Niche Twins - $5.4 billion was just set on fire 🔥

TGIF. This is the Niche Nugget. A monthly roundup where we bring you SEO and creator news and insights from across the industry.

What happened? What's it all mean? We've got you covered.

Here’s the crispy nuggets we've cooked up for you in July 👨‍🍳:

Google Pulls Uno Reverse Card on Cookies
Google's Creator Meetings
CrowdStrike Chaos

SPONSOR

For over a year now we've insisted that if you are going to use a link building service, Linkifi is the only way to go.

Their team has been quietly working in the background on my new site Startup Stumbles and they continue to deliver highly relevant backlinks.

Just last week, I was quoted in Forbes (DR 94).

And this is far from a one-off.

Over the past few months, the Linkifi team have consistently delivered high quality, high DR links from the likes of Yahoo Finance, Nasdaq, The Muse, Next Avenue, and more.

Along the way they have taken my site from a Domain Rating of 0 to just recently cracking double digits for the first time:

Good links are HARD to get! Don't cut corners and go with one of the rare teams that still does it the right way.

Right now Niche Twin followers can get $500 off Linkifi's Digital PR Campaigns - just use code "NicheTwins500"!

They provide a great service, but they are busy (rightfully so). So if you’re considering going with them, get on their list now.

–> Get $500 OFF Your Order! <—

Google's Cookie ADdiction

Lowdown

Google got right back to their regularly scheduled rollercoaster programming in July...

"Cookie ADdiction": In the early 1990's, a 23 year old kid named Lou Montulli invented a small text file at Netscape known as a "cookie" as a way to allow websites to remember user information and preferences, without allowing people to be tracked. It didn't take long though for advertisers to see their potential and essentially hack cookies to follow people around the internet. In doing so, "third-party cookies" were born. These hacked cookies allowed digital advertisers to serve up targeted ads to users, sparking nothing short of a digital advertising revolution - a revolution that directly led to Google becoming one of the largest companies in the world. So when Google first announced in a Chromium Blog post back in January 2020 their plan to "phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome", most industry participants were left shocked and frantically searching for workarounds. Well, guess what? After years of delay and anticipation, this week Google said 'just kidding' about all that and abandoned the plan altogether.
Google's Creator Meetings: Earlier this month, Retro Dodo's Brandon Saltalamacchia published a breakdown of his meeting with Google Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan. The face-to-face gave Brandon the opportunity to share his story of how the September 2023 helpful content update cratered his site traffic by over 90%. His business has been in pure survival mode ever since, with 5 years of profit getting wiped out over the past 10 months. Danny later noted that this was the second "creator" type meeting for him this year and that he is currently working on a third.
Core Update Announcement: In mid-July, Google stated that the next Google core update may be released “in the coming weeks.” Notably, the most recent core update took place back in March 2024 and took 45 days to roll out.
Reddit's Bold Move: This week Google became the only mainstream search engine that shows recent results when you search for posts on Reddit using the “site:reddit(dot)com” query. Reddit leadership insists the change is not related the recent $60 million deal with Google, but instead is a result of not being able to reach agreements with other search engines about how Reddit's content is used.

Takeaway

Google's threat to eliminate cookies has sent a ton of players in the industry scrambling to uncover alternatives.

They've all spent time, money, and resources planning for what Google has made them believe was inevitable...only to back out of the plan entirely FOUR YEARS LATER.

How many total, collective human work hours have been wasted thinking about this?

It's impossible to say, but two things we can say for certain are 1.) the productivity loss here is significant and 2.) Google doesn't give a sh*t.

On the creator meetings front, I think it's very cool of Danny to allow creators like Brandon to come in and air their frustrations - the same frustrations many of us share.

But at the end of the day, Google lit Retro Dodo on fire and it continues to burn.

So, unless one of these core update starts to put out the flames, I'm firmly in the camp of believing these meetings are further attempts to change optics, not outcomes.

CrowdStrike Chaos

Lowdown

On July 19th, a faulty software update pushed live by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, resulted in one of the largest global IT outages in history.

Incredibly, the code file that caused the whole thing was so tiny that it was reportedly “big enough to hold only a single web page image”.

But just how significant of an outage was this?

Microsoft currently estimates that 8.5 million devices running Windows crashed, resulting in the "blue screen of death".

What's truly wild to me is that while that represents less than 1 percent of all Windows-based machines, it still resulted in the cancelation of more than 46,000 flights worldwide and is estimated to have cost Fortune 500 companies as much as $5.4 billion in revenues and gross profit.

Takeaway

It has since been reported that the faulty code was rolled back just an hour and a half after its initial release.

And yes, by then millions of computers had already automatically downloaded the update...but remember this still represents less than 1% (!!) of possible devices that could have been effected.

It's hard to wrap my head around a scenario where say even 10% of Window devices were impacted.

The whole world could have literally come to a standstill.

Bottom line - our global IT system is terrifyingly fragile and interconnected.

But not to worry, CrowdStrike is offering its partners who suffered billions in losses a $10 Uber Eats gift card as an apology, so all is well (not a joke)!