Impact of the Helpful Content Update on Website Rankings

It’s Friday, and that means it’s time for another episode of the Niche Pursuits News podcast, where Jared and Spencer break down the latest SEO news into bite-size pieces. Buckle up people, because they cover many, many topics on today’s episode!

It’s been one week since Google announced its core update for October, plus the spam update was rolled out, so Jared and Spencer first talk about how to know which may be affecting your site.

For those affected by the HCU, they look at a very exhaustive, data-heavy resource and highlight some of the conclusions, including what type of content performed better, how new sites fared in the update, how article length importance has shifted, and conclusions about AI content. They also share their opinions on some of the author’s theories and touch on the future of updates.

Moving on, Spencer and Jared address Google’s antitrust lawsuit and the recent news reveals that Apple was in talks to buy Bing or DuckDuckGo. They talk about the money that was exchanged between Apple and Google and how Apple negotiated the deal.

The next topic is how a recent op-ed on Wired claiming Google alters users’ search queries was recently pulled from their website for “not meeting their editorial standards,” and Jared and Spencer discuss why it might have disappeared.

In the latest SGE news, they talk about how Google appears to be testing a lite version, where the results are taking up less space at the top of the page. They share a few theories about why this is, how the experience has changed over recent months, and what this means for website owners.

In other SGE news, the conversation shifts to Google’s AI-powered search and its ability to generate images and drafts. They also talk about how AI images are something we should be paying attention to.

The next topic is how Google is using clicks to rank websites, contrary to what the search engine has said for years. They talk about the implications for privacy data and how this information may change the way we operate. 

In the Shiny Object Shenanigans portion of the podcast, Spencer talks about a website in the news niche he created with his kids, the goal of which is to get traffic from Facebook. He built up a Facebook page to 30k followers and the website has traffic of 27k over the last month. His goal is to get into Mediavine in the coming months, and he’ll report back as he and his writer make progress.

Jared then talks about a spreadsheet he created to help website owners, SEOs, and content creators with prompts relating to the HCU. It’s free over the weekend and then he may start charging for it, so grab it now!

When it comes to weird niche sites, Spencer shares Cake Wrecks, which documents cake fails and adds some funny titles to the cakes. The DR59 site, which has been around for many years, is making money through ads and the author also has a book. 

As for Jared, his site is History Colored, which adds color to traditionally black-and-white photos. What probably started as a personal project to add color to photos eventually expanded into a bigger website that targets informational topics and gets more traffic. They talk about how some pages might go viral. With 515k followers on Facebook and 355k subscribers on YouTube, this is a topic that does well on social media.

And that brings us to the end of another jam-packed episode of the podcast. See you next week!

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