Google Removing 3rd-Party Cookies, an SEO "Traffic Heist," and a $13 Million Weird Niche Site

Welcome back, Niche Pursuits fans, to another episode of the podcast. As always, Spencer and Jared cover the latest news in SEO, AI, Google, and everything content creators and website owners need to know.

This week they kick off the show talking about how Google has been discussing its plans to get rid of third-party cookies for a long time now. The underlying argument is that consumers in the UK, Canada, Europe, and increasingly in the US don't like the idea of Google collecting all of their private data, which is then used for advertising purposes. The main issue is privacy.

But Google has finally announced its plans to really truly get rid of them and it all begins on January 4th. The roll-out is going to be gradual and may be completed by the end of 2025.

The big questions are how will this impact advertisers and website owners? Will display ads decrease? Will RPMs decline? Does this have a connection to the anti-trust suit? At the moment, it's really a speculation game, but tune in to hear what Spencer and Jared think might happen.

Then the conversation shifts to a tweet from Jake Ward, about how he stole millions in traffic from a competitor by using AI to write articles based on all of his competitor’s keywords. The tweet was essentially a marketing ploy to promote his AI tool, and it went viral.

The bad news is that his tweet was seen by Google and his site was hit with a manual penalty because of copied content. Traffic tanked as a result.

Why did Google penalize his website? What alternative strategy does Spencer suggest? Does the fact that it’s AI content factor into their decision? Has Google changed its position on AI content? What are the general takeaways from this story? Listen to hear what Jared and Spencer think.

The conversation shifts to the ever-changing landscape of artificial intelligence and offers an overview of the changes that Google has had to implement since OpenAI appeared on the scene.

They discuss spammy results and the future of spammy AI content as well as the role brands play in ranking. 

In the Shiny Object Shenanigans portion of the podcast, Spencer reports that his Amazon influencer side hustle is going really well. So well, in fact, that he has seen massive earnings in the month, including some $500 days. During the last 30 days, he earned $6800+.

Although he hasn't uploaded any videos since last week, he does have additional videos ready to go and is hoping to break $7k in the next few days.  

Jared shares his experience with the program recently, and he’s seen his 30-day rolling total at slightly under $6k and expects to be under $5k for the month of December. Although he killed it on Black Friday, his earnings have been lower this past month. 

Also, something “happened” to his star product that had been driving the bulk of his earnings until now. Listen to the episode to hear what he discovered, and hear what he and Spencer plan to do with the program next year.

Moving onto their weird niche sites, Spencer shares Elfster, Which is a website and an app that helps you conduct Secret Santa gift exchanges. It can also recommend gifts, which allows it to make money from affiliate sales and sponsored product placements.

He shares its highly seasonal traffic graph from Ahrefs, with 1.5 million organic visitors in December 2022, and appears to be trending up. The rest of the year, they’re still getting incredible traffic and are a multi-million dollar business. Listen to the episode for more details.

When it’s Jared’s turn, he shares Campsite Photos, a site he uses often. You can enter just about any campsite in the US and check out photos so you can decide if it’s the right fit. 

You can answer questions like if it’s flat or not, if your trailer would fit, etc. and is incredibly helpful if you’re into camping. This DR43 site is ranking for 119k keywords, and has organic traffic of 150k, according to Ahrefs.

The site is monetized with ads, and it offers a service where it finds you a campsite if the one you want is booked. Check out the episode to hear more observations about Jared’s weird site!

And that brings us to the end of another great episode. We hope you’re feeling inspired and informed, and don’t forget to come back next week so they can bring you up to speed on the latest happenings.

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