Winners and Losers of Google’s Core Update, 2 AI Content Challenges, and a Weird Novel Site

Welcome back to another episode of the Niche Pursuits News podcast, where Spencer Haws and Jared Bauman, of 201 Creative, discuss the latest news and important recent events in digital marketing, SEO, and website creation.

The first news item that Spencer and Jared address this week is the rollout Google core update, which concluded about a week ago. They share some of the key takeaways from Lily Ray's analysis, one of which was the importance of EEAT and the massive post-update boost to UCG platforms like Reddit and Quora and dictionary-type sites. 

Is this in response to AI-generated content? Will their rankings change over time? And what about the pre-update volatility that many sites experienced? Tune in to hear what Spencer and Jared have to say.

Moving on, they talk about how tech leaders like Elon Musk and Bill Gates recently met privately with the Senate to discuss how to craft guardrails for AI. This is especially interesting for website owners and content creators because regulations on AI could affect how we create content.

Other news covered in the episode is Google’s announcement that it will no longer be showing how-to results for desktop users. It had previously been removed from mobile search results, along with FAQ results. Spencer and Jared talk about the impact of this move by Google and why they think it was done.

The last news item they touch on this week is an exhaustive State of Digital Marketing report. They talk about the decline in the cost of ads, which is good news for advertisers. On the flip side, RPMs are low, which negatively affects website owners running ads. Will there be a comeback in Q3 and Q4, or is this trend here to stay? Jared and Spencer share their thoughts.   

In the Shiny Object Shenanigans portion of the episode, Spencer shares how he launched 2 new challenges. In the first one, people will build AI sites from scratch and document the process. In the second challenge, people will scale an existing site with AI. 

He created a free community to follow along, and the person in each competition who has the most organic traffic after 6 months (new site challenge) and 3 months (existing site challenge) will walk away with $2,500. 

Jared talks about doubling down on his Amazon Influencer side hustle as we move into Q3 and Q4, making 99 videos in the last week. He also shares his takeaway after looking at his August earnings, which had declined, suggesting that consumers weren’t making large purchases during the month. With 638 videos currently on the platform, Jared is ready to earn some serious money as the year draws to a close.

Then it’s time for Spencer to share his Weird Niche Site. The single-page site he found is getting 2.4 million organic visitors per month, ranks for 30k keywords, and is monetized with display ads: Compress JPEG. Although it seems like a very simple tool and website, Spencer and Jared talk about all the work that goes into creating and ranking it.

Jaren then shares his site: Your Novel, where you can submit your story, have a novel written about you, and get it shipped to your house. The books are available in a wide range of categories and come in hardback, paperback, or ebook formats. Although it doesn’t rank for many keywords or get a lot of traffic, they agree that the website has potential if certain SEO strategies were applied to it, and most of all, it certainly qualifies as weird. 

And that concludes another episode of the latest news in the industry. We hope you feel informed and inspired. See you next week!

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