Why is there less traffic than Squidoo?

1. 62

   bizgrrlposted 8 years ago

   I'm disappointed that there is barely any traffic to my Hubs. I was getting more with Squidoo. What's this about?

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      Elsie Hagleyposted 8 years agoin reply to this

      Good question, I would like to know the answer also.

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   2. 86

      TIMETRAVELER2posted 8 years agoin reply to this

      Squidoo was more of a site that catered to people looking to purchase products.  HP is a site that caters to people looking for helpful information and/or insites.  Two entirely different animals that make transferring from one to the other difficult.  It take a great deal of time to build up a reputation with Google and start earning here, and earning means getting views.
      
      Perhaps you are writing on the wrong topics and should try branching out a bit.
      
      If you write on saturated topics, such as some of the ones you have, or push "buying" things, which you also have, it is unlikely that you will get a great deal of traffic.
      
      People come here to learn or get help and not to buy or read what they already can find elsewhere on the net.

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      1. 98

         theraggededgeposted 8 years agoin reply to this

         That's not quite true. Yes there were spammy sales pages. There were also useful sales pages. Personally, although we were often encouraged to create them, I hated them as did many others. Lots of us wrote informative and interesting lenses... and our traffic reflected that.

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2. 83

   psycheskinnerposted 8 years ago

   I think if you compared both sites at similar time periods I suspect they would be roughly similar in terms of traffic per page.  Traffic going to content sites has been generally declining over the last few years.

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3. 94

   viryaboposted 8 years ago

   In my case, I got much more traffic on HP than I ever did on Squidoo when Squidoo was still up and running.

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4. 87

   Kryssy OSullivanposted 8 years ago

   I've been questioning about the traffic, and if it's just my imagination... But, my traffic count fluctuates up and down, oddly, through the day... I don't understand that, but hey. I'm getting something. At this point, I'm just starting to throw my hands up in the air, mumbling "Whatever" and just going on with doing what I've gotta do. I can't complain too much.
   
   I think the best thing I can say, other than rambling on, is just to keep up with what's going on, and float on... If anything major happens, like the EditBot premiere mess for example, then become concerned. Personally, HubPages just makes a good practice site.

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5. 81

   LeanManposted 8 years ago

   Are you sure that the cause of the drop in traffic is just the difference between HP and Squidoo?
   
   If the hubs in question had remained on Squidoo do you really think that they would have retained the same level of traffic as they were getting before they left?
   
   Google has gone to war against "sales" type pages and they will rarely appear on the first page as that generally gets filled by Amazon etc - their reasoning is why send traffic to a page that just then tries to send the reader to Amazon. just send them direct and cut out the middleman.
   
   So if you have pages here, as you do, that are "buy XYZ" you can not expect them to do that well anymore. But that is down to the changes that Google has made.

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6. 86

   Marisa Wrightposted 8 years ago

   One cause is the fact that your articles had to be moved from one site to another, and some traffic is always lost when you do that. 
   
   The other thing, which we can't know is - what would the traffic have been like if those lenses were still on Squidoo?
   
   Squidoo closed down because traffic was already declining, and the owner felt there was no hope of recovery - it was going to get worse.  He was proved right, because around the time the Squidoo lenses transferred, Google gave article writing sites another "slap" - HubPages lost a lot of traffic and it's likely Squidoo would have, too, if it had still existed.

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7. 96

   EricDockettposted 8 years ago

   I always saw way more traffic on HubPages than I did on Squidoo. To me, Squidoo felt like that job search commercial where everyone is trying to play tennis at the same time. It was very hard to publish anything that didn't exist already in some shape or form, and even when your keywords were fairly original you'd still get outranked by older Lenses that were sort of close to the topic you just wrote about, but not really.
   
   Unfortunately, since the merger HubPages now has a similar feel. It is harder than ever for a new Hub to get traction.
   
   That's my 2 cents. I don't know why you are personally seeing less traffic. However, I wonder if you are comparing apples to apples. In addition to search traffic, Squidoo had a lot of internal traffic due to the games and shenanigans, where HP traffic is mostly external.
   
   I also think there is a lot of validity to what Marisa and LeanMan told you. The web is different today, and was changing rapidly at the time Squidoo closed. I prefer to interpret that as writers needing to roll with the changes. HubPages is ahead of the curve on that, where Squidoo got steamrolled.

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8. 82

   Mark Ewbieposted 8 years ago

   Squidoo had those little icons of squids, squirrels and water-melons.  Webmaster SEO World made up some stats to prove that the squirrel in particular gave a content boost of nearly 30%!
   
   When multiplied by 2 for no obvious reason that comes to over 40% in raw search power.
   
   Unfortunately, when HubPages bought Squidoo, they could no way afford to buy the icons as well.  So as predicted by those of us who are - without bragging - experts in this area...
   
   ... it all went downhill a bit.
   
   Little extra fact. Squirrels also go downhill but not as fast as water-melons.

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      PegCole17posted 8 years agoin reply to this

      This explains it in understandable detail, Mark. Thanks. Squirrels, watermelons, who knew?

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9. 70

   makingamarkposted 8 years ago

   If you are going to make a comparison you always have to compare like with like.
   
   It's unfair to compare HubPages to Squidoo because:
   1) it's more than a year later and there have been major changes in Google algorithms since Squidoo died
   2) what era of Squidoo are you talking about? Squidoo was on a steep downward decline for at least the last year of its life
   3) the sites are similar (e.g. they're both 'content farms' from Google's perspective - hence the traffic hit to both sites) but not identical. They will have definitely had slightly different algorithms to drive internal traffic
   4) it depends on whether you are counting internal traffic or external traffic. The only traffic you should actually care about is the external traffic and Google doesn't count the social media stuff.
   
   If you want a better comparison going forward ask how HubPages traffic compares to other sites that content has moved to.
   
   There's a fair few people who can now say whether traffic is better on HubPages or somewhere else.

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      Sharlee01posted 8 years agoin reply to this

      Just my opinion - I believe that Squidoo went under due to Google slapping them with major penalties  for redirects within the site, and  opening the site to ads that weren't Google ads. The traffic here is failing due to the same practices. To many redirects within the site, and to many ads that are not sponsored by Google.

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10. 83

    psycheskinnerposted 8 years ago

    And ultimately, mammoths may produce a better quality of steak than Angus cattle, but only one of the two is available at the supermarket.

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11. 69

    JenwithMistyposted 8 years ago

    Did somebody really say that people come to Hubpages to find high quality informative information?  Do you honestly think like that?  I don't think I've ever heard anyone say, "I need some good high quality information, I think I'll go to Hubpages." 
    
    It's not true either that people don't come here to buy things.  They do.  The only difference is that when you make a sale here, your hub gets unfeatured whereas at Squidoo, you got fun points for it and your page stayed active so you could make more sales.

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