update’s winners and losers and the importance of looking at your website as a business and emulating the features that Google looks for in a business.

Jared and Josh move on to talk about Google’s antitrust lawsuit and the revelation that it might be altering search results to get better ad results. They talk about some shady emails that were leaked that give an inside look at how Google operates, but the truth is that there are a lot of changes going on now in search and it remains to see how everything will play out.

The next topic is how more and more publishers are blocking GPTBot, with news outlets following suit. Jared asks, “Why would you not block it?” Will partnerships be the way forward? What does the future look like for content creators in the world of AI? Jared and Josh share their thoughts and concerns.

In the Side Hustle Shenanigans portion of the podcast, Jared reports on his Amazon Influencer side project. September earnings exceeded his expectations in the first half of the month only to drop off a cliff in the second half.

Although he still earned over $2k, it’s unclear how profitable this “experiment” will actually be. What’s Amazon doing? What does the future of the program look like? Is it worth starting to make videos if you haven’t already? Tune in to find out what happens in the months to come. 

Josh then talks about a DR32 site of his which saw a massive drop in clicks over time. He recently added 4000 unedited AI articles to it as an experiment and he started to see an improvement; however, with the HCU, it got crushed. He’s going to wait and see if it bounces back or not and how future updates affect it.

They move on to talk about their weird niche sites. Jared’s is Cuddle Comfort, which was first created in 2011. This DR32 site ranks for just 2k keywords but may be getting up to 1 million visits per month. He and Josh talk about how it creates trust and they talk about its monetization techniques.

Then it’s Josh’s turn, and he shares Sunglasses ID, which identifies all the different sunglasses worn by celebrities and in the movies and includes an affiliate link for users to buy them. 

This DR31 site with just over 1000 pages is 14 years and 260 days old and gets 70k visits per month. They talk about how the publisher might get all the data for all of the sunglasses. Then Josh reveals a second site, WatchID, which follows the same concept. This site was created about 17 days after the first site and has a lot of scope for improvement. Are there similar ID sites out there? Maybe!

That brings us to the end of another great podcast on the current SEO landscape. Come back next week to hear the latest news and get plenty of inspiration!

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