Google Loves These Niche Sites...Here's Why

It's back to the basics

Author

Ian H
December 30, 2024

Google’s December 2024 Spam Update caused a lot of movement among niche sites. Mostly downward movement, as usual.

13% of the 11,500 Mediavine and Raptive-monetized sites I tracked had traffic declines of more than 20%.

But, it’s not all doom and gloom.

5% saw traffic increases of more than 20%! 🙃 

In an effort to understand what types of sites/content Google rewards right now, I’m sharing a couple of the biggest winners among the sites I tracked.

Sponsored Ad

Programmatic updates for your old WordPress posts

Freshenup.io is a powerful WordPress plugin designed to supercharge your SEO by keeping your content consistently fresh.

Following the May 2024 Google leaks, which confirmed the critical role of content freshness in ranking factors, ensuring your blog stays up to date has never been more important. Freshenup.io makes this effortless by revitalizing your old blog posts and making them relevant and engaging again.

Easily schedule weekly prompts from your WordPress dashboard to update your content automatically. With flexible options, you can filter updates by categories, authors, or post types and control how much content to add, all while preserving your unique writing style. Focus on your new articles, and let us handle your old ones.

Early buyers enjoy a one-time payment, and with the “bring your own OpenAI API key” approach, you only pay for what you use—around $0.10–$0.20 per article.

  1. VivCrochets - 1,738,400% traffic increase

So…what did this site do?

As far as I can tell, the only thing that changed about the site was that the owner added a page with a few crochet-related calculators.

What’s interesting is that the calculator page isn’t getting traffic. Various crochet patterns suddenly are. Perhaps the calculators improved the quality of the whole site in Google’s eyes, which caused increased rankings?

By the way, Ahrefs shows the calculators were added on the 22nd. But I checked the actual page source code and the page was added on the 16th, two days before the traffic spike.

  1. CastIronSkilletCooking - 2,629% traffic increase

A true HCU recovery!?

After the December Spam update, this site exploded and actually reached pre-HCU traffic numbers. This is an extreme rarity and perhaps the clearest HCU recovery I’ve ever seen.

What changes did they make?

It looks like there were tons of content changes over the past year. Layout improvements, clearer directions in the recipes, etc. Here’s an example from their highest-traffic recipe, comparing the latest version to the version back in July:

More recently, there were some content updates on the homepage, and the addition of a free downloadable eBook.

Simple content changes can make a massive difference. In this case, it was the difference between a dead site and a full HCU recovery.

I also checked the social profiles for this site, expecting to see some huge follower numbers. But to my surprise, Pinterest is their biggest account - with only 1,200 followers.

This goes to show that you don’t necessarily need to grow a large social following, like many of the most successful niche sites post-HCU have done.

So…what does Google reward?

Based on this extremely small-scale study, Google rewards sites that are making extensive improvements.

Whether that’s launching an eBook, adding entirely new features to your site, like calculators, or making many small but helpful changes to your content.

I should mention that plenty of high-quality sites were hit by the Spam Update, and making extensive improvements does not guarantee SEO success. But it’s worth trying!

Thanks for reading,

Ian

What did you think of this email?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

Things you might be interested in: