Welcome back to another episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast!
This week Jared and guest host Morgan Overholt take on the latest SEO news and break it down for listeners. They also share the side hustles they’ve been working on and dissect a few weird niche sites.
Let’s get started!
They kick things off talking briefly about breaking news: there’s a new Open AI model called Strawberry, which is expected to offer users more complex answers to their queries.
Watch the Full Episode
Then they move on to the big news this week, an interview with Google Search Liaison Danny Sullivan, who sat down with Barry Schwartz to answer a wide range of questions about the current Google Search landscape.
Jared and Morgan highlight some of the more pertinent parts of the interview, such as HCU recovery, parasite SEO, AI, and scaled content abuse, among other topics.
Were there any big revelations in the article? What did Morgan notice about Danny’s language about Google? What does she note about the feedback form conversation?
What does Jared say about the plumbing example? Is the interview worth reading?
Tune in to find out!
Moving along, they talk about an article in Moz claiming that the HCU was not what we thought it was.
They maintain that Google has penalized sites with a disproportionate ratio of backlinks to brand navigational searches.
What do Jared and Mogan think about the premise of the article? Do you agree with Morgan’s theory on HouseFresh? Is complaining a potential ranking factor, as they joke?
Morgan talks briefly about the takeaways from a recent podcast by Lily Ray on why she thinks sites were hit by the HCU.
Why does Lily think sites lost their rankings? And are ads a ranking factor after all?
The last news item they cover is Mediavine’s decision to ban publishers who overuse AI content.
What has Mediavine shared about its opinion of AI? What does Jared share about the situation? What are the chances your site could get kicked out of Mediavine for using AI content?
How does Morgan view the company’s decision? Check out the episode to hear what they think!
When it’s time to share their Shiny Object Shenanigans, Jared goes first with his Medium side hustle. He shares his earnings and everything he’s learned so far on the platform.
What does he like and dislike? What does Morgan think of this side hustle?
Morgan then shares her process of rebranding her freelance site, Freelancer Files, which includes rebranding and picking up her newsletter again.
What good news does she report about her newsletter?
She talks about the book she’s working on and the Facebook page she had been working on, as well as a new Facebook page she created. She shares some impressive numbers and offers very useful advice.
The next order of business is the Weird Niche Sites.
Jared goes first with a DR71 site called Nuclear Secrecy. He explains how it works and the shocking number of detonations done on the website, and takes a look at its keywords.
What does Jared highlight about the site? Why does he think it’s so successful?
Morgan shares the site Lipsum, a lorem ipsum generator website that’s practically unchanged since 2001 and produces the text in multiple languages.
What interesting facts does she share? What are the site’s stats? How does the text resonate with SEO, according to Jared?
And that concludes another episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast. We hope you’re feeling in the know and inspired by their side hustles and weird niche sites.
See you next week!
Transcript
Jared: Welcome back to the niche pursuits podcast. My name is Jared bomb. Today we are diving into this week’s news, and we’ve got many stories on the docket to talk about. While the dust has settled on the helpful content update recoveries and what happened out of Google’s august core update, we have not addressed and have not talked about that interview.
That interview with Danny Sullivan that happened and got released during the core update. There’s so much inside of this and Danny’s been at the center of so much of what bloggers have wanted to talk about as it relates to core updates and helpful content updates. So we’re going to dive into that story.
We do have some interesting data that has come out of the helpful content update sites and their recoveries in the core update. We’ll get into that. We’re talking about a very, very popular, uh, publishing, uh, ad agency, uh, uh, banning AI sites. And so we’re gonna get into that story. We’ve got, of course, our side hustles, we’ve got some very weird niches and I’m joined today by my favorite freelancer, Morgan Overholt.
Morgan, welcome.
Morgan: Oh, what an honor. Thank you so much, Jared. It’s always nice to be back on the niche pursuits podcast. And I’m excited to, uh, dive into some of these topics today.
Jared: I was thinking about it, you know, I mean, you kind of have hung your hat on being a freelancer as your day job and you’re kind of turning into like the, uh, the, the, the weekly Friday podcast freelance host here, you know, so it’s great.
Oh,
Morgan: freelancing, you know, freelancing is one of those things that brought me into the blogging realm to begin with. So to me, it’s a bit of a fusion of both of my worlds whenever I’m on niche pursuits talking about freelancing and blogging.
Jared: Comes naturally to you. It comes naturally. Well, good. Um, so much to get into today.
Have Before we even hit our headline story, I actually have a, like, I feel like I’m in a newscaster desk right now. We’ve got breaking news. This came out about 15 minutes ago, just before we hit the podcast. Open AI is announced a brand new model. It’s code named strawberry. It’s, um, Oh, one is a technical model name.
Basically it solves difficult problems. Step by step. I’ll just read a quick couple of sentences. We don’t have much more on it, so we’re going to move on from what I wanted you to know. Um, so. Unlike previous models, it focuses on solving complex problems step by step, rather than just providing us with immediate answers.
Um, it uses a new type of learning called reinforcement learning. It represents a shift in AI models. Uh, they’re going to incorporate it into GPT 5, it sounds like, uh, whenever that comes out. So anyways, they have released it to some people. I have heard of a few people who’ve already gotten their hands and started playing with it.
We’ll talk more about it in the weeks to come once we kind of get more time underneath us. But with 15 minutes, I just thought I would mention it. Okay. Let’s dive into our first story. And this is this interview that came out. Uh, it came out over a week ago, just so that we’re clear, but it’s an interview with Danny Sullivan, which is Google’s search liaison.
Now, Danny has been kind of that go between or that bridge between the, um, the blogging community, especially the blogging community that’s been hit by the helpful content update and Google themselves. Uh, Danny has been stuck, I say, in a position where he’s trying to communicate the needs of the bloggers back to Google and trying to communicate to bloggers what’s going on with these updates.
And sometimes it doesn’t always land as well as it could, perhaps not his fault, perhaps he’s just, you know, Literally the liaison. So he did a very long interview. It’s, um, I will say Barry Schwartz is the one who did the interview. I’ve got an article right up, uh, in front of us here on the live version, SEO roundtable.
com. I thought Barry did a really good job. Just cut to the chase. He asked all the questions I would have wanted to ask. Uh, he has a rapport with Danny, so that also shined through. Morgan, I’m, you and I are just gonna, we talked about this ahead of time. We’re just gonna go back and forth and talk about the things that stood out.
We’re not gonna be able to get to the whole interview. You should read it. It is really insightful. There are some really good things in it. Um, yeah. Let’s see, I’m going to pull out a couple soundbites here. Um, Barry asked about helpful content update recovery. So why didn’t we see improvements until this last update for some of the impacted sites?
Uh, Danny said he didn’t seem to know. Basically saying it’s difficult to say because the March core update was a whole new system. We should come back to that whole new system. On the topic of parasite SEO, Danny specifically said, I quote, there’s no algorithmic action. I don’t expect there to be any algorithmic action anytime in the near future.
They told us that there was going to be algorithmic action that would come out in early May of 2024. We haven’t seen it. Looks like it’s not coming anytime soon. Uh, let’s see. On the topic of hidden gems, Danny said, Where we went out with it was focused on social content. So where they released it into the algorithm was focused, it sounds like, solely on social content.
So hidden gems were not going to be surfaced on our websites in essence. Uh, Danny went on to say he would like to see other forms of hidden gems rewarded by future updates. I got a lot more, Morgan, let me turn it over to you for your initial thoughts, your thoughts on what I brought up and then anything else you wanted to discuss.
Morgan: Well, let me just say first, uh, the length of this article is, is tremendous. I was gonna, I originally tried to start reading it last week and it first came out and then decided I’d just wait on the movie. Um, but after seeing myself on the schedule for the Niche Pursuits podcast this week, I was like, all right, I’ll just dive into this novel.
Let’s, let’s take a crack at it. Right. Um, I want to point out a few different things. Like, obviously this, I think that Barry did a really great job. You can tell, like you said, that his rapport with Danny is really evident in this and Danny feels comfortable with him, which is great because we’ve really not seen a lot of, uh, really insightful interviews with Danny, really personal one on one interviews with Danny, you know, in the SEO industry quite like this.
So thank you to Barry for doing that. Um, I will tell you all don’t expect though, anything that at least. I personally considered coming at this with my blogger goggles on and someone who was hit by the HCU that’s going to be anything revolution, like, well, any, well, any big revelations, I’ll say that much, right?
A lot of this is kind of the same stuff that we’ve been hearing for a while. Um, I did count this up. Jared, you might find this kind of interesting, but Danny. It’s in some form said he wished Google was better at something in this article. 11 times. I counted that up 11 times. He said, I wish Google was better at, I wish Google was better at Google needs to improve doing this 11 different mentions of that, but there are some hidden gems in here.
Um, including a message, right? I didn’t even mean to do that. Including a message, um, from Danny to the people who are hurting. Cause Barry asked very specifically about that. Like basically what would you say, you know, to some of these people who are hurting and who are holding on, you have been holding on for a long time.
You know, and I don’t know if I should read this entire quote, but, um, you know, he, he basically said that I absolutely, I don’t want to take anything away from the lived experience of these other kinds of sites that are clearly producing good content. I know their hearts in the right place. I know raking systems are not doing a good enough job for them that they probably should do.
So I mean, he’s acknowledging it, but again, like always, you know, as someone who’s personally hit by this, is it, does it make a difference? Does it move a needle for me? Not necessarily.
Jared: Yeah, yeah, the sentiment I think has always been there with Danny at times his delivery can, you know, rub people the wrong way, but Spencer and I have long talked on this podcast about how difficult of a position he’s in.
I think perhaps this article more than any other thing I’ve read from him since the helpful content update hit, uh, kind of conveyed that sentimentality and the fact that, you know, he feels like someone who does. Care as much as he can about people who have put their heart and soul into their site, have focused on producing good content.
And I use the air quotes again because I have some some quotes about that and then haven’t seen not only reward, but recovery. Um, uh, I think. You know, like, let me just touch on a couple other things, and we’ll get into a couple of the things that I think are a little bit more difficult to talk through, but on the topic of AI and scaled content abuse, Danny said that the community seemed to take the first half of our statement on this when they released this back in May, um, and ignored the second half.
The first half of the statement was that we’re not really focused on how the content is created, whether or not the content is helpful, and that got turned into a bunch of people as, you know, If Google doesn’t care if content is AI, which is the wrong message, quote, the message is the message that should have been take from that is Is it helpful?
It is less about if it is a generator or not. It’s just the question of are you producing a lot of content at scale to rank well in search? I think that dovetails interestingly into one of our other topics we’re going to talk about today. With AI content at scale, um, this was where things got squirrelly again.
And I feel like to your point, Morgan, you said like, if you put your blogging glasses on and read this article, like, I’m not sure you’re getting anything new. You are, but I’m not sure. And let me read this quote. Cause I think this might actually dovetail into what you were talking about. Uh, Danny said, as I said, several times on social elsewhere, if you know, you’re producing great content for your readers, that’s your touchstone, your North star, whatever you want to call it.
If you’re feeling confused about what to do in terms of rankings, Our systems want to reward this type of content. If you know, you’re producing it, just keep doing that. And it’s up to us to keep working on our systems to better reward it. That’s like, that’s not giving anybody any hope.
Morgan: Yeah. It feels like a customer service.
We’re working on it. We’re working on it. Please hold, please hold. I feel you might as well have some of that annoying elevator music while we wait 11 months to see something happen to our websites, you know, and again, you know, even though we have seen some recoveries and I don’t want to go too far down in this rabbit hole until our next segment.
We’ll Um, a lot of the recovers we’ve seen so far are still very slight, right? And so having that paired with this interview where a lot of it’s kind of like, Hey, we need to do better. We need to do better. We’re thinking about it. We’re focusing on it. It just doesn’t seem to be, it just seems to be, I don’t know how to politely word this.
But I take this with such a grain of salt now. I feel like I’ve, I’ve heard this over and over again at this point and it just has less and less meaning every time. I do want to bring up one kind of interesting thing though. Um, actually I would say personally, I found this to be the most interesting thing in this interview.
It is the conversation around the feedback form. Um, because I know, um, A lot of people in March over that feedback form, they were like, I’m tired of talking about it. I feel like Google’s not listening to me. I am not feeling that thing out. Well, I’m not one of those people. I was tired of talking about it.
I do feel like Google’s not listening, but I filled out the content or the feedback form. All right. And, uh, One of the things that I repeatedly pointed out, and even though Danny says he makes very clear that he did not reward or punish any specific site who filled up the feedback form, it was just taken into general consideration.
But one of the things that I made clear over and over again was, especially on my freelance blog, I was being outranked by the same domain in like a dozen positions. And it was happening over and over. And, and I literally just said in my feedback form, Hey, doesn’t this go against Google’s own diversity policies?
When you search for a query, even if somebody is looking for this particular site or this particular form, do they want to see it in the whole first 1. 5 to two full pages of search results? Or do we want to surface? Some other option in there. And notably, Jared, at least on my sites where I saw that happening before, where I saw the same domain outranking me 10, 11, 12 times, it’s now only outranking me like two or three times.
So I actually did see that notable change. And I do feel like, you know, some of what I said was heard again, is it enough to move the needle significantly? No. But have I seen a notable change on the specific feedback I provided? Yes.
Jared: Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of, uh, he talked a lot about that form and the back and the forth he’s had with the engineers about it and how he’s read every, I think he said he was read every single, did I read 1300 submissions?
I think I saw, uh,
Morgan: 12, 12, 000 individual submissions and 13 unique domains. I’m curious. Does that number seem high or low to you? 12, 000 submissions and 1300 domains.
Jared: It’s hard to say. Yeah, I, I agree. Like, uh, I mean, low, but a lot, when you think about reading every one of those individually, I guess that’s the point I was trying to make,
Morgan: but it’s like a lower number than I expected.
Cause I’ve seen so many complaints and I know this hits so many websites, but then if I was Danny, I’d be like, Oh my gosh, that’s a lot.
Jared: So
Morgan: yeah, it’s, it’s, I guess it depends on your perspective.
Jared: Yeah. It does put in a perspective. Like if you’re, if you’re being told the sky is falling and then you say, okay, cool.
Tell me where the sky is and. A minuscule amount of the internet is actually telling you where the sky is falling. I mean, it could also be, I didn’t do the form because I’m like, kind of like what you were saying, skeptical and I don’t want my sites to get, you know, I didn’t sign. So I’m going to have people who are like me, like, but anyways, um, well, Hey, I, I’m filling out the form every single week on the podcast.
How’s that? There you go.
Morgan: Uh, yeah. Hey, Danny, if you’re watching.
Jared: Uh, we’ve invited him on so many times publicly here in the podcast, I’m not sure about that. Um, but actually, uh, I digress. I, we don’t want to spend the whole time on this topic. I thought, and I’m going to leave it to the listeners to go read about his plumbing example.
And I thought that that was interesting, fascinating, sort of confirmed some of the things we’ve been talking about in terms of what you need to do to stand out, experience, personal antidotes, examples, and yet it often played against itself in Danny’s example as well. So it almost circled the wagons, I felt like, on why we’re here.
We’re here because it’s almost conflicting advice. To what was said about the plumbing example about if you’re a plumber, why aren’t you ranking? But then why have what could you do to rank? And so that really kind of underscores the quagmire that I think Google is in as they try to figure out where AI Content plays into everything as they try to figure out where small publishers play their way into all this.
It is a difficult situation I mean, we talked a lot about even just solving parasite SEO algorithmically. So Notably, they got a lot of work to do Danny recognized that as you said 11 times. I’m glad you counted. It gives us a good barometer But it’s not a job or another Yeah Took a few liberties there, but it’s a great read.
We’re trying to summarize the high levels I think if we could summarize There’s not some, um, you know, groundbreaking news that was dropped here, but there’s a lot of context behind a lot of the topics that have been dancing around for the last year, and it’s well worth the read.
Morgan: Yep, and there was one other item on ads, but I’m actually going to hold that for our next segment because it plays into that so very well, because I think there’s another myth here that we need to, well, not quite bust, but clarify perhaps in our HCU findings as it relates to that.
Jared: So do I get to go on to the next one, or do you want to drop it now? All right.
Morgan: Oh, let’s go ahead.
Jared: Perfect. The transition was always there. We’re kind of sliding into talking about the helpful content update. Sites, right? And the sites that got hit by August, uh, sorry, September, 2023, subsequently, in many cases, the core update of March, 2024, and then how sites did, we finally saw movement in the core update of August, 2024.
Most of you know that by now. Here is a study by Moz that is titled, The Helpful Content Update Was Not What You Think. And, um, you know, we, we, we have to acknowledge that it’s a, uh, it’s, it’s a study by Moz and it features some of their tools. So we’ll put that out there. But with that out of the way, They are saying from studies that instead of it being about helpful content per se, that Google might be penalizing sites with a disproportionate ratio of backlinks to brand and navigational searches.
So the study was done by Tom Capper and his analysis of winners and losers from the helpful content update shows that sites with a strong brand authority, what they call BA, relative to domain authority. DA perform better. So in other words, the stronger your kind of brand signals, brand traffic, et cetera, compared to your overall domain authority, your overall backlink, um, uh, profile, the better your site did and an overemphasis on backlinks, but less navigational interest was demoted.
Um, and so this is really interesting. It really does dovetail into a lot of the things we’ve talked about up until this point, we’ve all talked about building a brand as an HCU, um, um, you know, kind of anti HCU sort of thing as a way to kind of survive the HCU, but it’s, um, it’s interesting to see a study that’s kind of sort of, uh, I guess, prove that.
Morgan: Yeah. I think it’s really interesting too. And perhaps not the best of use for all of those link sellers. Right. I mean, your PR campaigns are really important. Uh, links are really important. We know that that’s a fact. Um, but if you’re just spending all of your time getting links and you not enough time promoting your brand, uh, it looks like that might not be working in your favor, uh, it looks like you kind of need to simultaneously do both.
And I get to say, I’m. You know, if this is what they’re doing, I wish that they were a little bit more open about it because I don’t think that’s something that can necessarily easily be gained. Right. In fact, that’s one of the only things you really can’t quite easily gain with an algorithm is, is promoting your own brand.
So I would like to see them come forward and say, Hey, yes, your own brand is really, really important. Um, but yeah, I, so I’m, I’m honestly not like, I don’t know, I’m kind of a fan, had there been more transparency around that, if this actually does prove to be true and looking at this moth study, I mean, it does look like, and again, HCU, we all know multifactorial, and I will get into some of the other possible factors here in the next little bit, but I think this could be one of them for sure, just looking at this study.
Jared: Yeah, we’ve talked about, Hey, how do we talk brand? Like how does Google look at brand? You know, we’ve looked at like branded search queries. So how well do you rank for your branded search term? How much estimated traffic is that bringing in, bringing in, you know, you can start to look at that, but that’s only part of the picture.
It’s only a small part of the picture. Frankly, you know, you’ve got your social traffic, you got your social signals. You’ve got traffic from direct sources. You’ve got email. Um, you know, you, you’ve got all these components that go into it. Uh, you can see on the screen, and if you’re not watching the screen, um, losers, uh, in the HCU had an average DA to BA ratio of 2.
0. So I guess we could say that that would be almost two links for every, um, brand authority You know, uh, metric marker, uh, trying to keep this without going too deep into the weeds here. So two, and so obviously a lower number would signify less, uh, less, uh, or more branded, basically more brand authority.
And so the, the neutral sites, the ones that were unimpacted, and then the ones that won in the helpful content update, both had pretty much the same ratio and it was 1. 39 and 1. 4. So substantially less, you know, in terms of data analysis, like that’s a significantly lower. Number of, um, of, of, of, uh, of direct, sorry, domain authority to brand authority.
So I, again, if you were hit by the helpful content update, probably a essential mandatory read here. Um, I think you had some interesting things to talk about. I don’t want to steal your thunder here, but you, you definitely were, We were talking about last week, house fresh and their recovery, uh, almost full recovery as of last week.
And I think you had some interesting things to say that I’ve, I’ve heard other people talk about. So I want to make, make sure you had time to kind of share that and talk about how it relates to this year.
Morgan: Well, okay. So just putting a bit of a tinfoil hat on here, but you know, everyone on Twitter. SEO Twitter, at least seems to be all up in house fresh’s business saying, Hey, look, you know, they were making, they were public.
So that’s why they got a recovery, right? Or they, they complain as well. They got a recovery, but let’s just pose the question, knowing what we now know about brands, what if house fresh by being very vocal made a brand name for themselves. So with that theory, I SEMrush and actually took a look at their brand search and guess what, Jared?
In May is when they originally published that article about, or we’re originally started talking about what happened with Google in May, the brand terms for house fresh skyrocketed. So now do I think, do I think that there’s some kind of like crazy theory about how Google manually did something for them?
No. I personally do not believe that, but could that actually be related in some way for their brand? If this ma studies, correct? Yes. Actually getting yourself out there does promote your brand turns out. So it technically could have helped them just not in the way people think. That’s my thing. I mean,
Jared: tinfoil.
Yes. But data data wise, like there’s at least an argument for it. Um, you know, you’ve been vocal, you’ve been very vocal online about the effects of the update. You also haven’t though, been. Attaching your domain to your, your vocalness, right? And you, you didn’t recover. So these are obviously a very small sample size, but
Morgan: actually interesting.
Um, so I have a couple of different sites. One’s a travel site. That’s the one I don’t put my domain out there for. But of course, my name, Morgan overhaul was the brand. My freelance site was associated with, and actually that one did start to recover. I mean, not a massive recovery, just a smaller one. I’m back up to March levels and guess what, Jared?
My brand name, Morgan Overholt, also started going up this year as I was getting myself out there. So, um, you know, yeah, you’ve heard it here, folks, uh, complaining, a ranking factor,
Jared: not a direct ranking factor, an indirect ranking factor. So you just got to make sure you get publicity out of it. That’s the key.
Um, no, I think, uh, you know, funny analogies aside, the, It’s always interesting when you read a study that deduces something like this, and it makes sense. And I guess I would say that. This kind of makes sense. Um, you said the HCU was multiple factors, many, many factors, but at least at first glance, this makes a lot of sense.
And it substantiates a lot of the pretty nuanced ideas and theories that have been serviced over the last 11 to 12 months now. Um, and so, um, yeah.
Morgan: I also want to quickly bring up the Lily Ray podcast, um, because I know Lily was doing, um, all she could to get the word out, have people listen to this podcast.
She even, and I thank you for this, Lily, if you’re listening. She’s the best. Even slid into my DMs and was like, Hey, I wanted to make sure that you, you saw this podcast and listen to it when I was out of town, which I so appreciated. And I wanted to put this on everybody’s radar because she too, um, a bit like the moth study, uh, released some of her findings about why she thinks sites were hit by the HCU.
Um, I did pull just a couple of quick quotes, but I will say as a highlight, some of the things she listed were aggressive ads, um, a lot of affiliate links, and basically content that. Was otherwise not monetized with, with anything else. Um, the podcast name is the Publishers Playbook Podcast and the title of the episode is Google’s Unhelpful Content Update.
Um, but just a quick quote from Lily, cause I know I want to make sure I don’t paraphrase her too much. I want to speak as directly as I can because I respect her so much. Uh, she says the types of websites that were disproportionately affected by the HCU usually niche blogs and a lot of them were monetized with popular monetization methods where there’s a lot of ads all over the site, in some cases, very aggressive ads, and a lot of them have a lot of affiliate links the nature of a site like this.
Is that it turns out a lot of content, content that is extremely optimized for search search is probably where they’re getting 50, maybe 80, let’s say 80 percent 80 percent plus of their traffic. And let’s say 80 percent of the pages on this site have aggressive monetization and very little else. Like there isn’t any commerce store, there isn’t a section of content content that’s not monetized, et cetera.
Now I butchered that quote a little bit excited to put certain things into brackets, you know, cause audio doesn’t always translate into a beautiful quote. But that is what was, um, basically said. And I just thought those were really interesting insights, especially as teased earlier in the Danny Sullivan interview, he also mentions ads because this is something I’m constantly seeing people go back and forth on, right?
Like your ad providers will tell you. Ads aren’t a factor at all. Go ahead and load your site up. More ads, the better. And then you’ll hear so many other people say, Oh no, Google doesn’t like ads. But the truth is really somewhere in between, right? In the interview with Barry, Danny actually says the Google paid.
Well, let me back up a little bit. Barry says, and then Danny offers a quote, the Google page experience guy doesn’t say you can’t have ads. Many sites that rank well do have ads, Sullivan said, according to the article. There are plenty of sites out there that have ads that people don’t like because then they can encounter them in search.
And then they complain, why does the site have so many ads? That being said, Sullivan said that there is more Google can do here to make it clearer. I would love to see us get into a better state where we can point people to page experience stuff to understand what’s going on because it’s so important.
So when we’re talking about ads, are they directly a ranking factor? Again, it’s kind of like is complaining a ranking factor, right? Not directly, but indirectly they can be infecting your page experience, which then can become a ranking factor. So just kind of keep those things in mind, guys. And, and again, I’m really thankful to Moz and to Lily and all the people who are out there Putting out these kinds of studies and putting out their findings for free, by the way, um, that is the kind of stuff that honestly, as a blogger, especially a blogger has been hit by all of this.
And my life has been rocked by it that he genuinely appreciate from the bottom of my heart.
Jared: Yeah. You know, it reminds me of something I said this week in my, in my email newsletter that we’re starting to better and better understand what it is to make helpful content. And it’s really content that people find helpful, you know, and we, Have to look at other things than maybe we’re used to, like page experience, time on site, um, and all these other types of metrics to kind of feed into what helpful content update is.
The challenge is understanding how an algorithm picks up on that and then feeds that back and how we learn to continue to do it because a feedback loop isn’t quite the same as it used to be. That’s always so hard, right? It’s like the feedback loop we’re used to has changed so much. Um, that’s great. I mean, uh, it’s a well put, that’s a well put, uh, set of quotes and it ties everything back together.
so much. You’re getting really good at this podcast hosting stuff transitions us perfectly into our final topic. Uh, we’re always looking for good transitions here as podcast hosts and you’re really getting it. Segway. Segway, 100 percent A We’re talking about Mediavine. Speaking of ads. Now Mediavine made waves, uh, I believe it was late last week.
When they banned one of their websites, one of the sites that’s on Mediavine, and they banned it for AI, overuse of AI, I believe is the term. That first started getting shared on Twitter. Search Engine Journal ended up doing an article on it. That’s what I have here. And, um, basically what we have is that Mediavine bans publisher, uh, at the time this story came out, single publisher, but I have more to share about that.
Bans a publisher for overuse of AI generated content. Um, uh, basically, They have something in their terms and conditions, uh, where they have a commitment to maintaining quality standards, um, and basically this user was terminated by the publisher for excessive use of low quality, mass produced AI content, which violated Mediavine’s policy against using AI.
To replace legitimate content creators. Um, this is interesting, a number of points because, uh, as the article says, it kind of signals, I think this is a little bit of an overdramatic statement for the record, but I’ll just read it. It signals an emerging industry crackdown on deceptive AI tactics. Now, a big deal was made about this because a lot of publishers use ai.
A lot of publishers in Mediavine use ai. And so this, this idea of where. Where is too far? Where is unhelpful? Where is mass produced? It goes back to the comment that was surfaced in the interview with Danny Sullivan and the overscaling of content. So I think this kind of touched on a lot of different things.
I am in the Mediavine Facebook group because I have a couple of sites on Mediavine. Um, and, uh, um, you know, their chief revenue officer did share something about it. And it basically was on the lines of that. We’re in, she said this, we’re in favor of publishers using AI responsibly. As a tool to enhance their own work, but not as a replacement for creators.
So they’re really kind of drawing this land line in the sand. Now, if you also were to read on in that, it would sit, they’ve actually banned more than one. So it, um, they say that multiple ones. So the one. That got shared and got passed around on Reddit and Twitter. I think that’s interesting because context is important.
Um, and then I’ll pause, but the context there is it’s someone who has gone out and publicly shared how they are basically, and I am paraphrasing, but spam in the internet with mass produced AI content. So to some degree, this site that we know about that got banned certainly was being very public about what they were doing, which does go against something Mediavine’s been very public about.
So. What do you think about all this? What do you think about the potential for your site to get kicked out of Mediavine one day because you’re using AI content?
Morgan: I mean, this was a rollercoaster of emotions, right? First I read it and I was like, Oh my gosh, one more thing to have to worry about. Um, first of all, we barely use any AI content, um, but still we use it to like fix grammar, come up with a different headline ideas.
And I know how inaccurate a lot of these AI, uh, content detecting, uh, You know, machines and different things can be. So at first I was a little bit scared, but then I started to kind of learn a little bit more about it. And first, let me just say, I really love the fact that, like, I really love that Mediavine came out and basically said in response to this, without publishers, there is no open web, there is no content to train the models that power AI, and therefore there is no internet.
Um, and the more I dug into this, like there’s a tweet here by Mike, I don’t know how to say his last name. Futia? Futia? I’m glad you said it. Mike. I apologize, butchered that entirely. I’m sure, but he
Jared: heard you. He heard you mispronounce it. Just so you know, I
Morgan: know. So sorry, Mike and people mispronounce my name all the time as well.
I know, but, um, he, there is some speculation that this particular user, the one that least people are talking about is that same guy that was featured in the confessions of an AI clickbait king pin, um, several months ago. And it looks like there’s There’s also some speculation about the same on Reddit, the helpful content producer of the internet.
So, um, if Reddit says it, it’s gotta be true, right? Of
Jared: course. There you got, you got your ref, you got your Reddit reference in this podcast. Good for you.
Morgan: I couldn’t miss it. I couldn’t miss it,
but no, I mean, if that’s, if that’s true, let me just say though, if that’s, if that is true, I really, I am happy to see this, right? I went from being really scared to feeling kind of comforted because this is the kind of stuff that we don’t want. To, um, promote that we don’t want to encourage. This is the kind of stuff that steals directly from bloggers and content producers.
So, um, I went from being like a little scared, um, to, oh, wait a minute. Mediavine really has our backs. This is actually a great move, I think, for genuine content producers like myself and others.
Jared: I talked to a number of publishers about this. Um, just in passing or the last week or two since this came out.
And, um, I think if, if I were to read the temperature of, of publishers, it would be very similar to what you’re saying. I think the nobody really is in favor of mass AI publishing overtaking their content, you know, like that’s not something that people want for the world and publishers are publishers because they publish and they kind of are creators.
Um, and I think what this touched on and maybe touched on for you, but touched on for a lot of people is. Well, I sure hope that’s the line. I hope that this open ended policy that doesn’t have a lot of parameters around it doesn’t slip into something that all of a sudden now it can become politics, it can become a game, it can become maybe manipulated, and I’m certainly not suggesting that it will be that.
I think that if. If, if these sorts of situations that you shared where this actually is going, it’s probably a very big win for people who are really out there genuinely publishing good content. And if it can stay that way and that policy can just be focused on banning those types of people. I think overall, like you said, publishers are going to see this as a good move, not not necessarily a scary move.
Morgan: I know where else you can find really quality original content medium. Sorry, I’m just trying to segue thing out, Jared. I’m trying to segue thing out.
Jared: That is good. See, you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re, uh, now you’re getting too good at this. You’re taking my job from me. Spencer’s not going to need me anymore.
Uh, that’s the news. That is a wrap. And, um, man, we had like four or five more topics that I really wanted to talk about that we couldn’t get to today. So it was one of those weeks. Maybe we’ll surface one or two of them next week. We’ll probably talk about that open AI story next week.
Jared: Um, hey, we got to move into side hustles. Um, uh, and, uh, I, so I wanted to close out the news zone on this one thing. Um, uh, this is interesting. I pulled this up while we were talking because it hit me. It’s mid September. And sure enough, this podcast will release on a Friday.
And Saturday. Is the one year anniversary of the helpful content update getting released. So, wow. It’s been a year of. Craziness. And we actually are at the 365 day mark here. And, uh, what a way to close out one year of absolute craziness in the Google world.
Morgan: I don’t even know what to tell my baker to make the cake look like, right?
I mean, I just celebrate the anniversary.
Jared: Yeah, um, but we’ll put that to rest and move on our side hustles. The side hustle game has gotten more fun though, as a result of the HCU. I think a lot of people have been enjoying that. Um, I’ll go first. Uh, let’s see, you, you hit the nail on the head. We’re, we’re talking medium here.
Um, uh, I have a number of things I could, I could talk about. But medium is, is really interesting. Uh, I’ve been doing medium for just about a month now. And it’s had its ups and its downs. You know, I, I think that, you know, A lot of people are, are, have taken my excitement about the platform to mean that I’m killing it and doing amazing.
And I would say that that’s far from it. I love Medium as a platform and a month in, I love it just as much as when I started. I love it because it really is a place where you can go and write and you can share your content. And for me, it’s a place I’m sharing my content that goes out of my newsletter.
And, like, when I send out my weekly newsletter with Weekend Growth, I don’t really ever expect that content to rank, because it’s just me free, you know, I’m just free form writing, and it does well in a newsletter, because people like that, it, it has, you know, personality, and, you know, all the things that make newsletters successful, right, it does well, but if I were to put that in a blog, like, it would never rank for anything, because it’s, it’s got no formatting, and it’s, It’s got no keyword use and I mean, maybe now in Google’s environment, it would rank, but um, but it’s interesting is that the content that does well in the newsletter does well on medium.
And so I think that’s why I love medium is it’s this wonderful place to put content that I’ve already seen done well. I do think there’s a place though for certain types of content that people write for their websites to also go on medium. So here’s what I’ve learned a month in, um, I’ll say from the outset, earnings are still pretty flat.
I’ve earned about 150. at the one month mark. So, um, don’t quit your day job. That’s not going to pay anybody’s bills. But I’ve also learned that it’s a much slower burn to success than like say the Amazon influencer program or something. And a lot of the things I’ve learned is about it’s this kind of, it’s, it’s a faster response loop, but it’s still a lot about getting your name out there, getting your follower ship built up.
Getting stories out there, making sure those stories have high read times or high read, um, you know, percent that people read through them. And then it’s about getting in publications. So I’ve been able to get a couple of stories in publications. And I just today was able to get my story in a brand new publication and probably the biggest publication that I’ve been able to get into.
It’s called the Better Marketing Publication. So that story went live today when the podcast comes out. It’ll be a day or two in the rears. And then the second thing is that until you have a good amount of followers. It sure seems like you need to get articles boosted in order to make good ad revenue.
And my first article that I made money on was boosted. I made over 100 off that article. That’s where the majority of my income has come from. And so I think really this process is about publishing content, getting followers. Getting in, getting that content in different publications. So that you’re introduced to new followers and introduced to a larger group of people to read your articles.
And then some of them, when they fit and they make sense, getting them boosted and earning that ad revenue. And over time you can kind of start seeing the types of stuff that Thomas Smith has done and how he’s earning three, 4, 000 a month. Off medium. And I think he had like a 20, 000 a month at one point.
Um, so that’s my medium update. So it’s, it’s good and bad. It’s, it’s, it’s good in that I feel like every week I’m learning more about the pro uh, about it. I’m getting more followers and I’m getting into publications. It’s bad. Cause I’m, I’m, you know, nowhere near quitting my Dave job on it.
Morgan: You know, confession.
Um, I didn’t really understand what medium was at all until I heard you and Tom talking about it on the podcast. I mean, I know I’ve read medium articles, but I. Didn’t really see it as its own, like, social media ecosystem. I haven’t had a few articles on Medium just because a long time ago, another publication commissioned me to write a few Medium articles.
Um, and I also posted just a couple of things that kind of like lost rankings from my blog on there, um, several months ago, you know, but, But I, I, it was kind of a set it, forget it, don’t understand it. Whatever. I occasionally see some traffic and affiliate sales coming through it. I didn’t even know about the partner program.
So my mind is very much blown. Like I had no idea that was a thing. So I’ve already signed up for like Thomas’s course and I’m, I’m very curious after seeing what you did with it. So I might have to follow in your all’s footsteps and report back. I don’t know. It’s interesting though. It’s really interesting.
Jared: I feel like, I mean, you know, there’s some topics that do better on Pinterest than others, right? Like more visual topics do better on Pinterest. So if you’re like a financial blog, Pinterest, maybe not your jam, you know, maybe I could be proven wrong, but generally speaking, like, that’s not your jam, right?
Um, medium, I feel like has kind of some of those categories as well. And I feel like from now being in medium and like looking at the articles that I get sent every day and just kind of, Trying to satiate myself with it. I feel like freelancing topics would do really well in medium. I feel like there’s a whole ecosystem and a whole community there that is all about that and dying to learn about it from a voice like yours.
Morgan: Yeah. I mean, I did try, um, you know, and I, I didn’t even look at it recently. I did put up one article kind of based on one of my newsletters, kind of like you said to do more or less. And it wasn’t even very long. Um, just to kind of see what would happen and just pulling up my stats. Um, it looks like it’s had.
Handful of reads. Oh, I’ve made 60 cents, but it looks like I have, Oh, wait a minute though. I have, is this correct? It says I have a lot of claps and reads. Claps are good. Claps are like likes. I have like 51 claps on this. Um, so yeah, it’s interesting. I could definitely see as somebody with just like 25 followers, if I spent some time on this, I think the freelance niche, uh, this could be a, a pretty good partnership there with medium.
So yeah, I’m definitely curious about it for sure. I think it’s enough of a spark at least to, uh, to, you know, get me to give me to try it out, see what happens.
Jared: Well, Morgan, I just checked. And you’re not following me on Medium, so, um, Oh, no, I could be sure. I swear I thought I was. I have so few followers that I can actually check the amount of time it takes you to kind of give a one or two sentence blurb.
So, that shows you how many I have. But, you know, yeah, you’re not following along quite yet, so.
Morgan: It says here, look for, for the record, it says here following. I did not just press that button. That is what it says.
Jared: I guess I’ll have to take your word for it. I don’t see it on here, but I guess I’ll have to take your word for it.
What have you got going on for us? What have you got going on inside of the world?
Morgan: All right. Nothing too, too exciting, but I did kind of want to give you guys a little bit of an update about, um, all my rebranding because essentially. All this recovery stuff has not really changed my ultimate trajectory of rebranding my freelance site and, you know, doing it right from the very beginning, right?
Before now, I’ve been all about just being Morgan Overholt, morganoverholt. com, and then being slapped with even a temporary classifier on my actual name name in real life. It was a little scary. So I just think I need to actually have a brand that sits on top of my name, right? And no longer just be known as Morgan Overholt.
So I am going to instead continue doing this whole freelancer files thing. So here’s kind of my progress update. That I’ve shared with y’all. I’ve revived my newsletter. So I just took the old freelance newsletter and rebranded it and I’ve been sending them out regularly now. Like at least once a week, they contain a mixture of news, and they also contain a mixture of like, you know, freelance tips and advice.
What’s really interesting is even though I was not consistent about sending out newsletters before, my nearly 8, 000 subs are opening these suckers with a 30 percent open rate. And I already have one interest in a sponsorship, so that’s amazing to me. Yeah, lots of potential there. Um, I also have that book that I promised you guys I’d have like done by September 1st.
Yeah, it’s September 12th and it’s still improving, so that didn’t quite happen, but I almost hit the deadline and the book will be my first product as soon as that is completely finished. So, Um, and that was literally just me moving a lot of my like old articles over that I may or may not want to bring over to freelancer files.
Things that might have been a combination of advice, but also sort of geared toward SEO. And what’s crazy is when I finished that, I think I had almost 20, 000 words. So it was like, you know, I think, uh, I think they said the first Harry Potter novel was like, 78, 000 or something like that. So it’s like a third of the size of the first Harry Potter book, which is pretty, it’s pretty substantial, I think.
Um, and I’m going to turn that into a bit of a workbook type situation. Um, and of course, what was the last thing? Oh yeah. And then I also wanted to kind of give you guys a bit of an insight to both a win and a loss in this whole Facebook page situation. So I know that Jared talked about. Yeah. He talked about his Facebook page, um, last week on the podcast and how he built up, you know, this Facebook page by based on a dead blog and then eventually gave it away, whatever.
And then his page kind of grew organically and it went crazy. Um, even after he stopped posting to it and running ads on it. Right. And, and I originally went along with that, um, uh, just as my own, my own private competition in my head when he was doing his, I tried to build up a freelancing Facebook page.
And even though I was. Able to build a pretty substantially substantial following. I have noticed that that content is not really engaging on Facebook. It’s not really like taking off. It kind of does require me like, you know, spending ads on it and really working. It’s not a natural fit for the Facebook platform, but where my socials have taken off again, kind of going back to that medium thing are places like Twitter or places like LinkedIn, places that are more fit or more meant for content that is business related.
And I think it’s really important too, because as a side note experiment, when Jared kicked off, or I’m sorry, not Jared and Spencer, I’m so sorry. I’m like looking at you talking about Spencer, but when Spencer kicked off his competition again, uh, or his cohort, cohort, uh, group stuff in the niche pursuits premium group last week and challenged people again to do the same.
I was like, you know, I wonder what would happen if I just literally pitch for funsies, like. A topic that was built for Facebook this time, since I know what it’s like to build a hard page on Facebook, what if I just pick a content or a topic that I know is built for Facebook? And so I did, I launched that page three days ago.
I’m not ready to share the topic quite yet, but three days ago I spent 30 on ads and I have over 1000 followers.
Jared: Whoa,
Morgan: 30 worth of ads. This
Jared: is so much easier. This
Morgan: is so much easier. And I’m getting all sorts of organic engagement and stuff. I’m not even boosting wild. So I will say y’all as you’re, if you’re in my position, um, whether you’re like rebranding your site or you’re starting a new business or whatever, and you’re talking about building up your socials, you know, maybe consider, instead of trying to just do all of it.
All the socials are just the Facebook. Cause you heard somebody say they’re making a killing on Facebook here or whatever, you know, I’ve got certain businesses that are killing on Facebook and I got certain businesses that are dying on Facebook. I’ve got certain businesses that are killing on Twitter and certain businesses where no one cares about what I’m doing on Twitter, I would say, start to consider the ecosystem and how to play those individual, individual ecosystems to your strengths.
It’s just kind of the advice that I would give as somebody who’s a, who’s, who’s out there trying it all in a variety of niches right now.
Jared: Yeah, we don’t help on this podcast with, with the shiny object. When we, we call this the side hustle section, but the original name of it was the shiny object shenanigans.
Right. And we don’t really help with that because every week we kind of feature someone who’s just killing it on some platform, right? Like this person is doing whatever on Facebook and on medium, you know, and on dad, dad, dad. And so it just gets the eyes, these ideas. But to your point, there’s so much of what you, your lane and what you’re good at.
And it works really well on probably certain platforms versus other platforms. And you can really get down on yourself if you listen to Brian Nagel come on and talk about Facebook and you’re like, What the heck? Andy Skraga did it. Why can’t I do it? And to some degree, there is an element of like, what fits with the niche.
Morgan: I can already tell this like Facebook centered niche is going to be just 12 times easier than the freelance niche ever was. And probably cost just a fraction of the price. So yeah, I definitely think it’s a, it’s just something worth considering. And it’s been a really interesting, expensive, um, and interesting lesson for me too.
Jared: This is your, uh, birdwatching niche.
Morgan: Not quite. Maybe I don’t know. Is that hot on Facebook? I can make one.
Jared: I don’t know. I’m trying to think of things. Uh, every time I think of a hot niche on Facebook, I immediately try to think of like what my mom or grandma, you know, might like, uh, obviously there’s way more people than that demographic on Facebook, but it always, that’s what they’re always pinning as such a great place to be for those kinds of topics.
Yep.
Morgan: Oh yeah. They’re super engaging. It’s crazy.
Jared: Just so everyone knows, I have no clue what your niche is. I was just kidding. Everyone’s going to rush to search, herd watching, herd watching niches on Facebook and see what page might be more.
Morgan: Well, well, I will say though, I mean, you know, I’m pretty open thesmokies.
com and that’s kind of where I got the idea as my main baby, right? It’s about the Smoky Mountains and our Facebook page is massive and it’s saved our butts, um, through the HCU. We, we wouldn’t be in business today if it wasn’t for our social media. And like you said, to your point, that is primarily a demographic.
That’s probably, you know, 50 plus, uh, predominantly female and they’re highly engaging. It’s, it’s probably why it’s working on Facebook. So yeah,
Jared: Your
Morgan: audience, people
Jared: to your point. Hey, let’s move in to our weird niches. I was joking before we started hitting record, we were laughing about last week’s weird niche.
You maybe one minute you, uh, you enjoyed last week’s weird niche that I made Spencer uncomfortable with. And I, frankly, I was a little uncomfortable with if I’m being perfectly honest,
Morgan: my jaw hit the floor. I was listening to that podcast and I’m like, No, he did not bring this up on Spencer’s week because I don’t usually watch the, uh, the visual podcast.
I always listen. And I thought about tuning in just to like, see how many different shades of red you’d made Spencer turn by bringing that website up. And I of course was immediately on my phone, like, okay, I’m looking this up, getting my scores and then getting the scores from my girlfriends, you know, cause I have so many friends who are like, I need a man who Who makes six figures and is six foot four.
And you know, it’s just, I don’t know. I, I cracked me up. I was, I was giggling to myself. So thank you for that one. You are so good at finding these crazy
Jared: sites. Jared is crazy. If you missed last week, my weird niche was basically a female delusional calculator. Uh, and, uh, and yeah, while we joke that I made Spencer uncomfortable, I’ll have to admit I spent about a day or two.
How do I talk about this? Cause I really want to, but I don’t really know how to kind of found my way about it. Um, this week I’m not talking about something like that, but. It’s still an awkward topic, if I’m being perfectly honest, but for a whole different reason. Um, today’s weird niche, uh, and I’ll go ahead and pull it up here, and I’ll get the, uh, the, the URL name correctly.
Today’s weird niche is the nuke map. Um, nuclearsecrecy. com. And what I have up is, uh, the sub, uh, the, the, the URL, nuclearsecrecy. com slash nuke map. And, um, Yeah, it’s kind of what it says. Uh, I was sent this by Dan. Uh, he sent it to me a couple, I don’t know, maybe a month or two back. And I’m like, yeah, I don’t really want to talk about that one.
And then he reminded me about it. And I started playing around with it. And I’m like, actually, it’s a pretty cool website. If you take away all the, just, awkwardness to talk about it. So, Morgan, we’re going to do a little demonstration here. We got a map up. It looks like it, uh, kind of centered my IP address around Los Angeles.
I’m actually south of LA. But maybe that’s the biggest, uh, Metropolitan region. So, you got this map here, and you can enter in the name of your city, or you can select a preset, or you can drag the marker around, and then you can pick what kind of nuclear, um, uh, basically what kind of nuclear weapon you want.
Um, I’ll go with, uh, one of the original ones here, the, the one they nicknamed Fat Man. And, uh, you can kind of get into, uh, you know, making it a little bit more interesting, or you can just detonate it, and you can see the effects of it. And immediately on the screen, you get this interactive map that shows you the fireball radius, the heavy blast damage radius, the radiation radius, moderate blast damage, thermal radiation radius, and it goes on and on, the light blast damage radius.
So it feels kind of, you know, my first thought is, ah, this is, you know, kind of whatever. Who uses this? Well, according to this website, this was created in, I think, 2011. Copyrighted 2012. And, uh, there have been 348. 2 million detonations done on this website. So, um, Uh, I got a couple of things to talk about.
Really quickly, I will share that um, Uh, if you go over and look at it in Ahrefs. It’s a DR71! So, yeah, this is a popular site. The broader niche is this idea of nuclear secrecy. It doesn’t rank for many keywords. It only ranks for 4, 100 keywords. Getting 6, 400 organic traffic per month. If you look at the keywords it ranks for, you know, it’s all these blog posts.
I mean, the first one is dating back to 2013. You can just tell by the URL string. Um, you know, and a lot of it is, um, kind of the Manhattan Project, the nuclear secrecy, um, fallout maps, uh, Oppenheimer, right? That movie that came out about the, kind of the founder of the nuclear bomb and stuff. So, it definitely ranks really well for these somewhat, kind of, niche down.
Topics, um, couple other things, but before I go on, you want to share about, I
Morgan: feel like my, I feel like my face right now is, is probably like Spencer’s face last week. I’m not sure, but I, I, I’m both shocked. Um, I was slightly horrified and, but now I’m feeling a little bit better. Because I’m seeing that at least some of the traffic is coming in, you know, um, from like the blog post, like the Oppenheimer stuff and I’m sure probably the Oak Ridge project, you know, like where I’m from.
That was a really big deal. My husband even worked out there at the university in Oak Ridge for a while, where they built the atomic bomb. And so, uh, yeah, I can definitely see it from that standpoint. I’m glad that all their traffic isn’t just purely coming from, um, Things like, um, nuclear, how to de detonate nuclear bomb.
I don’t know. Jared, I’m nervous to even speak about this topic. I feel like we’re trying to tap into that. Hey, let’s see if we can get the FBI to listen to our podcast, uh, you know, demographic right now. .
Jared: Well, you noticed I haven’t used, I haven’t used a certain word if we’re being clear. I, uh, have avoided that on purpose, you know?
Morgan: Okay. I think I just did it. I
Jared: Yeah, you ruined it. So now we’re on the radar. Um, yeah, just what Spencer needs. Um. Here’s Oak Ridge, by the way. I pulled it up, Oak Ridge, Tennessee. So it looks like it would be, you know, pretty much obliterated. Um, uh, so again, I alluded to it, like, this map was kind of the engaging part of it.
And I think there’s something to be said for it, by the way. Tying it all the way back to our original conversation about Danny Sullivan’s interview and the helpful content update, Um, I think it’s interesting because, um, uh, the, we’re talking about engagement, right? And this is basically a blog, uh, it’s a blog about these pretty niche down topics.
But at the end of the day it, um, it, it was, It has this interactive map that clearly is being used 350 million times since it was created. That’s created all this engagement around this website, right? And you look at it, it’s a DR71, it’s picked up a ton of traffic, it’s survived and done well in all these updates.
Like, how much of that, like this person created a really interactive map that has Components about it. And as you know, as, as difficult as it is to kind of talk about sometimes, like it’s right on point with what this website is about. And I wonder if that’s part of the reason why this website and the blog content has been so successful.
Morgan: Is it monetized? I didn’t see. I’m afraid to click the link on myself. Just in case I’ll let you keep clicking on the links.
Jared: I’m all in at this point. Um, yeah, you know, Dan, when he messaged me about this site, thank you, Dan. He pointed out, he’s like, Hey, it looks like the big play here is this guy’s book. Um, and so he has in the sidebar, which I, I’d recommend Dan, get it out of the sidebar and into your content.
Cause that sidebar is at the bottom of all the mobile traffic, but I digress. Um, he wrote a book, it looks like 2021 and that book is being sold on this website. It’s on Amazon. If I go over to Amazon and look at it, it looks like it is, um. He’s got 98 ratings. So, you know, it’s nothing, uh, nothing super popular maybe, but 98 ratings isn’t terrible.
Um, so I think that’s his primary monetization path. I don’t think he’s got ads on here, but it’s funny that, uh, when you click on the book, it goes to a different website. AlexWellerstein. com was the author. Of the book. He’s a historian, a programmer, a professor. So, um, yeah, it seems like this is one of those things where he’s built a small, but loyal following.
It seems like he takes a very kind of tactical approach to a lot of these topics and really, you know, I mean, look at this, these slides are very nuanced and in depth, so it looks like an interesting website, especially if you’re interested in that. And obviously the, uh, the map, the interactive map is certainly the weird kind of off the topic, uh, or off the wall sort of thing to, uh, to, to share there.
Morgan: Yeah, I mean, honestly, I mean, being from East Tennessee, you know, again, um, being, I mean, I grew up 20 minutes outside of that town, like I said, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where they built the atomic bomb. They mentioned it in the opera. I’m in the Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer, I cannot speak movie. So yeah, I definitely know a lot of people who were interested in that topic from a historical standpoint.
So I could, I could, I totally understand the niche following there actually. So, yeah, but not exactly a very light finder there, Jared, I will say, but always entertaining.
Jared: Hey, you know what? Uh, I like to bring the heavy topics from, uh, uh, your unrealistic expectations of finding men in your life to, uh, nuclear, um, stuff.
Morgan: By the way, I did send that link from last week to my husband immediately. I said, I’m going to need you to make one of these for the men. Unrealistic expectations for men. If he makes it, we’re going to have some more
Jared: here on the podcast. There you go.
Morgan: Cause we’re not the only ones with the problem. Let me just say, all right.
So my website
Jared: is good to have a female voice in that topic. Let’s move on to your weird niche. I’ll pull it up.
Morgan: All right. My website is, is quite a bit. It’s a, it’s a palate cleanser. If you will, quite a bit later, we can all have a, have a sigh. All right. Um, but this is actually just a personal favorite of mine.
And I wouldn’t even say it’s very obscure. Especially not in my industry because I’m sure if you’re a graphic designer the youth you have used the heck out of this for Years literally 20 years because this has been around for quite some time In fact the way back machine has it going back all the way to 2001 And guys, it’s the lipsum or it’s the lipsum.
I’m sorry lorem ipsum generator um now a lot of people You may or may not know a lot of graphic designers, of course, know, but this is kind of that standard filler text, right? So like if you’re making a website or you’re making a book or you’re like writing captions or whatever, a lot of times if you need to put some placeholder text in that looks like real text and has a certain flow to it, You know, because if you just type like a, a, a, a, b, b, b, b, b, c, c, c, c, c on your keyboard, it’s not going to have like that realistic flow.
You typically go to lorem ipsum dollar and this website, like I said, been around since 2001, almost unchanged from 2001. I don’t know if you want to click on the way back machine link there that I provided, but that’s, what’s wild about it. I mean, Aside from just a little bit of responsiveness added somewhere along the line, the layout is almost exactly the same.
They’ve added a few ads over the years, but this is wild. This was basically like a set it and forget it for these people. All right. It not only produces tax. and blocks of lorem ipsum dollar, but it will do so in a variety of languages. And on their website, it says they’re always looking to add additional languages, uh, to continue to be able to produce that text.
And also gives a fascinating history of lorem ipsum dollar, which if you’re a dork like me, you’ll really appreciate because this is some really old text guys, like according to the website. It says, contrary to popular belief, Laura Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC making over 2000 years old.
And it has been the industry standard dummy text since the 15 hundreds. It was made so when an an unprinted took a galley of type and scrambled it into a, into a type to make it, to make it turn it into a specimen for a book, and it’s been used. Ever since, even today, platforms like Adobe, they have systems that you can automatically input lorem ipsum dollar, but graphic designers like me who are starting to show their age, might I say, we tend to still go to lipsum.
com. And again, I have been literally been using this website for 20 years, which is probably why it has a DA of 63, a 70, 000 keywords, 2 million backlinks and 1. 9 million, um, in monthly traffic. And I also just want to give us a little quote out because for some reason, I just, I’ve always found it beautiful, but if you’ve ever wondered what lorem ipsum dollar actually means, there is a section that roughly translates to there is no one who loves pain itself.
Who seeks after it and wants to have it simply because it is pain. Isn’t that beautiful?
Jared: Well, you really did bring the palate cleanser to the, uh, to the end of the podcast here. How does it rank for 27, 000 keywords?
Morgan: Well, 70, 000 keywords according to Simrush. But obviously most of them are things like lorem ipsum, dollar generator, or trying to find out the history of it or what have you.
So a lot of the keywords are really similar, but I too was surprised by that metric.
Jared: Yeah, boy.
Morgan: But more surprising, like I said, was the fact this site has not changed. I mean, they literally built this site back in 2001 and it basically looks almost exactly the same today. I mean, how many websites can you think of that have been unchanged for 20 years and are still rocking?
In fact, doing better than it ever has been. It’s like at the top of its charts right now.
Jared: You’re being generous when you say they’ve added a few ads. I would say they’ve added quite a bit more than a few ads, but good for them. High time they, they monetize and profit off that traffic they’re getting. Um, you know, it’s fascinating cause you didn’t even touch on it.
I think lorem ipsum immediately for an SEO, which I know you’re not by trade triggers. The famous Lauren Ipsum that is ranking, I believe it was Kyle Roof who kind of first kicked that off and has become kind of a bit of a cult classic. So I think it has so many meanings, uh, not only in your community of graphic designers, freelance writers, this sort of thing, but also to the SEO community.
Morgan: Yeah. Yeah. There’s something that’s kind of, uh, nostalgic about it, you know, and every once in a while I’m, I met with a client who’s never seen it before and they’re always like, Oh, what is this weird? Latin filler or whatever this word text is in my document. I’m like, Oh, let me tell you about lorem ipsum dollar.
And I, there was a time in my life, Jared, I was so geeky. I could even write out the entire first sentence of lorem ipsum without looking, but now I’m down to the first like five words.
Jared: I used to be able to do the first 30 numbers of, of pi. So
Morgan: it’s okay. See, yeah. Different breezy geek, but I appreciate that.
I appreciate that.
Jared: It’s all good. It’s all good. I got retribution in the end. My, uh, my, one of my, one of my children was born on pi day. So, you know, it, it all worked out for, for me memorizing all that.
Morgan: I just swing that one. It was pretty good.
Jared: I don’t know the math, the math gods were looking down on me with fate, I suppose.
Um, yeah, you know, that’s a good find actually, because I think to your point, Name another website on the internet that looks virtually identical as it did 20 years ago and still ranks and gets as that much as much traffic as it does today. I mean, that is the outlier of all outliers. You’re right. We had it up on the way back machine.
It looks exactly the same aside from the ads and you’re right. It’s still doing really, really well.
Morgan: Despite, you know, having things like chat GPT and Adobe and other ways to insert that filler text, a lot of us are still going back and using lipsome. com like we have forever. So, yeah, it’s kind of cool.
Jared: I saw you could donate on there.
I wonder how many donations they get. I hear like almost like a loyalty in your voice. I usually say like that donation button. I cannot imagine it working very well, but this might be the one website where I would say, you know, they might actually be getting some donations based on the way you, and probably a lot of others talk about it.
Morgan: Maybe, actually, maybe I need to go hit that donate button. Now I’m feeling guilty, Jerry. I don’t think I’ve done that yet.
Jared: Well, it’s a call to action. All of you Lorem Ipsum users, maybe this is where you ought to, uh, uh, you know, channel your efforts. So, well, I think that about brings us to a close here. Uh, another week in the books, quite a good number of topics to digest.
I think, uh, a lot, I hope a lot of you go to the show notes and take advantage of these different articles, because a lot of these were difficult to summarize in depth on a podcast. We tried to do our best to give you the high levels, the things we thought were important. Really interesting. The conversational points, but certainly that interview with Danny Sullivan and a few of the other things we shared are worth maybe reading over the weekend and whatnot.
Thank you everybody for being here. We will see you again next week. Morgan, thank you for being here as well.
Morgan: Thank you so much. Always a pleasure to fill in when needed.
Jared: We’ll see you guys next week. Have a good weekend. Bye bye.
