Welcome back to another episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast, where Spencer and Jared talk about the biggest news over the last week in Google, SEO, and AI.

They also give an update on some of their side hustles and top it all off with some very weird and entertaining niche sites.

They kick off this week’s call by announcing big news: Google has just finished rolling out the spam update, although the core update will continue to be rolled out for another two weeks.

The spam update targeted three types of abuse: scaled content, expired domain, and site reputation (also known as parasite SEO), though the latter will technically be targeted in May.

They share a tweet from Lily Ray, where she details the winners and losers from the update, and then Spencer looks at a handful of their data in Ahrefs.

If you take a closer look at the “winners,” you can see examples of sites that are crushing it and do your own deep-dive analysis. They also look at sites that were absolutely crushed in the update, as we can learn from both.

Listen to the full episode to see their analysis and which sites are doing well and poorly.

Moving along, the next news item is that Google is shaking things up a bit internally, replacing the Head of Search, among other roles.

What do Spencer and Jared make of this? And what does the new head, Liz Reid, talk about primarily in her announcement? What does she see as the future of search? And what’s motivating these changes at Google? Tune in to hear what they think!

During the Side Hustle Shenanigans segment of the podcast, Spencer goes first and talks about his Amazon Influencer business. He reveals his current earnings and reports that his earnings have become almost entirely passive since he hasn’t really uploaded videos since December.

Jared just finished his call with the Niche Pursuits Community, where he talks in detail about his business and how he’s grown it. Spencer did a call the previous week where he shared all the details behind his Amazon Influencer business as well.

If you want to see those videos and enjoy many other aspects of the Community, you can join right here!

When it’s Jared’s turn, he talks about deleting 18% of the subscribers to his Weekend Growth newsletter. He shares the process for culling the list and trying to re-engage with disinterested subscribers, and the resulting open rate after the process.

Spencer then shares his process for managing the people on his list who are disengaged. Which approach resonates the most with you? Check out the episode to hear how their strategies differ.

When it’s time to talk about Weird Niche Sites, Spencer goes first with Ling's Cars. From the psychedelic background to Ling’s bobbing head, the site definitely leans into its weirdness.

The owner also uses some unique real-life marketing strategies but doesn’t have a very strong SEO game. Most of its traffic is direct or comes from social media, reaching 84k visitors last month.

When it’s Jared’s turn, he shares the personal website, Tyler Vigen. The section that has gone viral is called Spurious Correlations, where he shows correlations between two completely random things, like Amazon’s stock price and the popularity of the name Stevie.

There’s a very entertaining AI component to this DR74 site, although it’s not ranking for a lot of keywords or getting much traffic, and the owner is not monetizing in any way.

And that brings us to the end of another episode of the Niche Pursuits News podcast, where Spencer and Jared break down the latest important news in the sector and seek to motivate listeners with their side hustles.

See you next Friday!

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The Google Spam Update Just Finished: Here's the Winners and Losers