How low can it go?traffic is almost gone!

1. 88

   Stacie Lposted 13 years ago

   my traffic is dropping steadily the past week...i have done all the suggestions that hubpages staff have given and tweaked the hubs to be streamlined and still traffic is disappearing.
   is it time to move on?

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      Mark Knowlesposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      This is quantcast's assessment of the last 3 months traffic from the USA. The site has fallen from a peak of 874k to 339k yesterday.
      
      

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         Sally's Troveposted 13 years agoin reply to this

         Thanks for this, Mark. Percentage-wise, this graph is an accurate picture of what happened to my traffic.
         
         @Stacie, you are definitely not alone. I'm staying, although I have yet to drum up the enthusiasm to carry forward with my personal goal of publishing 100 Hubs in 2011. The da** Panda kind of knocked the wind out of my sails, at least for now.

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         KeithTaxposted 13 years agoin reply to this

         You need to dig deeper into the data to see the real picture. Quantcast also reports global internet traffic declines that look similar to the hubpages graph, but to a lesser extent. Even more telling, Google traffic has declined from 82.5M to 67.8M in the U.S. in the last six months; from 75.5m to 67.8M in the last three.
         
         Go to Quantcast and check it out yourself. It might be a good time to sell that Google stock you're holding.

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            Mark Knowlesposted 13 years agoin reply to this

            Well - I don't think google is going anywhere, and I am fairly sure the recent change is more to do with pressure from certain media magnates who were threatening to block the google 'bot from all major media sites.
            
            A 10% drop in traffic to google in the last 3 months sounds like the typical Christmas drop off and I don't think bears any relation to the graph I added. That shows a very steep decline - overnight in fact - of more than 60% loss of traffic.
            
            Plus Quantcast shows no such relationship to the one you say it does. Not sure where you are getting your figures, but this is their rough estimate for the last 6 months:
            
            
            
            How low can it go? I have no idea.

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   paradigmsearchposted 13 years ago

   Have you done a hub theft check?

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      Stacie Lposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      i have to do another one...i check each week only a few but this is starting to become a full time job...

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3. 59

   paradigmsearchposted 13 years ago

   I remember that spike near the right when we all got excited...

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4. 0

   Nelle Hoxieposted 13 years ago

   Wow Stacie, I just looked at your hubs and they're great work. I thought that my traffic was falling because I write mostly sales hubs. (But I have datafeed sites which are all products and they're still doing pretty well - so products aren't necessarily bad!)
   
   Our hubs are as different as night and day - and the traffic is still falling on both. I admit that I was thinking about non-product hubs as a way of making adsense earnings grow. Now your post has me wondering.
   
   Thanks for posting - more food for thought.

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      Mark Knowlesposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      My informational hubs are as hard hit as the product ones. Worse in some competitive niches.

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         Nelle Hoxieposted 13 years agoin reply to this

         That's interesting. Some of the comments by HP Staff about the hubs that held up better led me to believe that non-product hubs were the way to go.
         
         But after hearing your experience, I just can't get enthusiastic about writing anything here. I mean what's left.
         
         (As you might have guessed from last night's comments, I've been researching my UFO niche!)

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            Mark Knowlesposted 13 years agoin reply to this

            Oh - I have a few that have not really lost any traffic at all, but I don't think it has anything to do with how many product ads were on them.
            
            More the subject matter.

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   Stacie Lposted 13 years ago

   thanks Nellie;i worked hard don my hubs and I'm disappointed
   
   maybe more of my hubs are being posted elsewhere and I haven't found them yet...sigh

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6. 67

   goldenpathposted 13 years ago

   At least I'm not the only one.  Way back in the military we often told the new guys not to drop the soap in the shower.  Well recent changes on the internet feels like I did just that...
   
   There's got to be a way around it all.  I continue to search..

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7. 94

   Dolores Monetposted 13 years ago

   I don't think Google did themselves a favor with the Panda update. At first, I was only concerned about myself and  my hubs. But the other day, I Googled "how to survive google's panda update." On the 1st page I spotted 2 article directories, and 4 articles entitled "how to survive a grizzly bear attack."

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   1. 0

      Nelle Hoxieposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      Google is fine. This was a very specific google slap at HP and sites like it. If you aren't working on this type of site, you very well might be cheering it on.
      
      I spent some time researching several sales niches yesterday and frankly they looked okay.

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8. 0

   Nelle Hoxieposted 13 years ago

   Yep Mark I hear you, I had a few seasonal Spring product hubs that were going gangbusters until I had to reduce the number of ebay products on them. I don't think the HP staff understands how those ebay listings create long-tail searches in specific niches.
   
   Yesterday I went through the staff bios and it's frightening to me the backgrounds some have - very little experience in online marketing. But it explains where they are coming from and their views toward content.
   
   I hope that their strategies are profitable for the community as a whole, because they've decimated what I had left here.

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      Randy Godwinposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      Well, if you are dismayed by their bios then don't watch the Facebook videos they've produced. 

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9. 69

   ThomasEposted 13 years ago

   I'm pretty much moving on... leaving what I have on hubpages, and watching to see if things improve.
   
   I've been writing an short ebook for Amazon kindle as an experiment.
   
   My hypothesis is that at 35% of sales, you can make decent money at it.

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10. 88

    Stacie Lposted 13 years ago

    well i found  my hub about jewelry parties on a wordpress blog and no conatact information.
    i left a comment,and told them they didn't get my permission.they stated that they wrote it..think they'll respond?

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11. 78

    suziecat7posted 13 years ago

    Hopefully all this will be straightened out soon.

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12. 78

    Shadesbreathposted 13 years ago

    What cracks me up is that I wrote a hub to help out my son's girlfriend with selling some of her crafts (it's on my sell-out commercial name, not this name). The hub is really tight, about 1100 words, videos, relevant links, the whole nine yards. A week ago or so, I went on Squidoo and wrote a 400-ish word one on the same thing, pointed at her site with it, tossed in 2 pictures and that was it. Took me like 14 minutes to write it. It's already page two on Google, and kicking the crap out of the HubPages one.  lol.

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       prettydarkhorseposted 13 years agoin reply to this

       Nice, congrats there Shades. E-how articles length I think are just below 400, so length is not really a factor.

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          Shadesbreathposted 13 years agoin reply to this

          Yeah, but it just goes to show that putting in time to really make a quality, detailed hub on HubPages isn't going to net you anything. In fact, quite the opposite. The lesson I draw from that is that I can blast out as many 400 word pieces of crap as fast as I can type and I'll do better than spending time on quality. I mean, that article I put on SQuidoo actually makes fun of itself for how crappy it is. I only wrote it to have a link to her site based on her keywords as they are frequently misspelled in Google search. But, oh well. I don't write for money, so it don't really care. That was just a favor to her, because she's sweet. But it does prove how far the system is from working very well.

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             prettydarkhorseposted 13 years agoin reply to this

             I understand, that is sad. But knowing you, I know you won't do that. You always go for quality.

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                Shadesbreathposted 13 years agoin reply to this

                I know, which sucks because I could make a lot more money if I actually cared just about the money part. I love money, why can't I be more motivated by it like other people? I know people for whom money is the reward. It's like a winning score in a game, and they don't care what the actions are, they just have fun getting it. I have fun doing what I think is actually fun, which unfortunately for me in my world seem to correspond with doing things that make money. lol. (sigh).

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                   prettydarkhorseposted 13 years agoin reply to this

                   Fun is worth all the money anyways. You can write for money sometimes and for fun most of the time, or combine it Shades...Good luck!

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    IzzyMposted 13 years ago

    You know how we try to write quality hubs? Maybe 1000 words or more with detailed information, and added pictures and videos and anything else we can think of to make each hubs as complete as it can be?
    
    For this, we get high hub scores, and high author scores etc etc.
    
    We take care to write as well as we can, with correct grammar etc.
    
    Some hit the mark, and some don't, and we don't know why?
    
    Yet, following on from what has been said in this thread already, some us write fluff - whether here or there doesn't matter - and are an instant success.
    
    I can think of at least two 'authors' here on Hubpages who have written what I would consider to be terrible hubs, with minimum content and questionable grammar, who are getting thousands of hits per day.
    
    Why bother trying to write quality articles then?

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       Randy Godwinposted 13 years agoin reply to this

       Because some are satisfied to write "fluff," Izzy!   
       All writing sites say they want quality, informative articles to give the site credibility so Google will smile on them and us.  But we now know they will take anything and hope we find the worst ones to flag.  What the heck are they thinking?

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14. 88

    Stacie Lposted 13 years ago

    well I didn't think my stats would go any lower but I was wrong....i am depressed...

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    tritrainposted 13 years ago

    I also wonder about the use of various browsers, plugins, and settings that are blocking cookies and javascript.  These two can greatly affect the statistics.  More and more people are blocking one or both.
    
    That and the amount of internet access that is mobile.  How many people are using Google when they are on their iPod?  I don't know.
    
    
    Has anyone tried accessing HubPages via an iPad?  Is it mobile-friendly?

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