Exploration of a Satirical Verge Article Mocking Google's Ranking Methods

Welcome back to a new episode of the Niche Pursuits News podcast! 

Jared and Spencer, as always, offer an insightful take on the latest happenings with SEO, publishers, Google, and AI, and give a peek behind the curtain at their latest projects. Stick around for a laugh when they reveal the weird niche sites they found.

The first order of business is to mention that the March Core Update has still not finished rolling out and Spencer and Jared decline to guess when that might be.

Moving along, they jump into the first big news item: The Verge trolling Google, once again.The Verge published a new article for 2024 “reviewing printers,” when in reality the article is just mocking Google for how they rank articles.

Did The Verge actually test the printers? What outbound links did they include? What did John Mueller have to say about it? 

And most importantly, how’s the article ranking? Find out the amusing, and depressing, story behind this news item.

Moving along to another article in The Verge, Spencer and Jared talk about how Google is experimenting with a small subset of news publishers, removing their links from Google News. It’s doing this because California is thinking about forcing Google to pay its news publishers.

What are the implications for publishers? Is there any precedent in these types of situations? What happened in Australia? And will Google extend this to other areas?

In other Google news, the company is launching a new ad product whereby ads appear inside your content, as hyperlinked text, which takes users to advertisers’ products. This is optional for publishers within Google AdSense.

What does Spencer think? Would he enable this on his own websites? What scenarios does Jared share where this might work? Tune in to find out.

The latest news item is that Brave Search has released an Answer with AI feature. 

What do Spencer and Jared think of it and its impact? What does it remind them of?

Moving along to the Shiny Object Shenanigans portion of the podcast, Spencer talks about his Amazon Influencer side hustle and his decision to publish those shopping videos on YouTube.

Incredibly, his channel disappeared! What happened? How did it turn out and what’s happening now?

When it’s Jared’s turn, he announces a new side hustle: an email newsletter. He talks about how he plans to build it, why he decided to dive into this project, and his experience in this area.

When it comes to Weird Niche Sites, Spencer reveals Pets or Food, a very entertaining tongue-in-cheek website that does get some traffic, according to Ahrefs. It doesn’t have a lot of ads but it does have merch, which may be a source of revenue.

Jared then reveals Line Rusher, which allows people to hire someone to wait in line for them at places like the DMV, Apple, and at restaurants and amusement parks.

They offer some interesting services and are constantly hiring line sitters, which may be an interesting option in the current gig economy.

What do the stats in Ahrefs reveal? What spin would Jared put on this service?

And that brings us to the end of another episode! We hope you learned from the latest headlines in the space, felt inspired by our side hustle projects, and got ideas from this week’s weird niche sites.

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