Will my traffic return?

1. 89

   RyanBudaposted 11 years ago

   I've only been writing only for 4 months, so this is the first Google algorithm change I have experienced. And it hurt, alot. I went from around 150 hits per day to around 14. I also noticed that most of my page ranks are not first page anymore.
   
   How do these Google changes work in the long run? Will any of my previous traffic and google page ranks return?

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   1. 87

      IzzyMposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Quite possibly.
      
      Don't panic, we have been through this before.
      
      Google often makes minor adjustments and one of those could bring your traffic back in as little as a few days to a few weeks.

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   2. 58

      Mark Knowlesposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Highly unlikely - no. Go ahead and panic. The chances of your traffic returning are extremely remote. Just look at the last 18 month so Quantcast traffic details - no recovery at all. This is a video I made showing the traffic losses across my own and all the "success" stories.
      
      http://mark-knowles.hubpages.com/video/ … es-Traffic
      
      Quantcast:
      
      http://www.quantcast.com/hubpages.com

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   3. 82

      snobletposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      I came across site like http://www.seroundtable.com/google-emd- … 15776.html and others who are also having issues with traffic, but hopefully things can get back to how it was... or this is suppose to be how it is?

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2. 87

   IzzyMposted 11 years ago

   
   
   The graph Mark is referring to, from just before Panda till now.

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   1. 58

      Mark Knowlesposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Yup - no recovery there. The subdomains thing worked briefly, and then sliding back on down. When you consider the 100,000s of extra pages produced over that time - a substantial fall.

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      1. 79

         sabrebIadeposted 11 years agoin reply to this

         One...very nice video.
         Two...how long after you posted this video did they get rid of the graphs?
         Three...I LOVE your accent! LOL

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         1. 58

            Mark Knowlesposted 11 years agoin reply to this

            1. Thanks
            2. Not long.
            3. Aww shucks....
            
            Seriously - I would like nothing better than a return to my previous traffic (and income) levels, but nothing HP has done has helped.

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3. 61

   zulumuscleposted 11 years ago

   It will return, just keep promoting your hubs like you would any other webpage you own, increase the amount of backlinks pointing back to your hubs from quality sources. Remove any links that might be harming your pages. Make sure that your hubs are original and quality (more than 500 words) so that others share links to your hubs.

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   1. 74

      WriteAngledposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Ummm, you've been here for 6 months and have 6 hubs.
      
      Mark has been here for 5 years and has 369 hubs.
      
      You promise recovery, Mark says it is highly unlikely.
      
      I wonder whom I should believe???

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      1. 61

         zulumuscleposted 11 years agoin reply to this

         Hehe I am not really a hub pages expert, I was commenting based on my experiences with having many web pages(traffic trends on ezines, other article directories, squidoo pages) and from my experiences with my personal blog after facing google updates which decreased my traffic by more than 50% and then having recovered after that. I was merely trying to help in that regard, I did not look at Marks answer just offering my point of view,

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   2. 0

      summerberrieposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Sounds like good solid advice.

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      1. 87

         IzzyMposted 11 years agoin reply to this

         Summerberrie, I am surprised at an apprentice agreeing with this advice.
         
         HP themselves have frequently reminded hubbers that creating artificial backlinks is NOT what they want hubbers to do.
         
         The power of the platform alone, along with good quality, original content, is supposed to be enough to ensure high rankings.

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         1. 0

            summerberrieposted 11 years agoin reply to this

            Sorry, IzzyM.  Maybe it is the verbiage .  I did not read his advice as promoting artificial backlinks. If that was his intent in his advice then by no means would I promote that behavior as being healthy.  I'm sure many on this site were penalize  for promoting that practice. However, to clarify this is what I read from his post.
            Promote on social sites
            Use (quality) backlinks pointing to your site (these don't have to be bad) could be from a relevant website,blog or social media.
            Remove any harmful links
            Write quality hubs with at least 500 words (to attract organic links)
               
            I may have miss read his post, but really only he can verify.

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            1. 87

               IzzyMposted 11 years agoin reply to this

               The lines "It will return, just keep promoting your hubs like you would any other webpage you own, increase the amount of backlinks pointing back to your hubs from quality sources. " (my bolding) suggests to me the same old, same old.
               Whether they are quality sources or not is immaterial. The suggestion is that you have to find a way to add the links, which is artificial backlinking, no matter what way you look at it.
               I am not convinced that promoting your own articles on social networking sites is the way forward either.
               I am in several Facebook groups and I am already well sick of seeing hubbers do nothing else than promote their own work.
               I used to do it myself, until I realised what effect it had on other people.
               
               The power of the platform alone should be enough, at least when talking of Hubpages.

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               1. 0

                  summerberrieposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                  IzzyM, you are right this is a same old same old argument that has been discussed here before. It is really personal preference how one promotes their hubs. One can not argue that there is a tasteful way to promote quality backlinking. Yes, it can be misused, but it does not make one wrong to suggest  increasing the number of backlinks can be helpful.

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                  1. 61

                     zulumuscleposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                     Summerberrie gets what I was trying to say.
                     
                     The thing is If there are no backlinks to your site, your hub will not go up in search engines (one cannot rely only on hubpages traffic, if search engine traffic is going down, if you are on page 3 you need links to get to page 1) , and also I do not mean to spam people with your HP links, that is not a good social media practice. The point is to share your links plus other links from other people which your followers might like so that they view and share your link to multiply the effect and number of eyes on your HP.
                     
                     I am not promoting black hat tactics here, these are all legit methods to increase exposure to blog. Over use of social bookmarking sites is not what I support. Sharing the same links every day on your FB and twitter is not what I support (that will only cause you to lose followers and have you marked as a spammer).
                     
                     In April i went on a backlinking campaign for a couple of weeks whereby I created too many backlinks in a short space of time, my blog disappeared for two weeks after that and I have since learnt my lesson. My blog traffic has increased in the past couple of days (when other sites go down, others go up, just the way it is), and I have been using the methods above.

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                     1. 85

                        aa liteposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                        Actually the idea that you need to build backlinks to get organic traffic is disputed as a myth by Paul E. who claims that there are some hubs doing well without backlinks.  This is supposed to come from analysing hubs on HubPages.  The fact is that HubPages hubs have the data to be able to make proper conclusions, whether you believe them or not is up to you.
                        
                        I have not had any results with Facebook, a few of my hubs have been shared through FB by some of my readers, I've never seen any traffic from Facebook.  I did get good results from reddit, a few hundred views in a few hours, however that quickly dies out.  Some people do see a lot of good traffic from Pinterest, although that hasn't happened to me yet.
                        
                        My problem with Facebook and most other social media, is that even if you get a lot of your FB friends to click on the link, that surely dies out after a day.  You would have to keep sharing your hub all the time.  Pinterest probably works differently because of the way the pins are displayed and the constant repinning.

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                        1. 0

                           summerberrieposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                           Hubpages stance on building backlinks:
                           
                           http://hubpages.com/learningcenter/a-gu … acklinking
                           
                           I don't see where anything zulumuscle or livewithrichard says that contradicts HPs.

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                        2. 73

                           livewithrichardposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                           This is a view of my backlink profile here on Hubpages.  It shows that in early July I had just around 2000 backlinks pointing to my subdomain... not a lot by any standard.  It also shows that on or around the end of August they started to drop and I lost about 100 backlinks... not nearly enough in the total scheme of things to cause such a drop in traffic:
                           
                           
                           
                           This next image is the backlink profile of Hubpages as a whole.  At around the same time they lost around 500k backlinks, again that is not a lot in the total scheme.  Whatever it was, it happened to all of us and then it looks as if it leveled out around September 24th. 
                           
                           
                           
                           
                           The thick blue line represents backlinks not traffic and there is a similar pattern on both my profile and on Hubpages as a whole.  The faint lines on the graph show new and lost backlinks and they pretty much even out but during those 3 spikes I noticed a considerable drop in traffic at the same time.
                           
                           Maybe these were spammy links to our pages, I don't know, but for whatever reason they are gone and hopefully things will level off and we can regain some traffic.

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                           1. 30

                              Writer Foxposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                              Were these links from unique URLs, or were they mostly from HubPages?

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                              1. 88

                                 lobobrandonposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                                 Seems like the time when HP changed the way they link to related hubs and probably it's just internal link loss.

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                           2. 58

                              Mark Knowlesposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                              I would say these are links from ZZZed hubs. I see a lot of hoping on these threads. Wonder why that is........

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                              1. 73

                                 livewithrichardposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                                 Yes that makes sense, the idle hub feature was introduced around the end of August. 
                                 
                                 The hope probably comes from the same reason why you haven't removed all of your content... Too much time spent creating content that just won't fit in on your personal blogs.  It's really tempting to unpublish everything, don't really have to worry about it getting de-indexed from Google since most of it is gone anyway, then republishing it somewhere else.  Of course that would mean you lose all the backlinks and social mentions on that content as well.

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                                 1. 58

                                    Mark Knowlesposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                                    I have not removed all of my content for a completely different reason actually. But - I am not wasting my time hoping they will recover. Seeing as I have now lost 90% of my income here and have failed to see a positive result with any of the changes - I think my pessimism is warranted.
                                    
                                    Don't get me wrong - I would love to go back to making several thousand dollars a month - I just don't see it happening. Hard to point to the most negative change but NOINDEXING hundreds of my hubs is up there.

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               2. 73

                  livewithrichardposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                  Wrong... the new and most effective way is to find Guest Blogging opportunities.  Most bloggers will allow you 2 links in your byline... one should go to your blog and one should go to a related article (Hub) of yours.  This is not artificial by any stretch of the imagination. 
                  
                  
                  
                  It is highly effective and is the way forward taking into account that Google has created its own platform just for this.  Social networking is time consuming but if done properly you can yield tons of benefits.  I'm not suggesting your friends and family members come check out your hubs, but you have to request of them to share your links... they are your friends and family right?  The whole point of it is to make this whole internet a little bit more connected and the real providers a bit more vested.
                  What I mean by doing it properly is this:
                  
                  Establish yourself on a social network and befriend those with similar interests.  Share content that fosters that interest. Engage with those followers on a more personal level, Share their content as well as your own. Make use of the tools the social network provides or caters to... hashtags, url shorteners, completed profiles with real pictures.  Google wants to connect searchers with authoritative content from identifiable authors, this is why they made it possible to claim authority with your Google+ accounts.  Having a pen name is fine so long as there is a connection to a real person
                  
                  The wrong way to use a social network is to just post links to your own content and never anything else.  There is no engagement and nothing that makes it social whey you only do this.

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                  1. 61

                     zulumuscleposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                     If you read my previous statement you will see that we have some of the same points regarding social media. Also guest posting is not new, and since the updates people have been promoting guest posting a a legit method for growing traffic, increasing exposure and getting backlinks. It is a great method when done right on sites with enough exposure, I have done a couple guest posts as well for some top sites in my niche.
                     
                     
                     There has also been talk about how social shares are now taken into account when it comes to rankings. These are all changes which were the talk of the internet ,6 or more months ago.

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4. 64

   LucidDreamsposted 11 years ago

   Yeah, at first I thought maybe this was related to the Hubpages blackout. Now I can see it goes far deeper and is surley another Google update that is wiping out everyones traffic. My personal websites are also taking a hit. I had hoped when I got up this morning that atleast a slight recovery might be taking place.
   
   This is truly frustrating, it seems that each time I work on getting my traffic back, just as my income get's healthy again, Google kills it! Then I start all over............I'm seriously tired of it. This has been a problem for close to two years now and is starting to feel like a losing battle. I thought last night, if things don't turn around, I may just focus on driving paid traffic for longtail keywords so atleast I can get a handle on my budget and income from online activities. Organic traffic is way too unreliable lately as Google keeps shaking things up.
   
   Unfortunately I had two sites hosted with Blogger and Google deleted both this week calling them "Spam blogs". One was a custom domain that had close to a thousand pretty high quality backlinks and 70 pages and the other just a blospot. Either way, there is no way to control what decisions they make and how it might affect us.
   
   It's really a shame that so many have worked hard to overcome all of the changes, just be be penalized once again.

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   1. 79

      sabrebIadeposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Lucid have you asked Blogger to reconsider?
      I lost a few that way BUT I have also had several re-instated.
      I think it depends on who reviews it.
      One took two months to re-instate but they finally admitted it wasn't Spam and put it back up.

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5. 86

   Rik Ravadoposted 11 years ago

   I've had at least 3 plunges in traffic over the past year and, on this account, the traffic has always come back within a few days.  Currently my traffic has fallen from well over 3000 hits a day to 400 and earnings have fallen around 90%
   
   I'm not too confident of a recovery.  I have a second subdomain whos traffic fell to less than half and has never recovered.  We all have different experiences here and I have coped better than most so far but there does seem to be a long term downward trend.  It is like living in a flood plain and no sooner do you rebuild than another flood hits!

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   1. 73

      livewithrichardposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      I'm pretty much in the same boat as well as most other hubbers that were here before the first Panda.  However, my traffic has been steadily climbing since August 11th... not sure what happened on August 8th but the subdomain switch was starting to work and then suddenly on the 8th in nosedived yet again.  Since then I have become more aggressive in my social networking.. and I have published my first 3 hubs of the entire year... that may has something to do with the increased traffic, not sure.  I'm convinced there is a "freshness" quotient in the new algorithm.
      
      My blogs were never affected by the Panda or any other updates and they have continued to grow and surpass the traffic I was getting here 10 fold.  I've even moved over 80 hubs to those other blogs and they started generating traffic within days of the relocation. 
      
      With the drought in traffic here on Hubpages I have come to the theory that Google is viewing our hubs as if they are blog posts rather than articles that are supposed to stand on their own merit.  The reason they are not fairing as well as my blogs is because unlike my blogs, my hub topics are all over the place... there is no central theme and nothing that gives them authority to move them up in the SERP's other than the social mentions they receive.  You will probably see that those hubbers that stick to a single theme are going to do much better than those that do now.  Those that write about history, or recipes, or How to's or DIY's, are much better off than those that were doing all of that as well as writing product reviews.  Google does not know how to categorize us anymore.  We're not a blog, we're not an article directory... what exactly are we?

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      1. 82

         David 470posted 11 years agoin reply to this

         Interesting point. Maybe Google does view us as just a blog because most hubbers do not focus on a central theme.

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6. 64

   LucidDreamsposted 11 years ago

   Sabreblaade, I have not tried that yet. Tjhought about it but both blogs were deleted within 4 days of eachother and I have a feeling they were caught in the net of this most recent update. Not sure anything can really help. I do have other sites hosted on Blogger also. I always thought it was an easy platform to use so I just bought custom domains and optimized the blogs. I had been told of Google deleting blogs but it had never happened, until now. Just hoping for the best.
   
   Despite of all the algo changes, from now on I will be building my sites on Wordpress.org either way!

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   1. 79

      sabrebIadeposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Well I dont know how it works now since the dashboard change thing but you used to be able to just click a link and fill in a captcha to get them to look at it.
      Don't waste your time at the Blogger forum because I have NEVER had one re-instated going through what Nitecruizer advises.

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7. 64

   LucidDreamsposted 11 years ago

   Thanks for your help...the new dashboard made it easier to optimize your blogs via custom search metatags for each post. I guess I will give it a shot. Seems as if any work spent is in vein when it can be deleted at any time. I do have my blogs backed up on another site. I did this just a week ago..Whew! At some point I will get re-organized and launch a new site with the old posts after I tweak them a bit.
   
   I am just concerned about how Hubpages will bounce back from this as things were just starting to look up again for me..Same old same old the past 18 months!

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8. 60

   truebluewriterposted 11 years ago

   There's really no way to tell how long the plunge will be, that's assuming it will ever end. On this account for example I droped from 200-300 daily views to aroun 20 the last 4 months, and just got back up last week I think. On my blog on the other hand, early this month i dropped from 300-400 dailys range to about 40-50 (prolly sept 4 or 5), then i slowly climbed back up the next two weeks. Hit over 400 last week, then just droped back a couple days ago. I believe google's been rolling out updates and testing out some new algo so my traffic has been cycling.
   
   I think my last drop was because of an update release on the 25th (not entirely sure), but there is a new  update unrelated to panda and penguin that just rolled out yesterday that hits exact match domains. I dont know if that one would affect hubs though since we're in a subdomain. But then again you never can tell with these things.

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