Google Core and Spam Updates Unleashed…Here’s What You Need to Know

Welcome back to the Niche Pursuits News Podcast, everyone! 

This is the podcast for SEOs, content creators, webmasters, and entrepreneurs looking to understand the latest events and get inspiration for their businesses.

It’s been a crazy week in SEO news, so let’s get right into it! And, as Google suggested, you better buckle up as it’s going to be a wild ride!

The first (and only) topic Spencer and Jared dig into is Google’s very big news

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Watch the Full Episode

It’s rolling out the March 2024 Spam Update, which will take 2 weeks, as well as its March 2024 core update, which will take about a month. It’s also worth noting that the Helpful Content system is now part of the core updates.

Spencer and Jared discuss this news at length, covering the main aspects: scaled content abuse; site reputation abuse, or parasite SEO; and expired domain abuse. Google’s stated goal is to reduce the amount of low-quality, unoriginal content by up to 40% and send search traffic to helpful and high-quality sites.

What does this all mean? And what does it mean for AI content? Who is Google targeting specifically? 

What cryptic sentence from Google’s announcement does Spencer consider the most interesting? What sort of behavior is Google cracking down on in particular? What types of penalties is Google doling out, and who’s getting hit?

What step did Google announce that leads Spencer and Jared to suggest Google is biased? And what kind of practices are they cracking down on when it comes to expired domains?

They also talk about how Google might start to use a page classifier as opposed to a site classifier. What implications would this have?

Tune in to hear Spencer and Jared discuss Google’s latest news and share their thoughts on what’s going on.

The next portion of the podcast is Shiny Object Shenanigans. 

Spencer goes first with an update on his Amazon Influencer side hustle. He reports a rough number of his videos and his earnings this month to date. The good news is that he is officially in the black.

He also announces that he’s going to do an in-depth presentation about his Amazon Influencer side hustle for the Niche Pursuits Community, his new, premium membership group, which launched at the beginning of March. 

Spencer will be sharing just about everything, from his storefront to his earnings to his secrets for hiring people. If you want to check it out, join the community before Monday!

When it’s Jared’s turn, he provides a brief earnings update on his Amazon Influencer side hustle, and then digs into another project: using paid ads to drive subscribers to his Weekend Growth newsletter.

He explains how he set it up through ConvertKit, how he’s going to try different ad ideas, and how he is about to go live with the ads. He will be providing more details and results as they come in, so watch this space!

As for Weird Niche Sites, Spencer reveals that his site is getting 2 million organic visitors per month and 6 million visitors in total. Random lets you generate random things, such as numbers, and they do it using a very unique method. Listen to hear what it is!

This DR83 site is making some money. Tune in to hear how they do it.

When Jared’s up, he shares the website for the Stinky Candle Company, which sells unique candles with scents like chlorine, gasoline, and bacon. 

This DR30 site is not getting much traffic, but Jared does reveal a few interesting tidbits about it. It looks like they could be getting 30k visitors a month. With targeted traffic like that, how much might the site be earning? Tune in to hear what they think.

And that concludes another episode of the Niche Pursuits News podcast. 

There’s a lot going on right now in Google’s world, so come back next week to hear Spencer and Jared break it down all over again.

transcription

Spencer: Welcome back to another episode of this week in niche pursuits news. And, uh, we do indeed have a lot of news, Google update news, and we’re going to cover that in depth here. Jared, um, you excited to dive into this? 

Jared: Oh man. When you host a news podcast, these are the weeks you wait for. This is what gets you 

Spencer: up in the morning.

That’s right. This is good stuff. You know, sometimes we go through and we have several stories that we’re going to hit on and a lot of things going on and there is a lot of things going on still this week when Google has an update and it’s a core update and it includes three spam updates and it talks about the helpful content update.

All sort of packaged together. Like we’re going to just, we’re going to dive deep on this subject. It’s like 

Jared: Google decided last year to give us update after update after update. And then this year they’re like, you know, forget all these updates. Let’s just put them all into one big 

Spencer: gift. Yeah. And so it’s technically two updates and we’re going to dive into this.

Uh, but yeah, they’re happening at the same time. Of course, Google loves to do this. Uh, so you don’t know exactly which update, you know, is helping or hurting your site. Uh, but yeah. So we’re going to, we’re going to cover this in depth, but we are going to save some time for, uh, our shiny object shenanigans that we got going on.

I’m going to talk a little bit about Amazon influencer. Uh, and then, uh, we got our weird niche sites. We’ve got two weird niche sites that we’re going to talk about, jump into. Uh, I will just say that the site that I have is getting millions of visitors every month. And it’s, it’s pretty interesting.

Pretty 

Jared: interesting. You know, I’ve been so focused on building out the agenda portions for the news that I haven’t even seen your site 

Spencer: yet. Good. So this can truly be a surprise for you. 

Jared: 100%. At this point I won’t have time to look at it because we’re doing the podcast. No. No. 

Spencer: Uh, so stick around for that, of course, but let’s jump into the main subject of the day, let’s talk about the new Google updates that are happening.

So, uh, Google just announced that they’ve got the March, 2024, uh, spam update, uh, that is going to take, I believe that one’s two weeks, uh, to roll out, uh, Yeah, two weeks to complete. And then we’ve got the March 2024 core update that is going to take a full month to come out. Now there is, uh, so much in both of these updates.

Um, and so we’re going to do our best to cover everything that’s happening. What, what Google has said, I mean, this is. Uh, just yesterday they announced that these updates were happening. Like I said, it’s going to take two weeks to a month to fully roll out. And so as of today, we don’t have a lot of real world results.

We only know what Google has announced and what is coming very soon. So, uh, overall, Here’s kind of the announcement, new ways we’re tackling spammy, low quality content on search. Uh, if you read this article, the word help or helpful or unhelpful is mentioned 11 times. Uh, so they are certainly signaling that they’re continuing to try to do something with the helpful content update.

And in fact, they did announce that the helpful content system is now part of. Core algorithm updates. So this core update does involve the helpful content update. Uh, we don’t know of course exactly how your site is going to be impacted if you were hit with the careful content update, but there has been an update to that system.

And, uh, so first they talk about trying to reduce low quality on original, uh, results. And, uh, So they’re definitely talking a lot about AI, um, that’s involved here. Uh, and then second, they’re talking about, uh, spam, keeping more spam out of a results. We’re going to jump into that, but first just high level, uh, with going back to this reducing low quality on original results, I think this paragraph is just, uh, fascinating to give people an idea of how big this update is says we believe These updates will reduce the amount of low quality content on search and send more traffic to helpful and high quality sites.

Based on our evaluations, we expect that the combination of this update and our previous efforts will collectively reduce low quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40%. Uh, that is a massive number. 40 percent reduced low quality on original content and search results by 40%. Maybe I’ll take a breather here and, and Jared, let you kind of jump in normally 

Jared: with core updates, normally with updates in general, we either don’t get direction, right?

We get the usual one line, uh, from Google, which is today we launched the blah, blah, blah, core update. As always, if your site gets negatively affected, do all the things that, you know, people want carry on. And so this was a lot more documentation about it. And I think this From a high level, I’ll start by saying that’s good, right?

Like they needed to not only fix the SERPs. I’m not saying that this is going to fix the SERPs, but they needed to take steps to fix the SERPs, but they also needed. From a PR standpoint to address the steps they’re taking to fix the SERPs. And so I do think this is good because we learned and know a lot more about this update than we do in most updates.

And they’ve, they’ve directly spoken about several areas. Um, and again, normally they speak in superlatives and innuendos and high level, but they’re basically saying we are targeting expired domains. We are targeting mass AI publishing. We are targeting Parasite SEO and you know, they, they, they named it Parasite SEO, something different.

We can get into all the details, but from a high level, like you get a lot of. Vision into what they’re trying to do here. And then now we’ll see over the next two to four weeks, what actually gets accomplished by that. 

Spencer: Yeah. What I find really interesting when I even read this short announcement by Google, Uh, it hits on all those points that you mentioned, and it’s like, man, these are all the subjects that we’ve been harping on, like when we read these tweets or we read these complaints from people, it’s like Google is taking notice, right?

The, you know, the parasite SEO, the unoriginal content, I think about house fresh and how they published this whole article saying, man, we do these in depth studies and other people use. You know, essentially kind of copy that and sort of say, Hey, here’s our top pick and don’t have anything original. And it’s all these things that we talk about.

It feels like they’re trying to tackle, they’re, they’re trying to tackle that. So, uh, one thing that I want to point out, and then I want to talk about the three things in the spam update. One line that I found, uh, really interesting. It’s a little bit cryptic, you know, so we can conjecture exactly what it means, but, um, It says, uh, quote, this update involves refining some of our core ranking systems to help us better understand if webs webpages are helpful, have a poor user experience.

Or feel like they were created for search engines instead of people. And then this really interesting sentence, this could include sites created primarily to match very specific search queries. So when I read that sentence, I don’t know what it means exactly in practice. Right. Uh, but does this mean that sites that only target really long tail, you know, very specific search queries, if a hundred percent of their content is this long tail search query targeting stuff, does that mean.

That their site might be hit. Is that kind of what it’s saying? Uh, I don’t know. 

Jared: So the, this was, I’m looking through my notes here. Cause I feel like I have something on that. I have a lot of notes for today’s podcast. Um, uh, and in the search engine land article that we’ll probably get to the Google representative that was quoted, what Tucker, what’s the first name there?

Um, 

Spencer: uh, Elizabeth, Elizabeth Tucker 

Jared: explained, I think this quote might have something to do with what you brought up. Tucker explained that those. Are the pages that start off by stating it will answer your question, lead you on with low quality content and never end up giving you the answer to your questions.

End quote. 

Spencer: Yep. That is a good clarification, right? So 

Jared: that is a level of depth. I have never heard Google described before. Like that’s true. I mean, were you, I was just, I read that. I’m like, wait, wait, did somebody from Google actually say that? That’s so specific. That’s interesting. 

Spencer: Yeah. And, uh, I guess that does kind of harken to the previous sentence, right.

Of that, um, uh, you know, have a poor user experience. Or feel like they were created for search engines instead of people. So if, uh, you’ve got an article that’s targeting a long tail search query, it seems like it’s going to get to this great answer and then just, just sort of fizzles and never goes anywhere.

Right. 

Jared: It’s like our pair is red, you know, and somebody will write 1500 words on it. And, uh, you know, uh, that’s what I think of. I was just a lot of examples that could come to mind, but that’s a query, uh, where you write an article specifically for search. And, uh, it seems to speak exactly to what Tucker was talking about in her quote.

Spencer: Yeah, no, great. A great quote, uh, indeed. So let’s bring up, you know, overall there, there’s this core core update system where again, the helpful content system is now part of that core update, which, which is a change, right? And so we’ll see what’s going to happen there. Um, but in addition, they’ve got, uh, Keeping more spam out of your results.

And you mentioned three of those. So let’s talk about each one and what it means a little bit, right? So we’ve got scaled content abuse. And basically what it’s saying is, uh, you know, they’ve long had a policy against using automation to generate low quality and unoriginal content at scale. Um, but today.

Uh, there, there’s content creation methods, they say here that are more sophisticated and it’s not, uh, known whether the content is created purely through automation, uh, or AI, right? I, they don’t ever use the word AI, but certainly that’s what we’re talking about here. Um, so they’re strengthening their policy to focus on this type of abusive behavior, producing content at scale to boost search rankings.

Right. Whether it’s through automation, humans or a combination are involved. when they went 

Jared: out of their way to say, no matter how it’s created. So, um, exactly, they’re talking about AI, but they’re also making sure to not make any, any overtures about how AI could be bad, be probably because Gemini, but anyways, 

Spencer: Exactly.

And, you know, it again sort of harkens to that quote you read previously, right? It targets types of pages or content that, uh, with little to no value created at scale, like pages that pretend to have answers to popular searches, but fail to deliver helpful content. So these pages, Just like we were talking about.

Never quite get to the answer. It’s not really helpful content, but they publish a million of them or 10 million of them and with the hopes that, hey, they just rank for some things. Google’s detecting that a little bit better. So I’ve kind of been saying, and this is way unofficial, right? But this, I mean, this is targeting, uh, people that are publishing, uh, Thousands of articles a day or, uh, millions of articles in a month, right?

There are massive abusers out there that are truly just spamming Google and Google is getting way better at detecting that. And so if you’re publishing 10 or 20 articles a day, like that’s not really something that Google’s talking, I think about things that are much larger, but I, you know, we don’t know, I guess if you’re truly using just, you know, Automated systems, uh, maybe, maybe they can figure that out, even if it is a few articles a day, I don’t know.

Jared: So we’ll touch on it right now. Maybe we’ll come back to it. We’re making up as we go here, folks, because there’s so much to talk about. But, um, this, this section of the core update seems to have already been put into play within 24 hours. Of the core update going live. We’re recording on a Wednesday, just for clarity.

We normally record Wednesday or Thursday. This goes live on a Friday. You might be listening to this on a Saturday. So this stuff is dynamic and will be changing. But as of Wednesday, Google has already started de indexing sites. For what they are calling and referring to as a I spam, and it probably most it definitely most relates to this portion of the update, and I’ve seen a couple firsthand, uh, examples of the manual penalty that’s been issued in Google search console.

And, um, and, uh, anyways, it, I’ll say that they definitely, uh, these aren’t my sites, by the way, but just things I’ve, I’ve been able to kind of hear about and see. And, and it’s been reported all over, you know, Twitter and other places. So this is happening in mass. But my whole point in all this is to say that, uh, it seems to be targeting just AI sites in general that have been publishing content, certainly not fitting your large mass production of thousands a day.

Some of the sites are far less in terms of the amount of. Content that they’ve been publishing. Um, but they all fit the AI bill. So it’s interesting. I agree with you this, as this reads like, well, you know, I use AI, I don’t publish 10, 000 posts a day, so I’m fine. It’s going to have to see how this rolls out because it looks like they might be willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater on this one.

Spencer: Interesting. And so what does the warning say in Google search console that you’ve seen? Um, Oh, it specifically says 

Jared: AI. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a manual action. So, um, uh, you know, and, and the, the D index, you know, like no longer in the index and that’s happening, it sounds like in bulk from a lot of the reporting that we’re reading within 24 hours of this update going live.

Spencer: So it’s interesting. It’s almost as though, um, they clearly stated announced their new guidelines, right? They kind of mentioned a couple of times, like, Hey, these are sort of new policy. They’ve updated their policy. Right. And, uh, you They are making tons of manual actions. They’re finding sites that are clear abusers.

Um, I’ve seen it on Twitter as well. Uh, Jeff Coyle, uh, posted on Twitter today. He’s, you know, been on the podcast before and, uh, a bunch of sites that he says he’s been following for a long time. They all got de indexed. Um, and so that’s happening. It appears to be manual actions. Uh, but I suspect obviously as the algorithm rolls out, they’re not going to do everything manually, right?

It’s going to start. Catching a lot of these automatically. And it’s 

Jared: just a couple of things here to your point. There’s manual actions, which is a manual penalty. And then there’s what we generally refer to as algorithmic penalty. It’s not an actual penalty, but it’s, it’s what happens when your site basically drops out of the SERPs for all of its rankings.

It didn’t get a penalty, but Google’s like, we don’t trust it. This site anymore. We don’t like this site anymore. And so these are manual actions. And, you know, what we, anyways, we could get into what that does for their training model. And, you know, we know that Google hires quality raters, uh, not to police the internet, but to train their, uh, their, their large language models and their machine learning.

It’s interesting to think about if this, if this, These if this book manual action of sites is also being used for these kind of things, if these were identified by their machine learning, or if they were identified, I’m just so curious about all that, but that’s not really for here or there, but this part of the update is kicking off really fast and really heavy, and it’s in the manual action 

Spencer: space.

And since you mentioned the, uh, quality Raider guidelines, might as well just mention that, uh, they also updated their quality Raider guidelines the exact same time that they released this. So, I mean, this just feels like a huge update, right? Um, they’ve kind of been warning, uh, Danny Sullivan said, buckle up, you know, a couple months ago, there’s been lots of other warnings that, Hey, Big things are coming is the, is this the big thing that’s coming?

It kind of feels like when they update all of these things, they’re taking big manual actions. They update their policies. They have two updates coming out at once. That’s targeting AI. They update their quality radar guidelines all on the same day. Like this feels like. The big update. They’ve kind of been pushing for 

Jared: it.

It’s hard for us in this space. You’ve been around for a while because we, we all remember the big, big helpful content update of, I think, August 2022 where they had this whole PR thing where like they brought in a bunch of journalists. And so everyone launched in the same day. We have the biggest update in the history of the world going out.

And like a bunch of big journalists went out with it, that we all reference and talk about here. And it ended up being nothing. And a lot of them are like, I’m never doing that again. So we’ve had updates that felt big, that didn’t turn out to be big, but this one feels big and feels different. I’ll just, I’ll agree with you a hundred percent.

Spencer: Yes. The amount of, uh, sort of call it fanfare or an announcement certainly feel big. Uh, we’re seeing manual actions. Still waiting, of course, on the, uh, the, the core algorithm updates itself. Um, so one more 

Jared: thing, if I could, on this, uh, it does hearken back. Uh, we had Casey Botticello on the podcast. Um, I don’t know, three, four or five months ago.

Uh, he’s been a big part of your AI. Case study in terms of kind of helping out in what a mentorship role there, or at least a, uh, anyways, his interview is wonderful. If you want to read about an entire AI case study that we did, that was a great interview. And one of the biggest things that I took away from that podcast interview was how, how laser sharp focused he was at his content velocity.

He was very focused at keeping the velocity very low. So I’m dying to hear how his site is doing, but also, I mean, that was a premonition, if you will, of what really Google is looking at to identify. What they’re calling AI spam versus what they maybe don’t know as well is an AI generated site. 

Spencer: Now I could be wrong, but I’m 99 percent sure that I saw a tweet from Casey today that says he sold his AI site.

Uh, just. Real recently. So did he really? He did. He did. Uh, so it, his tweet didn’t say much other than, so we might never know. I just sold my site. Yeah. We might never know. Well, we might never know. Um, but, uh, so, so interesting nonetheless. But yes, he was focused on that and he fortuitous timing his content a lot.

But perhaps fortuitous timing, we’ll see. 

Jared: Oh, good for him. Okay. Well, that’s interesting. And if you have any more about that, that’s a good podcast to go back and listen 

Spencer: to. Yep. Okay. So the next one here is, uh, site reputation abuse. Now we call this parasite SEO in the industry. Google calls it site reputation abuse, but that’s clearly what they’re talking about.

He told 

Jared: us they were going to come with a better name for it. I think Danny, remember Danny saying that 

Spencer: I like the name. It’s not bad. No, it’s not. It’s not as catchy, but it’s more professional. It is. Yeah. Um, and so, so basically what it is, is that, uh, sometimes you got these well known websites, uh, that host low quality content provided by third parties, as it says here, um, basically guest posts, right?

Uh, uh, With the goal of capitalizing on the hosting sites, strong reputation, for example, a third party might publish payday loan reviews on a trusted educational website like Harvard, which I think like Harvard, I was going to say example that happened. 

Jared: Where did they get that example from? 

Spencer: Exactly. Uh, to gain rankings benefits from the site.

So they’re targeting this, uh, specifically, which I think is a good thing. I, you know, I’ve been saying this a long time. I mean, there’s a lot of sort of gray hat, black hat people in the SEO industry that think parasite SEO is the end all be all, and they love it and they’ve abused it and they use it because you can write about something you can rank really well because you’re on the harvard.

edu domain domain and you make a affiliate commissions. You rank for that keyword. You make a bunch of affiliate commissions without your own websites, it’s kind of a loophole there. Well, Google is closing that loophole, but perhaps the most interesting thing, uh, about this, uh, controversial, I would say, is that we’re publishing this policy two months in advance of enforcement on May 5th to give site owners time to make any needed changes.

Um, You know, why did they do that? Why? I feel like they’re doing this when the, the Harvard’s and the, you know, big websites of the world, uh, are involved. It’s like, Oh, we’re potentially penalizing large publishers and large corporations. We’ll give them two months advanced notice. But if it’s just, you know, the little guys, we’re going to just release our helpful content update, you know, and crush it from day one.

No warning. Uh, anyways, that’s, that’s my hot take on that. 

Jared: I mean, has there ever been a, uh, easier or, I mean, I guess just more obvious example of, of the bias that Google has towards large sites. And we’ve been talking about it. And that they don’t, they say that they don’t have a bias, right? Like, uh, we’ve, we’ve seen Danny say like, we just wanna reward helpful content.

Um, that’s all we care about is just content that serves the readers, right? We don’t see that. And then I, why, why? Why do they get an update? They’ve been doing something that is wrong for a long time. They know it’s wrong. Google always points back to their documentation of that fact that it’s wrong. And now they get two months to fix 

Spencer: it.

Right. It, uh, it’s a very controversial indeed. 

Jared: Can I ask you about this though? Yes. So how does it, sorry, I have to dig in a little bit. We don’t have to derail the podcast on this, but first off, do they just not have a solution yet and they’ve been to buy themselves a couple months? 

Spencer: I don’t know. That’s a good question.

Second 

Jared: off, it’s not like Google just can press a button. Re recrawl every single site on the internet and then run an update. How are they going to know that someone’s, what if I update mine in 59 days and the update hits on day 60, like this isn’t, I just can’t see this playing out the way that they’re making it so simply.

I think this is going to be a long drawn out thing in some capacity, just because when you think about the dynamics of it, like what’s the solution and how are they going to enforce that? And it’s going to be very interesting how it plays out. But. I’m not sure it’s going to be quite as abrupt as what we’re seeing with the AI spam, uh, solution they’ve, they’ve, they’ve developed, you know?

Spencer: Yeah. And it’s interesting. Uh, I’m, I’m trying to think through, even when they do roll this out in two months, are they going to just target the spammy pages, penalize, you know, that low quality guest post on harvard. org or is it going to somehow penalize the overall domain? Right. Um, it, I mean, it appears that it’s just the, um.

Perhaps the individual page, but I don’t know 

Jared: granted. These are large sites. Typically. So Google crawls these sites frequently, you know, I get that. But yeah, to your point, like, I mean, they’re not really going to take harvard. edu offline because they didn’t purge all their parasite SEO pages. Right? 

Spencer: Right.

Prop probably not. And, but, but again, that’s, that’s the bias. They’re going to only do it because it’s Harvard, right? If it was, you know, if it was niche pursuits. com participating in this like wiped off the map, gone, you don’t care. Yeah. You know, double standard for sure. 

Jared: I it’s. It’s unfortunate, but at the same time to give them a little bit of grace on it, we’ve said many times the podcast, like, how do you solve this problem?

And I’m still not sure how they’re going to solve it, how they’re going to actually go about it. I’m really curious to see. And so. You know, maybe this, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? Like we got to maybe let them eat their elephant one bite at a time here. 

Spencer: Yeah, I think so. And it, yeah, it does open a whole can of worms about, you know, how do they detect, uh, what, what is right.

Uh, a guest post, a low quality content provided by a third 

Jared: party. Are we going back to topical authority now? Like, is Harvard going to stay in its lane? Is that what we’re going to look at this as? Is it subdomain strictly? So now you basically can’t publish on a subdomain anymore because of this? Or subfoldering?

Like, I’m 

Spencer: curious. Yeah. Are they looking overall topical authority? Is it out of that? Like you said, are they looking at authors? Is it like, who published this? And we know that it’s a third party, right? Because of course that could be abused by just not publishing. Publishing under a third party author name.

Right. Um, so what they’re going to use to detect, I don’t know. And it is a complex system, but, um, kudos to Google for trying to tackle this. Maybe, um, you know, I’ll, I’ll give a, um, you know, I, I will hold my clap, uh, on the giving people two months. You know, I feel like they should just do it. 

Jared: This is another one of those where.

It feels like I’ll wait and see if they actually have a solution, you know, they’re telling us, I think they telling us they have one. And so let’s see how it, how it plays out. But you know, uh, no doubt it’s an issue. So I’m glad 

Spencer: you’re talking about it. And then the final, uh, spec. Part of the spam update is expired domain abuse.

Boy, oh boy. That is a really interesting one because of course we talked about this a lot on the niche pursuits podcast, going back many years and, uh, had different guests that have talked about using expired domains that. Strategy is you buy an expired domain that has this great, uh, domain authority, domain reputation, right?

And you buy it and you build up your own website on that. And you get this boost in Google because you’ve got this powerful domain over, you know, years ago, had lots of, uh, links and different things pointing to it. Well, Google is saying they’re getting rid of that. Right. They are, um, expired domains that are purchased and repurposed with the intention of boosting the search ranking of low quality content are now considered spam, right?

They do include this phrase of using low quality content. So does that mean, Hey, if I buy a, you know, here’s the issue, right? Is. I have a really great business idea. I then go search old domain names and I find one that’s a perfect fit for my business idea. I pen paid 10, 000 for the domain because it’s a great fit, right?

Um, Then I build up my own business. Hopefully that’s not going to be considered spam, right? That’s I’m going to produce new high quality content. I just, I want to get this well known domain name, but if on the other hand, if you truly are just buying this weird sounding domain name, that’s, you know, the political campaign of 2018 of some random Senator, and you turn it into, you know, a sports blog.

Like that’s, that’s a whole other story and should probably be penalized. Right. 

Jared: We’ve actually done a site audit where we finally did discover that. And the owner of the website was unaware, but that the old, the website domain prior to them was being used for, let’s just say, very nefarious purposes. And then when Google caught up to that domain doing that, it was.

I don’t know if it was de indexed, but certainly it lost all of its rankings and then the site dropped and was an attractive domain name that the person just picked up unsuspectingly many years later. Whether that was a contributor to the site’s downturn. It did have that nice little pop of great rankings and then bam off of a cliff and, but yeah, so it’s a good point.

Now I wanted to ask about, so the blog that you have in front of you. Is pretty vague. If you go to the Google search central documentation on this, I want to read something out to you. It, I could be wrong, but it feels like they are only potentially only focusing this around expired domains where you don’t line up the topics correct.

And if that’s the case, this is something that SEOs have figured out a long time ago. It’s not really a good idea to get a brewery website that went into business and then start publishing craft content on it. Like it, that did work for a while back in the day, but that hasn’t really worked for quite a while.

And what they said was, for example, someone might purchase a domain. Previously used by a medical site and repurposed that to host low quality casino related content, hoping to be successful in search based on the domain’s reputation from a previous ownership. Um, uh, and so they go on to say it’s fine to use an old domain for a new original site that’s designed to serve people first.

I just wonder if they’re really targeting expired domains or if they’re just targeting something that they’ve been targeting for three or four years now, and they’re finally announcing it. I don’t 

Spencer: know. Yeah, I don’t know either. I mean, it feels like it’s something new or at least more explicit, uh, you know, with this update.

But yeah, how, how much of a change that that will be, uh, is interesting. So, uh, a couple of interesting lines there, right? It basically, it’s fine to use an old domain for a new original site that’s designed to serve people first. So there you go. There’s that sort of line that is the saving grace that, Hey, you can still buy an expired domain if you sort of follow the example that I just gave.

Right. I’ve got this business idea by a great domain name. And, uh, you know, I’m off to the races from there, but I do wonder how this will impact businesses that sell expired domains, you know, Otis global is one of those well known that has, you know, uh, been mentioned many times on the podcast. Uh, how’s that going to impact their business?

Right. I’m not sure I’d want to be, uh, I’m not sure I’d want that to be my business. Maybe it’ll work out just fine, but you know, there could be a lot of, uh, trepidation in the marketplace for expired domains now. 

Jared: Yeah. Google wants us to not write for search, but to write for just broad, you know, For broad reasons, and it seems like they don’t want us to pick domain names for search, but for broad reasons.

Spencer: Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, we’re over at this, uh, Google Search Central blog. You know, what web creators should know about our March 2024 core update and new spam policies. It goes a little bit more detail, a little bit more in depth, has some, uh, FAQ here, or, you know, Q& A. Um Any, anything else that you wanted to point out either on this or search engine land also covered this core update.

Um, that’s kind of, of course, the broad strokes we’ve now been talking about it for 30 minutes, but, uh, there’s, there’s a little bit more here and just curious if you had anything else to bring up. 

Jared: I definitely have two more things I want to get to before I move on, but I will just say one thing I’m looking at my notes that we didn’t mention is they said likely there will be more fluctuations in rankings than with a regular core update.

So. In the vein of Danny Sullivan, buckle up like the next month. I say that to the site owner that’s listening right now that sees a massive drop or a massive uptick. And they’ve already told us, like, expect lots of volatility, which volatility means we could watch sites go up and down and up and down and yo yo back and forth.

So just, you know, keep that in mind when they, we know that about a core update when they tell us that about this one being more volatile than normal. So, you know, just expect that if, if it’s something you see, just ride the wave until we get to the end of it. 

Spencer: Great point. Definitely gonna be a lot of volatility.

It sounds like my poor 

Jared: inbox from clients who don’t read and know all this stuff. And I’m going to have to take that snippet and just email it out to everyone every time for the next month. 

Spencer: That’s right. And did you have one other 

Jared: point? So, uh, we just, uh, helpful content update. Quality rater guidelines.

We didn’t talk about either of those updates. So really quickly, I’ll just breeze through it since we are coming up on time. The helpful content update is now a part of core algorithm. It’s no longer going to have helpful content updates. We see them sunset product review, updates, review updates. Uh, all these kinds of things is very normal.

Um, uh, that’s the quote. I can’t remember where I saw it, but there was some indication that it could be moving to a page level classifier rather than a site level. Wide classifier. I was trying to find that while we were on the podcast and I couldn’t so I don’t have a screenshot to show We’re saying yeah, I saw it and it’s been talked.

I know I saw 

Spencer: some tweets. Um, And you’re right. They quoted some things and I don’t remember where that was either. I don’t either I tried to dig it up 

Jared: Possible. Yeah, but hey, so that could be a big deal, right? Like Um, you know, that, uh, that could be a big deal because what we’re seeing is certainly this classifier seems to sit and weigh on a whole site if the site’s been deemed unhelpful.

Um, and again, I’m not saying that that’s what they said because I don’t have it in front of me, but I’m, I, I remember seeing a lot about that and we’ll have to see how it plays out. But for those of you waiting to recover from a helpful content update, we’re gonna have to see if this brings some recovery for certain sites, but also maybe partial recovery in the vein of it moving from a domain wide classifier to potentially a page level classifier.

Yep, 

Spencer: which would be really interesting. Um, that was a big part of one of my big angry tweets that I did about Google slowly killing blogging was, hey, uh, you know, if all of a sudden you write one article that just isn’t that helpful, does it penalize your whole domain? And of course, Danny Sullivan responded to all of that.

And so maybe there’s a tweak here that maybe it’s a more based on the page level, which is really the way it should be. I mean, come on, Google. If you got one bad page that for whatever reason doesn’t seem helpful, fine. Don’t rank that one as well, but don’t penalize the whole 99 percent of the other website.

Right? Uh, so we’ll see. We’ll see. 

Jared: Um, quality radar guidelines. There was an update made. This is pointed out. I first saw by Marie Haynes. They added this line. I’ll read it out loud. Multiple or significant factual inaccuracies or an informational page, which could, well, I’m not reading it perfectly, but they added a line about, um, Things they don’t trust that is multiple or significant factual inaccuracies or an informational page, which would cause users to lose trust in the web page as a reliable source of information should have kicked off that way.

So, their example in the quality radar, which they have a bunch, by the way, you should go through and read it. Uh, they reference a section suddenly refers to praying mantises as praying mollies, a name that isn’t supported. Through a quick web search. There you go. So, um, yeah, take that for what it is. I mean, I think that, I mean, what is this?

Is this a, an ode to AI hallucinations? 

Spencer: Right. That’s kind of what it feels like, right? That it’s making up stuff. Yeah. So 

Jared: when you publish stuff made up by AI, you’ll be held accountable for it. And basically, again, quality rater guidelines are there for their quality raters to learn how to train their machine learning program to identify this stuff without quality raters.

So they’re looking for 

Spencer: this now. And of course they publish the quality rater guidelines so anybody can go and they can read through that, right? It’s an extensive document. People can look at that. It’s probably a good idea to do every once in a while. 

Jared: Oh, yeah. Light reading, you know, while you’re in bed, getting ready to go to bed.

Yeah. 

Spencer: Yeah. Put yourself to sleep, you know, you’re having trouble. 

Jared: Oh, wow. I mean, what are we at here? You said, Oh my goodness. We’re at 36 minutes. I feel like we just breezed over the 

Spencer: topics. I know I like, there’s so much more to talk about and the history of things that led to this and what potentially is going to happen here in the very near future.

Um, but here we are. We’re, we’re pretty much out of time to cover the news, uh, which usually we cover a bunch of subjects today is just one. We’ve got these Google core updates. Uh, they just started, so please contact us. Or leave comments on the YouTube videos or other places. If you see fluctuations in rankings, I’m really looking forward to some real world data as this happens.

I don’t know if it’s going to happen this week or next week or the full month, right? Before things get really volatile as Google hints at, um, So let us know if you see any, any fluctuations in your sites. And we, of course, we’ll keep you all posted. I imagine we’ll talk about this next week on the podcast as 

Jared: well.

Oh, we’ve got the next four to six weeks of news topics. Here it is. Slated now, you know, I mean, we’ve got a four week update and then several weeks after to analyze the results and what happened and all that. So stay tuned. We’ll be talking about this for a while. 

Spencer: Oh boy. Oh boy. Should be fun. Let’s jump into our next subject of the day.

Here are shiny objects, shenanigans, and I’m going to go first here today. Um, it’s been a little while since I provided an update on my Amazon influencer business. Yeah. Yeah, so I thought I’d go ahead and share that. Um, I should’ve looked at the agenda before 

Jared: we started. I’ll tell you. 

Spencer: Yeah. Well, we nailed the first section.

That was the most 

Jared: important. That’s all I was focused on the rest of this. I’m making it up as 

Spencer: I go. Me too. And, uh, I forgot to look at how many total videos I have now. I was going to do that. Uh, but. There have been, I would say another 10 or 20 videos have been published in the last couple of months.

They were kind of backlogged videos that I’ve had actually sitting on my hard drive here for a month or two. Uh, finally got, you know, additional 15 or 20, whatever it is published. So that gets me. Close to 1100. I don’t know exactly where I’m at a number of videos, but people will remember that in December I had this huge spike in earnings, November and December holidays.

Of course, that’s normal. Uh, last month, uh, February is earnings was about 1, 600, uh, over the last. 30 days here. Uh, I’m just at about 1, 700, right? Yeah. So 16 to 1, 700, you know, I’m at 50, 60 a day, sometimes 70, you know, something like that, uh, is kind of where I’m at, which is great because I have not done anything other than publish those 10 or 20 videos.

This, this entire year, I haven’t done anything. So it, you haven’t even talked about it. Uh, it truly is passive at this point for me and profitable, you know, I’ve, I’ve stopped paying for new videos. People will know that I’ve been outsourcing these videos. And, uh, so. I’m, I’m in the black, I’m in the black, right?

So every month I’m basically pocketing this 1, 600. Uh, and I’m going to see how long this, this wave rides. Um, and so the other thing that I wanted to mention about this is that on Monday, uh, coming up, so Monday, the 11th, if you’re listening to this podcast before March 11th, um, I’m going to be doing a live call to go over this.

In depth for the niche pursuits community. Now the niche pursuits community is for paying members only. I just launched this community earlier this week. We’ve got lots of members in there already that have joined, and so they’re going to be able to be on the call or you, if you’re listening, can be on that call.

If you join the community before that, uh, you can get on the call. I’m going to share everything and way more than I’ve ever shared here on the podcast. I’m going to show you my shop. I’m going to show you my videos. I’m going to show you my earnings. Like I’m not holding anything back, um, in the community.

I’m going to go over exactly what I did. I’ll even if people want, you know, I’ll show you how I hired people on Upwork, what I’m paying them. Like I’ll show you screen shares of everything. Um, and then I’m going to answer any questions, right? So if people, uh, have any additional questions, it’s live. So.

We’re going to interact. I’m going to answer all of that. That’s the kind of thing that I want to be able to do, uh, for the community. I don’t do everything here on the podcast just because it is public, but I feel a little bit more comfortable when it’s private in a smaller group. Uh, and so if people want to join the community, they can just go over to community.

nichepursuits. com, uh, join before Monday, and I’ll be talking in depth about my Amazon influencer business, but that’s pretty much the update that I wanted to give is, um. Yeah. It’s still kind of trucking along. It’s doing, doing pretty well. 

Jared: And Oh man, I tell you, I got a raw deal on this one because I’m the one that has to follow you the following week in the community and talk about Amazon influencers in the private community.

And you are going to one up anything I can do here with your. That is amazing. 

Spencer: I know. Well, it’s not about one up. It’s like two approaches. 

Jared: I think now I have to bring my game. I’m gonna have to put some time in this. Um, that is super cool. I, um, obviously know your Amazon influencer storefront and it’s fun.

It’s really interesting to be able to watch other examples as you’re going down that journey. Even if you’re looking to, um, to, to like, you’re not sure if you want to dive in or not. Uh, it’s one thing for us to talk about it, kind of conceptualize around the videos, but it’s super helpful to see the actual videos from someone, you know, you can kind of correlate a lot of what you hear us talk about to the video.

So it’s really, it’s, that’s really amazing. Yeah. 

Spencer: Yeah. Hoping to make it hands on and, um, very useful for people. So, so with that, Jared. What are you working on? You 

Jared: know, I just pulled up my results from the last 30 days. Cause I’m like you, I haven’t really checked much. I haven’t done a video for a long time.

It’s just been sitting on autopilot. We’ve kind of moved on to other things. And I mean, I was, I was behind you there for many months. My earnings are last 30 days, 2, 213. Whoa. 

Spencer: Yeah. Well, talk about one, one upping. I mean, there you go. Hi, 

Jared: no kidding. That’s um, excellent. That’s a lot. I’m looking here and just been, so I’ve had a 200 day in the last couple of 

Spencer: weeks.

Whoa, somebody bought something big or a bunch of, 

Jared: I don’t know. I haven’t dove into whether it’s one thing or whether it’s a bunch of things, but anyways, so, I mean, again, to be able to just get, uh, like you said, like kind of on autopilot at this point, and that won’t last forever, but certainly seeing it’s improving, even though I haven’t published a video in, in a, in a while.

So what a, what a, what a side hustle. What a passive income.

Spencer: Absolutely. Let’s um, 

Jared: I’m pulling up my actual side hustle thing to talk about though, sorry for the delay there. Um, so I’ve talked about this a little bit and I want to circle back to it. Uh, first off, if you’re wondering after last week’s episodes, uh, yes, we did go to the donut store on Saturday and I did pay for donuts.

And I did tell our donut store owner that I’m paying for this with the earnings from my YouTube channel and he Kind of looked at me quizzically and we moved on from that said, okay, 

Spencer: that’s nice. 

Jared: Great free donut. So anyways, um, there we go. Maybe I still am earning donut store money. Uh, once a week donut store money from that, but um, It’s kind of a fun ode to last week.

If you, if you know, you know, um, hey, so, uh, What i’m talking about this week is that i’ve started down the process of driving Using paid ads to drive new Subscribers to the weekend growth email newsletter. And this is something I talked about that I wanted to do at, at some point, but I wanted to kind of give it a little bit more runway first.

And as we’re approaching, I think we’re just a hundred subs or so shy of 5, 000. Um, this seemed like the right time to try this out. So. Just to bring people up to speed on what I’m doing. Um, I use convert kit for the email newsletter platform. And I think that’s the same you use for new, right? Yep. Big fan of convert kit.

MailerLite to them when, um, around December. And they have a lot of things that are really, really amazing. So higher price point, but very happy with the switch, definitely getting more value for money. Um, they are connected to spark loop, which is an ad platform for Email newsletters and you basically can set it up where you recommend other newsletters and you get paid per subscriber.

And then you can also do the same thing where you offer to pay other newsletters a per subscriber fee for them to recommend you. Now, it’s pretty quick and easy. If you want to recommend others and get paid for it, that’s just press of a button and, and, and, and, and then you kind of, you know, go about your business.

But if you want to pay others to recommend you, you have to go through a whole process with them. So I had my call last week with spark loop to get it all set up. Um, we had a couple of changes we had to make because you have to tag. Um, you know, you have to tag the emails properly when people go through, they have to get tagged as a new subscriber because you can basically set your criteria.

And so that way, if you’re, um, referring people, uh, uh, or people started referring newsletter subscribers to you, you don’t want to pay for, you know, AI bots, right. Or spam bots or something. So you can kind of say, I’ll pay X amount per new subscriber that opens Say two emails in the next month, you know, or whatever you want it to be.

And then these publishers have the opportunity to review that before they agree to start sending you, um, uh, potential subscribers and whatnot. So I think it’s really interesting. It’s more involved than I thought it was like, we’re used to generating ads on Facebook and you just go press a couple buttons and you’re off to the races.

You can get as detailed as you want, but they really take care. To set it up properly, make sure you do your targeting correctly so nobody gets burned in the process. Um, and so I just wanted to kinda share that with people who are interested in this and maybe would want to use a spark loop rather than maybe a Facebook ad play, which is another great play that a lot of people talk about.

So I’ll take a breath there. That was a lot, but that’s what I started doing 

Spencer: this week. Yeah, so it is interesting because there’s a lot of different ways that you can grow your email list and even. Paid channels. And this spark loop convert kit, you know, partnership is one of those ways that, uh, I’ve been familiar with, but I have not tested, uh, on my own yet.

And so I’d be curious is, is, is it live yet for you? Have you paid for any leads, uh, or any results you can share in that regard? We had to 

Jared: do a couple of things, set up a couple of things and I pinged Caitlin about it on our team this morning. And she said, they’re all set up and she’s going to press it live this afternoon when she has an hour in case something goes wrong.

Okay. But so it’s going live. It’s it’ll be live by the time you hear this podcast, um, uh, go out and 

Spencer: stuff. Oh, that’s so cool. Um, yeah, if you’re willing to share results, I will 

Jared: definitely share results. I will share what we pay, you know, how much interest we get, you know, all that kind of stuff. Cause I’m going to be kind of learning as we go.

And especially in the first month, like trying to align budget with what we pay with the quality of subscribers, you know, like I’m really interested in monitoring, interested in monitoring all of these facets. 

Spencer: Yeah, no, that’s good. I mean, um, you know, I’ve heard lots of stories and specifically with a spark loop, uh, people that kind of have this flywheel going where, uh, you know, they’ve got an email list and they pay for a new subscribers, but then once they’re on their list, they know they can make X dollars per subscriber.

Hopefully it’s more than they paid for and then they take that money and they just buy more subscribers, make more money. And flywheel where. It’s all right there on the ad, you know, convert kit, spark loop, uh, platform. 

Jared: And I am, I am going to try to also do other types of advertising like Facebook ads. I mean, Keith mint emailed out this week about how he’s, he’s having a lot of success early days, but success with, with using a Facebook ad for that.

And so, um, I was emailing back and forth with Keith about that. And so, um, You know, I’m going to try several different ad, uh, ideas as it relates to weekend growth. And I’ll, you know, share those in coming in upcoming podcast episodes. So 

Spencer: awesome. That was good. It’s piqued my interest. I am very curious to hear how it goes.

So thank you for sharing. Yeah. Maybe we’ll jump over to our weird niche sites. We only got, you know, a few minutes each here to go through our sites. So we’ll kind of be quick hits, but I do want to get to them. Uh, I teased that my weird niche site is getting millions of visitors per month. And, uh, excuse me while I look over to the side here to look at my numbers.

Yes. Um, my site is getting 2 million organic visitors per month from Google and 6 million visitors a month total. And so that site is random. org. That’s it. Random. org. And if you look at it, I mean, it kind of looks like a. Wikipedia page here in terms of no fancy design, that’s for sure. Uh, but basically, uh, all you do is you can generate random numbers or random, you know, random lottery jaw drawings, statistics.

There’s a lot of different random things that you can do. Uh, but, uh, numbers. So if I go to. Well, let’s go to the, uh, well, let’s go to the coin flipper here. So let’s, let’s say we’re going to flip a coin, uh, 10 times. Um, you can select your coin type boy. You can really. Narrow it down. So let’s just do, well, let’s do the Pennsylvania quarter.

Uh, and then you just hit flip coins, right? And it’s going to give you random heads and tails results, right? So in this example, it looks like one, two, three. We only got heads three times and seven times tails. Yeah, that’s bizarre. Truly random. And if we flip it again, right. Now we got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven heads and three tails.

Anyways, um, you can go through and generate random numbers. And their big thing is that this is truly, truly random. Uh, most, um, random generators use mathematical formulas that can be predicted. This uses, um, Oh, what did they call it? Okay. The randomness comes from atmospheric noise, uh, which. Anyways, there’s noise in the atmosphere often caused by like lightning.

I did some research on this. Uh, and so they use this atmospheric noise combined with, I don’t know, they’re whatever algorithm they’re using to generate truly random numbers. And, um, if you notice, I don’t appear to see any display ads. Yeah. I’ve done it. I don’t appear to see any ways to make money. They may have some premium tools, but I’m not seeing any.

Um, it’s interesting because they have a Wikipedia page. Right. Random. org. Uh, so they’re, uh, they’re big time. They’ve been around since 1998. So it’s been, um, more of a sort of scientific thing to truly tap into this atmospheric noise, to generate random numbers, um, and then just to show some of the stats that I mentioned earlier, if you go to AHS, they are a DR of 83, and they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re.

They’re getting 1. 9 or 2 million, uh, organic visitors a month. They rank for keywords like, let’s see, uh, organic keywords here. Uh, random number generator, flip a coin, number generator, coin flip list, randomizer, et cetera. Right. Uh, and then just to wrap up the traffic performance here, we’ve got random. org on a similar web.

You can see that they’re getting. 5. 9 million visitors a month. Um, kind of crazy. 53 percent is direct traffic. 38 percent is organic traffic. Um, but, uh, yeah, I, a very cool website. Um, just interesting. I don’t know if it’s making any money, but, uh, it’s getting a ton of visitors. 

Jared: I’m just poking around the about page.

So it, it really does look like a play on very scientific, factual. Based type stuff. It’s it’s it’s the directors are two doctors that we’ve got a ceo. Dr. Mads. How are Um, I don’t know if i’m saying that name correctly. Uh, another director is dr. Svendhar Um, he’s a danish national the company is based in ireland Um, and I was reading about the analysis.

You pulled it up. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I majored in econometrics, so this is right up my nerdy alley. And this is 

Spencer: fascinating. I’m reading this. 

Jared: Oh man, this is my bedtime reading. I love this stuff. So this will be what I read tonight on this, um, atmospheric noise. I have heard about this. I did discuss this in college a bit, I believe.

Um, and so yeah, this will definitely be my nighttime reading, but it will probably be nobody else’s, right? Um, if you look a little bit more interestingly, if you look up in the menu there, the learn more a couple of things. Um, first off, they have a login. I’m wondering what the login is for, but in the learn more drop down, they have a newsletter.

Um, uh, I wonder what other things they’re doing with this, uh, with this brand. 

Spencer: Right, that’s, that’s what I was trying to figure. It feels like it perhaps needs a premium subscription and maybe it does. Uh, okay, here you go. Most of our services are free, but if you are paid, 

Jared: all are free of 

Spencer: advertising. Uh, it’s really interesting that I can’t even find the paid, you know, like, talk about making it hard, you know, okay.

Popular premium services, our most popular premium services, third party draw service, which is used to hold professional drawings and lotteries in a way that is guaranteed to be fair and truly random. So that does make sense. That’s smart. Um, and then when I click on it, of course, it’s a session timeout.

So, um, I guess I won’t be holding a large scale lottery, but they do apparently offer that service, which makes sense. You truly want to make sure it’s fair and random. They seem like a legit service to do that. So, yeah. And 

Jared: again, you might be thinking like, what the heck, well, you’re, you’re talking about maybe giving away a million dollars, right.

And like a contest or a lottery, right. You don’t want to just go to some random. Uh, you know, hacked random generator on the internet. Like you want something that seems to be verifiable, you know, these sorts of things, uh, for insurance and stockholders and shareholders and stuff. That’s the kind of stuff they’re probably charging for.

Spencer: Exactly. And nobody can game the system. There’s no way to game this. It truly is random. There’s also no way 

Jared: to log in, 

Spencer: apparently. Apparently, you know, that service isn’t working at the moment. So, um, very cool website. You can read about it more, you know, Jared, um, on your spare time. I will. If you’d like, I can give a 

Jared: full recap next week on the podcast.

I’m sure our listener numbers will drop off precipitously, though. 

Spencer: That’s right. Oh, he’s going to talk about that random website again. Um, let’s jump into your weird niche site before we have to end the show here. 

Jared: Yes. Uh, we are running out of time. Mine is, Hey, you know, I’ve got a good streak going here with weird, truly weird niches today.

We are talking about, uh, the stinky candle company at stinky candle company. com. What a name. Hey, yeah, you know that talk about putting You see all these screenshots on twitter here and there about you know, some some some pizza company names their company pizza near me um Uh, sorry, that’s an seo joke, but um, they just named their company what it is, you know So they’ve got themselves in a nice box, but they they make stinky candles So I I got the idea to find this site because I heard about a candle.

I think this is great by the way So let me just share this story. I heard about a candle. It’s like a gag gift You But it burns for like 10 hours and smells, you know, good. It smells like vanilla. And then after like 10 hours, it switches and smells like, you know, something awful. Oh, that’s hilarious. Isn’t that awesome?

So I was trying to find the website for that. I didn’t find that, but I landed on stinky, the stinky candle company in the, uh, in the interim. So 

Spencer: this is so funny. I mean, you’ve got all, you know, you’ve got gasoline, smell chlorine, 

Jared: that gasoline. Uh, candle is their number one keyword, so it’s probably their best seller.

Spencer: Uh, it’s so funny, I mean, enjoy the scent of poolside ambiance anytime, anywhere. Chlorine. Chlorine. That’s what 

Jared: I’ve always wanted. Uh, dill pickle candle, um, french fry, I mean, that doesn’t sound great. Grandpa’s pipe. Not bad. Like, man, I have a million friends. I could buy the bacon candle for. 

Spencer: Yeah. Yeah.

They’re apple pie, right? Bacon. There, there’s definitely some legit ones, but you know, beer and if 

Jared: we believe what they say, their best sellers are, it seems to be an even split between, you know, uh, I don’t know, something kind of nice, like, uh, uh, apple pie or bacon. And then something really awful, like fart candle, chlorine candle.

Uh, I don’t know what it was. Money candle. Like what does money smell like? 

Spencer: Money smells dirty and in a pocket, you know? Yeah, yeah, there 

Jared: you go. Musty, maybe. Um, from a site standpoint, as per many of these, it’s a DR30, but it’s not getting much traffic. It’s got about 1, 800 keywords it ranks for. Uh, A Refs predicts, um, Ahrefs predicts about 14.

1. 4. So 1400 organic search. It’s gone up and down. Um, if you go over the keywords though, it does rank number one, like I said, for gasoline candle. I don’t know who’s searching for a gasoline candle necessarily, but, um, 

Spencer: yeah, gasoline, money, candle, cash candle. Interesting keywords. Yeah. 

Jared: 200 searches. Uh, A month, um, but you can see like they have pear scented candles.

Like that’s not stinky. I think a pear smells lovely I love pears Um, so they’ve kind of you know taken the brand and and and gone as wide as they can they have about a hundred pages I don’t see any informational content So seems to me like they’re just they’ve got about a hundred different candle variations or in that ballpark, right?

Yeah Uh, they have a facebook they have an instagram and they have an affiliate program So if you are out there and you want to be an affiliate for the stinky candle company, they pay 10 percent 

Spencer: Oh, that’s pretty good. 

Jared: Um, what do you think? So this was registered in 2013, this domain. So they’ve been around for a while.

What do you, do you think this is a drop shipping play? Do you think they’re, um, white labeling this product? Do you think someone’s actually making all this? Like, what, what do you think? 

Spencer: Good question. Uh, it could be a drop shipper. Yeah. I’m just trying to see if there’s any, um, I don’t know. Do, do all of them have the same.

I don’t know. I mean, sure, surely they’ve got a third party manufacturer, whether it’s drop shipping or just somebody that, you know, they’ve contracted with that slaps their label. Cause it looks like all their labels are consistent, you know, with, uh, the type of candles, but I bet they do fairly well if they, if they’re ranking, even though it’s not a lot of traffic, like it’s highly targeted traffic.

So if you’re getting 1500 people a month, 

Jared: like, I mean, to your point, if you’re looking for a gasoline candle and you land on. This page, here’s your gasoline candle. It seems to be very reasonably priced and bam, you order and you’re off. Like, like you said, like it’s not all about search. It’s all about volume.

We saw with our last website, random. org tons of traffic, no monetization, real path. We could see these guys, you’re not getting a ton of traffic, but it’s incredibly target rich traffic for 

Spencer: revenue. Yeah, and they make it a bunch of returning visitors and direct traffic, right? Once you kind of hear about it, it’s like a chlorine candle and buy some others for 

Jared: family.

I was going to say, you know, when you’re, when you’re outside of Amazon, um, oftentimes these really niche down orders are higher cart because, you know, you get your free shipping at 50 bucks or 75 bucks or whatever. Right. So you can kind of play that game. I don’t know if they are playing that game, but.

You can also drive a higher order value, uh, from, from someone from, from that, that visit you get from search, even if there aren’t as many of them. 

Spencer: Right. And a lot of these, uh, companies will, uh, do, do paid traffic, right? So they might be getting. They might be doing pretty well for all we know. I mean, 

Jared: this is ripe to show up in your Facebook feed, right.

Or, you know, something like that. 

Spencer: Yeah. So, um, I just quickly pulled it up on a similar web. Uh, they’re getting, it says about 35, 000 visitors, at least in December. It’s about 30, 000 visitors a month. Uh, with, um, yeah, a lot of it is direct. I mean, and, uh, organic. So 

Jared: I bet they’re making decent money. I really do.

Because like you said, it’s so targeted. Uh, the brand it’s simple. Uh, they’re definitely not building this Shopify site out past the basement, the base, uh, template that you get, but it’s, um, you know, they got it, they got a brand going, right? Like all their, all their candles have this, have a branding going for them.

They seem very reasonably priced. And at 30, 000 visits at that targeted of traffic, I’ve got to imagine they’re making good money. 

Spencer: Yeah, good job. You found a, a weird niche, kind of a, uh, you know, humorous niche, if you will, with a serious, serious and humorous, right? It’s a kind of fun candles and, uh, normal candles as well mixed in.

So. So there you have it. Good site. Uh, thank you everybody so much for sticking along, uh, for the ride boy, these Google updates, we, we dug deep and I feel like there’s going to be so much more to cover in future weeks. Like you said, we’ll probably be talking about this for the next three or four weeks.

Um, so stick around for future episodes. We will definitely share results next week. As we see them specific sites that were hit, or if we have some winners at that point, fingers crossed that we definitely do. I would love to share some of those. Um, and so please stick around and listen, uh, to the next episode.

But, uh, other than that, thank you everybody. Appreciate 

Jared: it. Have a great weekend. We’ll be talking Google for a while. See you back here next week.