Traffic at zero. All my Gogle page rank 1 hubs dropped dramatically

1. 61

   WebsiteConfettiposted 11 years ago

   I used to get in the hundreds daily for traffic, now in the last week I have been getting a mere handful. Today is at 5, one day last week was less! Thats overall traffic for all my hubs
   
   Ive checked my Google page 1 hubs and they are no longer page 1. I couldnt even find them up to page 5 (didnt bother looking beyond that) Surely, not all my hubs could have had such a fall in the 1 week (i have thirty-something hubs)
   
   Could something be affecting just my hubs? I thought it was a phase but im getting concerned now. Under 10 hits for almost 10 days straight!

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   1. 89

      Jason Marovichposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Has it been a month since you published a new hub?  If so, small subs like yours (and mine) could suffer from a lack of freshness penalty in Google's algorithm.

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      1. 61

         WebsiteConfettiposted 11 years agoin reply to this

         Yes it has been more than a month. So does that mean that even though Hub Pages overall gets new content daily, if I don't keep my hubs on my subdomain fresh I will suffer a penalty in the algorithm?
         
         I guess it makes sense, it's such a huge drop though.

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         1. 89

            Jason Marovichposted 11 years agoin reply to this

            Yes, your subdomain is treated separately from HubPages where new content is concerned.  My traffic dives when I'm not actively publishing and rises when I regularly publish.  Not saying this has caused your own traffic drop, but it's the first thing that comes to mind.  I hope that's all the problem there is in your case.
            
            Updates and edits are fine so long as significant new material is being added.

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            1. 89

               WryLiltposted 11 years agoin reply to this

               Pffft. I didn't write for 8+ months after subdomains and my traffic had no issues. And my last hub was 6 weeks ago. I doubt that's the problem. It's more likely a panda/penguin issue.

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            2. 68

               lrohnerposted 11 years agoin reply to this

               No, no, no and no. I've got 41 hubs. Have had about that same amount on this subdomain for three years. Trust me -- you don't need new, edited or tweaked content. Seriously -- I won't even profess to know what Google is looking for, but I do know it doesn't give a rat's arse whether it's "fresh" or not.

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2. 79

   Sally's Troveposted 11 years ago

   Google rolled out the Panda 3.9 update on July 25. That could have something to do with it, but who knows?
   
   http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/2906-g … rithm.html

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      WebsiteConfettiposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks for that. I didn't know about the latest Panda update.  Perhaps I am inadvertently being penalized for something other than lack of fresh content.

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      Healthy Pursuitsposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks for the link, Sally's Trove. I didn't know that yet another rollout had occurred. It didn't affect me, thankfully.

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      cryptidposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      From that article: "the ongoing battle between the good guys with high-quality websites and the bad guys who build content farms"
      
      Is HubPages a content farm?  Are we all "bad guys"?  I don't like that wording one bit.  Maybe I'm just too sensitive. 
      
      This sub was unaffected by the Panda, but my other one dropped like a rock for about three days before pages regained their positions in the SERPs.  It was distressing.  Hang in there, WebsiteConfetti, and hopefully traffic will return too.

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      1. 61

         WebsiteConfettiposted 11 years agoin reply to this

         Thanks cryptid. I'm with you, I don't like that wording either, and for some, Hub Pages could be seen as a content farm. It's a tricky area.

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3. 94

   PaulGoodman67posted 11 years ago

   There have been lots of dramatic drops in traffic in recent months and there are many reasons why that might happen - what caused your drop might not be the same as what caused mine or someone else's. 
   
   Freshness is possibly a factor, although I think editing and updating existing hubs may be a better approach than just writing another hub for the sake of it? 
   
   There are lots of other potential problems that could be the cause too, however.  You need to study forums etc to get ideas.
   
   Its complicated and I have only partially recovered after being in the dumps for months, so I wouldn't claim to be an expert.  But then, who is?  There's a lot of contradictory info flying around at the moment.  You make an educated guess at the end of the day.

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      WebsiteConfettiposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks for your reply.  There are so many variables to consider which does make it complicated.  I do think google is penalizing me for something though but I going over old forum posts trying to get ideas which could relate to my situation and pin point what could be the cause of my dramatic drop. Its very frustrating.

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         PaulGoodman67posted 11 years agoin reply to this

         Yes, I agree.  So many variables.  As far as HP goes, I have actually moved/deleted about 25% of my (worst) hubs from this account.  The remainder I have tried to improve as much as possible by editing and updating them.  I have a couple of newer HP accounts that I have opened up too.

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4. 86

   rebekahELLEposted 11 years ago

    
   
   It sounds like you were affected by the latest Panda if it happened on or after the 25th of this month.
   Perhaps check the search queries in the past week/month for the hubs that have lost traffic. 
   
   Did you take a look at the articles that made it to page 1? 
   
   I posted a link the other day to a helpful video.  Here's the post. http://hubpages.com/forum/topic/100672? … ost2160781  He explains with simple graphics things we can look at with our pages.  It's a year old, but it still has helpful advice.

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      WebsiteConfettiposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks that's very helpful.  He mentioned some things that I hadn't thought of, such as if on a website there are some pages of low quality, the other pages will be affected. I have a few hubs which were published rather quickly and are essentially  a published  WIP. I wonder if those could be affected my previously high ranking hubs.

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5. 66

   Cheeky Girlposted 11 years ago

   Sally is right. July saw another Panda update from those really sweet darlings at Google. This is just a wee suggestion but you could register a new Klout account or an alert accoount somewhere that measures and indexes the amount of times you are mentoned in searches or on the web and it gives you weekly reports. If the rank you have is falling, then you need to be more active. More than writing hubs, I mean. Try using more social media to push your hubs... don't use the wrong social media that are nofollow types. Twitter still is good for promoting hubs and other stuff, as it Pinterest.
   
   Just a few small suggestions! Traffic goes up and down all the time.

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   1. 61

      WebsiteConfettiposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks for the suggestions. Never heard of klout before but I will look into it.

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6. 79

   LeanManposted 11 years ago

   I would say you have been pooped on by the big black and white bear..
   
   Having just looked at a random selection of your hubs I found no interlinking between them but a few links out that were affiliate links and little else, that was a random view of 5 or 6 hubs.. if the rest are similar I would guess that is your reason.
   
   Put in more interlinking and more relevant links that are not all affiliates..
   
   Keep your fingers crossed for the next update and let us know!

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   1. 61

      WebsiteConfettiposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks for taking a look at my hubs.     I do have interlinking hubs, I try to create hubs in groups of 3, which I guess not surprisingly are the hubs that prior to a week ago were hitting the top 1-3 search rankings.
      
      I guess my hubs which do have affiliate links are bringing the other ones down. The affiliate links are always in context of the content, but perhaps I'll use it more sparklingly. Thanks for the advice

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7. 70

   joyfuldesignsposted 11 years ago

   Mine also dropped badly recently, not that they were great.  They have been poor, then about 2 weeks ago, really picked up, and fell in the toilet again.   I feel your pain.

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      WebsiteConfettiposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Its extremely frustrating, especially not knowing exactly what needs to be done to fix the problem. I hope your hubs bounce back soon!

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8. 67

   topquarkposted 11 years ago

   Same here: a dramatic drop about 3 days ago with page one ranked hubs completely falling out of google's search rankings. I have been publishing recently (albeit on topics not connected with my highest-ranking hubs) so this was a big shock.

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   1. 61

      WebsiteConfettiposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      My Hubs have suddenly been relisted on Google again, many on page 1 rankings just like they were before. Have no idea what happened, but glad its back to normal now. Hope your hubs have bounced back too.

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         PaulGoodman67posted 11 years agoin reply to this

         Good to hear, I'm pleased for you!  Mine has picked up a little in recent times, but still nothing like it was!

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         topquarkposted 11 years agoin reply to this

         Mine are still getting less than 5 hits per day, whereas before they were getting well over 100.

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            brakel2posted 11 years agoin reply to this

            My traffic dropped today Aug 20, and my profile page rank went from 3 to 0  I had good links to popular Google sites. I am afraid that may be what happened. Any others with such a change? Maybe it will come back, and is a fluke.

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            1. 86

               rebekahELLEposted 11 years agoin reply to this

               Your PR is not 0.  It says NA which can happen at times.  It happens for a few different reasons. 
               
               IMPORTANT: N/A (not available) - it is not possible to show any pagerank now.
               
               The N/A pagerank (grey pagerank bar) might be due to one of the following reasons:
               
               (1) the web page is new, and it is not indexed by Google yet,
               (2) the web page is indexed by Google, but it is not ranked yet,
               (3) the web page was indexed by Google long ago, but it is recognised
                    as a supplemental (Supplemental Results) page,
               (4) the web page or the whole website is banned by Google.
               
               It's probably the second reason.  It's not 1, I just checked.  It's indexed.

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                  lrohnerposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                  PageRank may make you feel all warm and fuzzy, but it's totally meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

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                  1. 85

                     aa liteposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                     I have heard that PageRank isn't as important for Google ranking as it used to be.  This seemes a little strange to me, since PageRank is thought to depend a lot on backlinks, and I haven't heard people saying that they think links are not important.
                     
                     Whatever the case might be, it is one thing not to have PageRank, and another to have PR of a well established page drop down suddenly.  Pages that are well established, and are the main pages of a site are rarely less N/A unless they are very new.  Hopefully it's just a glitch in the PR detecting add-on or script that you are using.

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                        Greekgeekposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                        A few articles you may have missed:
                        
                        From 2007: Beginner's Guide to Backlink Theory (and pretty much anything written by Michael Martinez dating back half a decade or more)
                        
                        From 2011: Google doesn't count links they don't trust
                        
                        From 2012: Linkbuilding = hard links, not easy links (Culmination of years of trying to get the word out by top guru Danny Sullivan)
                        
                        There are more. "Backlinks are not as important as many people claim" has been a part of the SEO industry conversation for years, but that argument has been shouted down (see below for why). More SEOs have picked up the tune since Google started sending out tons of webmaster warnings about bad linking practices, and since Penguin took a machete to many linking schemes Google wasn't able to detect and demolish in the past.
                        
                        After all, most Wiki Answers and Yahoo Answers pages probably have NO backlinks pointing to them, but they still outrank thousands-of-backlinks pages.
                        
                        As Martinez has pointed out many times, just because a tool by SEOmoz or Yahoo or random SEO website says, "I found a link to your site!" doesn't mean Google cares about that link.  Google is looking for relevance -- are Wurlitzer experts and Wurlitzer pages linking to your hub on Wurlitzers? -- and is actively trying to discount any form of linking which is just done for search engine purposes.
                        
                        As I have noted before, Google's semi-secret Internal Quality Raters Guidelines define webspam as practices done to manipulate search rankings. Spewing thousands of links to boost rank is one of the practices Google tries to detect and ignore. It's just gotten better at it. The Penguin updates of 2012  have been major moves forward in Google's quest to eliminate link spam (as it defines it) from its algorithm.
                        
                        The trouble is that the SEO industry discovered backlinks as a useful metric to impress clients. "Look!" they could say. "I built 10,000 backlinks for you, and now your site ranks better!" (Yes, they really do throw around those kinds of numbers. What most hubbers do as backlinking doesn't match what they're up against. Luckily, backlinks aren't that important.) Never mind that most of those 10,000 backlinks weren't counted as relevant or important by Google. Google may have counted only a few of those links from particularly important sites. Or all the people who followed those backlinks may have shared or tweeted. Visibility begets visitors who beget more visibility. But by golly, at the end of the year, a put-upon SEO consultant can put up a shiny graph showing thousands of backlinks were built. And as long as SEO professionals have backlinks to wave around, they don't have to figure out any other form of SEO.
                        
                        </soapbox>

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                           aa liteposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                           Hi Greekgeek, sure I'm not saying that thousands of backlinks from crappy sites with no authority, on completely different topics are good or important for ranking, I'm just saying that backlinks are still probably quite an important ranking factor.  If they weren't then Google would not be spending so much effort on detecting and eliminating link spam.  If Google didn't care about backlinks then it wouldn't be letting Penguin out of its cage, and it wouldn't be trying to close down spamblog linking schemes, or sending out thousands of 'we've detected bad links' emails to webmasters. 
                           
                           Google is not the guardian of the purity of the internet (despite it's much talked about philosophy).  It is a business.  It's main aim is to provide its users with search results they like.  It gets annoyed by people creating links to manipulate its search engine, because this interferes with its algorithms.  If backlinks weren't a factor in ranking, I cannot imagine that Google would care if SEOs were artificially manufacturing thousands of backlinks for their clients.  Ergo, the fact that it puts so much effort into discounting inorganic links means that backlinks are an important factor.
                           
                           I've also obviously missed the articles that explain how PR is calculated, except I seem to remember reading somewhere that it was 10% onsite factors and 90% offsite, i.e. backlinks.  Now I'm sure when PR was first used, they just counted all backlinks, but since the explosion of SEO and link schemes etc. it makes sense to me that if Google doesn't count links it thinks are 'bad' in its ranking algorithm, it has probably done the same thing with its PR calculations.  So if somebody has thousands of bad links I'm not sure it would give them much in terms of PR.
                           
                           So I do think backlinks still count in terms of ranking, it's just that they either have to be good, organic backlinks from high authority sites, or bad backlinks, whose badness Google still hasn't learnt to recognize.  What I wrote was in answer to the idea that PR doesn't mean anything in terms of ranking in the SERPs, rather than telling people that they should go out and linkspam.
                           I would agree that PR is only one of many factors that Google uses, I have seen low PR pages outrank high PR pages.  To be honest I really don't understand how Google ranks things anymore.  I know they would say "quality", but if that was true wiki answers and yahoo answers would definitely not rank as high as they do!
                           
                           PS Wurlitzer? Wat's dat?

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                     brakel2posted 11 years agoin reply to this

                     I know, and thank you for reminding me. There is that new algorithm for August punishing sites for copyright infringement. Have you heard anything? I also wonder if they are reindexing our new profile pages.

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                  brakel2posted 11 years agoin reply to this

                  Thanks for your response Rebekah I am sure you are right. always liked having good page rank. even though some say it doesn't matter. I just wondered about my page without the links.

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         aa liteposted 11 years agoin reply to this

         That is really good to hear, WebsiteConfetti, a similar thing happened to my traffic 6 days ago.  I guess I should sit patiently and wait for Googly to reprieve me.
         I really can't understand these big variations.  I can understand that there might be a big algo change and ranking change dramatically, like after the first Panda update I get.  These huge ups and downs, that come out of nowhere don't make any sense, and I really don't see how they fit in with the whole "quality agendy".  Hubs are considered high quality, then they are rubbish, then 3 weeks later they are high quality again......does G know what it's doing?
         
         I know I am biased but my hub on types of frogs is now outranked by 2 wiki answers (a site which Google seems to really like, although a lot of it is absolute rubbish) pages.  One page has the question "What are some types of frogs?" and a list of about 10 frog names.  I mean why bother writing 600+ words of researched content, about which I am quite knowledgable sine I keep pet frogs, add pretty pictures and youtube videos, when you can just list 10 frog names and rank on the first page?

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            WriteAngledposted 11 years agoin reply to this

            Because despite shooting their mouths off about "authority", the teenagers at Google seem to believe that knowledge is only validated by "the community". Hence the reason the search results are overwhelmed by non-authoritative material from sites with a Wiki prefix.

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               aa liteposted 11 years agoin reply to this

               That's very true, WriteAngled, I don't mind wikipedia dominating the search results so much, at least it's pretty heavily moderated, but some of the other sites are absolutely terrible.  I guess Google must find people who write for free more trustworthy than people like us.  However, if you allow anybody to answer questions, and they have absolutely no incentive to make what they write good, a lot of what will be written is complete nonsense. 
               
               Incidentally it seems to me that SERPs have changed quite a lot in the past couple of weeks, and they are really bad now.  Sometimes you will have the same website showing up in two positions, and quite a few youtube videos are returned on the first page.  It almost looks like a lot of text works against you now, perhaps it's a clever Google idea, if they write a lot of text, they must be spammers!  Perhpas writing very short hubs is the key, but I really can't be bothered to check that now.

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            Dolores Monetposted 11 years agoin reply to this

            I've had that problem when I am looking for some real information and wind up finding those stupid lists. I can't imagine why Big G would create new algo's that offer up such rubbish. Also, after some of the Panda updates, a lot of commercial material was coming up. I want citizen written articles. If I am researching a home project, I don't want to read how great some product is in an article written by someone selling that product. Once again, I ask, is Big G going the way of Alta Vista? (Once the go to spot then disappeared under huge piles of commercial junk)

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   urmilashukla23posted 11 years ago

   Good for you, WebsiteConfetti.  No luck here. Traffic has not been picked up yet. No motivation.

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10. 57

    Dame Scribeposted 11 years ago

    I checked on one of my hubs in search. I found it and the title was somewhat - rearranged not sure who's fault it was but figured, no wonder it's on this page rather than page 1 like it used to be. My hub showed up something like -->   'xxxxxx / title' . I was sitting there looking at it thinking, well, wtf is that?! I didn't write my title like that I double checked at HP and didn't see it but clicked on the edit button and backspaced right to last letter, checked search again and found it 'listed' normally again. Not sure what was going on, was weird seeing that.

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