We are working to track down an issue with the site that we think may be impacting traffic indirectly. So, until we can be sure we've identified the issue and developed proper fixes, we are going to revert the Amazon capsule back to its previous state and we are going to remove the QnA and Forum tabs from the new profile.
We believe it's possible that one of these two changes started impacting traffic late last week, but aren't sure which one, or if it's the cause at all, but to be sure we are going to make some changes to test. The Amazon capsule added one no follow link to all amazon capsules and the forum and QnA tabs were having all the links picked up as the page loads. Ideally, just hub links are picked up.
We expect it will take about three days for the site to get re-crawled, but a huge thank you to Fawntia for working on this most of today to get the temporary fixes out.
nofollow links still dilute passed values to followed links.
Oh come on.
Isn't it time you just admitted that you don't have a clue what you are doing.
The "idled zzzz hubs" is probably the crowning glory to a long series of panic driven changes that have resulted in your traffic figures dropping off a cliff, and your best authors leaving in droves.
If you hate HP so much, why are you still posting here 3 years AFTER you removed your hubs? IMHO, that sounds mean-spirited.
It seems you have opened an account in Wizzley, Healthy Pursuits. Just saw you forum post there. Here it is (anyone can check that, search Wizzley "Newbies say "hi"" Forum Category, it's No. 2nd) -
"I see the names of several fellow hubbers. That's nice. I don't feel like I'm beginning from scratch. I have to try Wizzley, as I hear that bad articles are ditched. So I'll be writing my first here in the next few days."
It seems you have not sufficient rights to make those statements.
Healthy Pursuits: you know nothing about me.
You arrived here long after I left.
I'm amused that my comment has led you to the conclusion that I "hate" hubpages, and am "mean spirited".
I'm also amused at the cheer squad that is proclaiming the excellence of the emperor's new clothing, when the evidence shows that he is standing there stark naked.
My interest in checking these forums from time to time is purely academic. No hate involved.
Many thanks for keeping up informed, and for analyzing and tackling the possible problems, Paul, Fawtia and team!
Just today, I had a 'comment' alert on my home page - when I clocked on it, it was a new feature alerting me a Q&A comment to a question I posted was 'awaiting moderation.' But there was no way to approve, moderate or reply from that page. I think it would be helpful to have answers to our questions pop up in our account info, though, so we could keep track without constantly going to the questions to check for traffic. Not sure if that's part of the mix in this thread, but I wanted to mention it.
Anyway - thanks, again, for your terrific support!
Paul - I have a (possibly dumb) question - could one problem be that new profiles no longer contain live links? Would that change have resulted in a lot of 'no follows' in our profiles? Again, please excuse if this is a blonde question.
Marcy, my own gut feeling is that the loss of live links did not cause this.
If a link is live, it will still be followed for so long as it remains in the cache. When the cache gets updated, and there are no live links there, then that is the end of the matter.
I think a problem can only arise if Google sees a link that no longer exists, yet links in profiles probably do exist if they go to external sites, so no issues there.
Possibly what could be a problem is links going to hubs that no longer exist, as could have happened with the introduction of the idle hubs.
Between people unpublishing, and every account getting the googlebot visits at different times, there could well have been a lot of conflicting links, some that actually existed and others that didn't.
Even so, I would not have expected Google to punish the whole site for what is a temporary state, although that may have actually happened when the site was down.
Unlikely, but possible.
Then again, what do I know?
Thanks, Izzy - I knew others here (like you!) would know more than I do about how that works. I was just curious, because many of us have put links to outside sites in the text of our profiles (other places people write, etc.) and I don't know what happened to that when the site stopped letting those be live links. The URLs are probably still there, but of course the links are not live. But I am sure the site figured a way to make the changes without having a 'do not follow' issue happen?
I have so much to learn . . . !!!
I'm sort of glad to see the Q & A tab go, at least for now. I have answered enough questions, but they didn't show up anyway (just the one question I asked). For the forum tab, it was showing really old posts that I had made in the forums. Eh, we don't need the tracking of forum posts either.
I agree that the old forum posts are redundant.
Thank you for updating us, and letting us know that you are reviewing the issue. I know a lot of us had seen a drastic decline in traffic and it's somewhat disheartening, but good to hear that you are investigating a potential cause of it.
My Hubs are still ranking good on google but my traffic are dramatically down, this is confising!
Kinda' the same here. Ranking okay on Google, but while my traffic is not down it isn't up either
That is exactly my problem. Some of my hubs are ranking a little lower, but others are ranking high and traffic is down. Glad I'm not the only one. : )
I wonder if we might be losing traffic for long tail keywords. Perhaps Google is introducing more semantic search thingy (I'm not entirely clear about how this works). I think Google has been threatening for a while to teach its algorithms how to speak human, understand synonyms etc. so it is less reliant on keywords.
Although in the case of one of my hubs I blame image search, My hub still technically ranks second for its chosen keyword, however Google has now decided to display the images above it, so really it is third in the SERPs and I lost some traffic because of it. I think this might be a factor in what's happening to everybody, with all the 'sponsored links' image searches, youtube videos that Google now shows on the first page, just ranking well against the other webpages means less.
My traffic is confusing, too - the only factor I can add (aside from Panda antics and changes HP made) is that right before the drop, I had posted several Questions (in the Answers section). Now I am wondering if they appear as 'short content' pages, and perhaps posting several during a small window of time affected things. Wish we had a crystal ball . . .
Hi Marcy,
I am also wondering the same thing. I just deleted a bunch of my questions today...especially ones that did not have that many answers or which did not inspire hubs. May do more of that!
Peggy - I was just wondering if we could delete questions. I sort of hate to do that, when people have taken the time to leave thoughtful answers. But if they've been indexed somehow as part of our pages, I'm worried it will impact us. I need to find the Delete option & try that tack.
I didn't know it was possible to delete questions. I'm going to look into it. Last night my traffic dove even lower. When I Googled my most popular hubs, they had actually risen in ranking overnight! It really doesn't make any sense. How could my ranking improve and my views drop?
Peggy & Vespa - I started deleting my Q&A entries today, and I plan to delete more this weekend. I hate that people comments (very good ones) that will be deleted, but that's the main thing I suspect may have caused the odd drops. I had posted several new questions just last week, and based on the indications that 'short' pages are gigged, it sure sounds like those are possible factors.
Please let us know if your views increase. It's all very baffling right now.
I can't tell just yet, but there are still some Questions to be deleted. I got rid of very old ones, and any that had few responses. But I think the batch I posted last week is pulling me down. Google would have interpreted those as several very new 'pages' with extremely short content. If that's the case, and even if they're deleted, it could take a while to recover.
How you delete Q&A? I couldn't figure it out...
Letitia - there's a link on the actual question you post that lets you delete it. So far, I've only deleted older Qs and those with very few responses. I'm watching things on the rest of them & I'll decide what to do with them in the next few days.
I've deleted a lot of mine that had just a few answers. Now it's the waiting game.
Same here. First traffic recovered, then it sank again, but my hubs still seem to rank as they were.
I don't know what the heck is going on.
This "may" explain some of my recent lowest page views in the past 8 months. The first month was expected to be low, but it picked up by the second month. Now I am diving back to an average of 1 view a hub per day.
Paul
Good to hear you guys are working on finding whatever the problem is. Hopefully it is a fixable issue and we can all go back to creating great hubs!
Great news! Thank you for all the hard work. We knew it would get worked out eventually.
Paul, I think most of us are sensible and realistic enough to know that the weekend's events are as much of a shock to HP staff as they have been for the average writer. Appreciate very much your efforts on your "day off" (do you get such a thing?) to let everyone know that efforts are being made to resolve any issues.
Yes, and big thanks to Fawntia as well.
Good to know. I did see a drop in traffic and I was going in and sprucing up my hubs.
Hi Paul,
Thanks for tweeking HubPages to best effect. I always thought that the Q&A as well as forum posts should not be a part of what the average reader of HP sees...just our hubs. Of course, that is just my opinion. I am no expert on what makes money for HubPages, and therefore us, the writers. Obviously we all want the best for HP. Thanks for working overtime on figuring out what will be the best impact.
Very cool the way you folks are forever on top of such things.
~hats off~
Thanks for letting us know, Paul. It is always nice to know what's going on.
And thanks to Fawntia for working overtime on a Sunday.
Thank you for letting us know. And for all of your efforts this weekend!
We trust you Paul! This is a temporary phase and it would pass soon. You Guys would fix this up. Thanks to Fawntia for talking the matter in hand.
Thank you for keeping us informed on this. The pages seem slow to load at the moment I am wondering if it is a related problem.
Although the mass de-indexing of low traffic content might not have helped
Thank you Paul and Fawntia for working on these changes. I would be more than happy to leave the Q&A and Forum topics off of the profile page, whether or not it affects traffic.
Shasta
Paul, it is good to know that HP is pursuing solutions methodically in this matter. My own traffic dropped a little, but not very much more than the usual slow Saturday. I'll be happy if your results increase all my traffic, though!
Thanks,
Patty
As always, thank you so much for working on this issue. I know my own traffic has dropped some, but I attributed it to the weekend slump. I'm grateful HP is on this and I might even get a little extra traffic boost. I appreciate your tireless efforts.
All this traffic loss makes me want to eat BBQ....I is feeling depressed and Marikandi is too.....I like beans...Shh Marikandi...have you farted?....Yeeeeesss...it smell good....how make money hubpage?
Like this - captures my mood well. Indeed how make money Hubpages?
When someone post here: "I need $100 a day quick! Tell me now how I do using Hub?"
At one time I might have tried to advise and politely suggested they need stronger English skills coupled with SEO knowledge.
Today I'd say, "forget hub - no work no more - try bank rob? or online scam?
Bank rob sounds good....how make bank rob? Heard someone use lemon juice to distort face for security camera....didn't work too well.....how make bank rob?
I think its the enforced changes in the profiles last Tuesday - coincides with the huge drop in traffic on Thursday 27 - too many changes all it once!!!!
Seems possible. I know when I logged in a couple times the text didn't come on even though the pics did. If a visitor was stopping by they might leave if the page tookd too long to load.
My traffic is now less than half of my normal levels and there are many hubs with 'zero' traffic now. I sincerely hope that these hubs would not go to 'sleep' and be de-indexed on Google soon. I barely manage to make a payout every month and if the problems are not fixed soon, I doubt if I will make one this month. But I am sure that the HubPages Team would fix it fast. Thank you, Paul and Team Hubpages for working overtime for fixing the issues of the site.
my traffic gone down to 50% ,,,hope things would be fixed soon
My traffic is unaffected - just saying as it appears the crash is not universal. Hope everyone recovers soon!
Kudos to you guys for making these great changes. But Paul can we have our referral link live again on our profile page?
I was just wondering about this too. Any reason why it's no longer possible?
I am guessing that all of our referral advertising was encouraging the wrong sort of people to join HubPages. Without all of our links, the advertising message stays consistent, and HubPages can warn people up front that this is not a get rich quick scheme (somewhere in the fine print.)
I have lost 50% of my traffic. Whilst this isn't a detrimental amount as I only get around 100 visits a day anyway, in total, it is saddening for me. I can take it knowing it is not only myself that it is happening to.
This is when I am glad I am on a platform with those who know what they are doing on the programing side of things. Thank you for working hard to get things back on track.
Since my new profile came into effect my traffic has dropped by about 30%. My position in the Serps has dropped off, some hubs are still doing well but quite a few have dropped a few places. It seems the drop started just after my new profile went live. Seems like a bit of a coincidence. Hope it will right itself soon.
Yes, I{ve noticed the same drop since the profiles went live. I've lost 65% of my traffic and it hasn't gone back up.
My traffic started to drop also after the new profile. Hubs got lost. My summaries are no longer being used. Yesterday, I tried to find a cache and got a 404 error. Thanks for anything you can do to help fix these problems, some of which may be out of your control. Thanks to all staff members for helping us.
Like most people I have dropped about 50% since the end of last week. Good to know it wasn't google destroying me alone!... and hopefully it's something you guys can fix soon.
Gotta say, these announcements are pretty important, and I had no idea what was causing my drop in traffic before I came to this thread. Perhaps there could be a box on the account page that puts these traffic related announcements in a place where people can see them easier? For the last few days I was worried it was just me.
It is comforting to know we're in this together. I have confidence in the HP team. They also want to solve this issue and put it behind us! So I'm trying to be patient. Not one of my virtues. : )
On a positive note, some of my hubs that never ranked before are now getting traffic through Google. So you never know where that will lead. I think everything will work out in the end.
That's a good suggestion, Thomas - these are important threads, and they can easily get lost in the other posts here. My traffic is down about 50 percent since the new profile, too - or since late last week (whichever may have triggered it). It's clearly some sort of problem, because it continues to decline this week, rather than going up after the weekend-slump pattern.
I agree. I would prefer to see this type of announcement instead of or in addition to the question that is now on my accounts page.
I seem to be the odd one out. My traffic has actually increased!!
Yup my traffic in the last week and significantly in the last 2 months.
I think instead of Critiscising Hubpages, we need to appreciate that they are taking steps and working hard to try keep all our subdomains in good standing with Google.
Are we guessing that the Q&A sections are creating a lot of idle pages, which Google is marking us down for? this is something i asked a question about shortly after the idle hubs gate
That is an excellent insight. I would imagine that for me, a lot of my questions would be more likely to be idle than the hubs themselves.
I hadn't thought about the Q&A section generating idle pages. Makes sense, though. I 'asked' several questions toward the end of last month - but I don't think there were enough idle days on them to trigger a Google drought. However, I had not converted to the new profile before the site switched all of us, and my drops started Friday & have continued. I'd be curious if there are stats about those who converted early on, and those who were automatically switched last week?
BTW - I do like the new profile format - not complaining at all about that part!
I lost a little more traffic than usual on Saturday, but Mon and Tues my traffic is up more than usual, so something is working well. Thanks!
So if your traffic is moving up, what is going on with the rest of us I wonder? There have been a few posts about traffic rising although they are few and far between. I wonder what this means?
If Hubpages does not work to fix this then many of us will go away. I'm sure they are very aware of that and so they will be "on it".
Although fluctuations in traffic can certainly be trying, I accept that there will always be a degree of trial and error whenever there are attempts at progress. I appreciate the efforts of the HP team and hope that there will be traffic improvements over the next few days.
Like almost everyone else who has posted here I have lost a lot of traffic since Friday and I am also very grateful to you Paul and everyone else on the team for the work you're doing to fix things. Let's hope it's soon back on the upswing.
I have been out of the loop for most of the summer and am spending this week revamping a lot of my hubs and answering comments. I have one stupid question though that I can't seem to find an answer for. Since the links in our profiles are dead now, how do we get people to sign up under us? I don't want to always have to post it in my hub to have people sign up or sign up to comment. I would rather have them sign up because they would like to share their writing. Let me know what I have missed here. Also, I noticed that if I added two amazon caps to my hubs, one of them gets cancelled out. I try not to add more that two per hub depending on the length and topic. Thanks! Keep up the awesome job!
I converted mine early and have seen a steady increase in traffic. I'm not sure if there was some kind of google update that happened at the same time, but I think there was.
It's hard to tell, I think. I also have a number of education related hubs which see an increase in traffic during the school year. I don't look too deeply at percentages, but traffic is up for me.
I think with so many changes, it's hard to determine where major problems are coming from. I hope things get figured out. I'm happy to see the Amazon change back to normal. It looked too spammy to me to see such a huge buy button.
Speaking on behalf of my other account generalhowitzer too...
This account emilgen2011 experienced around 15 %to 25% drop in traffic but I think this manageable since I have more than 30 new articles, and this will soon negate the drop...
My other account generalhowitzer is surprisingly strong and unaffected as its page views were steady until now and I even posted my highest income per month in September since May this year.
Hehehe, my target is to increase the total number of my hubs in emilgen2011 or generalhowitzer to 500 articles... to keep me going further here at HubPages. I am quite tired with the averages of 1k views per day for generalhowitzer and 300 page views per day for emilgen2011...
BTW, I am still very thankful to HubPages... for giving me the opportunity to earn extra income for the past several years. Through thick and thin, I will keep on writing for this wonderful site...
I think it is about to say, "Count your blessings" amigos... There are always ups and downs, and their is a cliche that goes, "You win some, you lose some," hehehe, it balances out in the end!
Almost sounds as if you are mocking those who have lost traffic. I hope you are not.....If you are one of the fortunate who have not really felt the negative side effects from the past several days, good for you, if you are just on this forum to brag, well nobody wants to here the hehe stuff!
I guess you understand this well my friend: You win some, you lose some," hehehe, it balances out in the end!
I have faith in Hubpages that things will go back to normal and I have no intention of mocking anybody else... They've hurdled the Panda outbreak before right... and why they can't topple this new problem now.
I also mentioned that this account also experienced a drop in traffic...
Dunno if the tide has been reversed, but my traffic is up by about 17% since yesterday evening. I think HP's fix may have targeted the right issues. Thanks, guys - you've had a busy time the last few days!
This might not have anything to do with the loss of traffic, but there is something strange going with Google indexing, right now it looks like there are 5,970,000 pages on HubPages indexed by Google. This is a huge jump, before the idle hubs there were about 4,600,000 and after the idle hubs were introduced this fell by over 1 million. No idea why the number has increased so much, if it has anything to do with the loss of traffic, or even if it reflects reality, but it is curious.
After I changed to new profile a few weeks ago, I lost all Google traffic, and my hubs seemed to be de-indexed. A week later everything went to normal.
So, we've been cranking on the profile to address a few issues we found. However, I heard from Google today that what we experienced on Thursday afternoon was a Panda update. If your are in the group that lost traffic starting Thursday afternoon, this is likely the cause.
We know Panda is a hard thing to figure out. Google's advice to us continues to be to focus on improving the sites content.
We are working on making a few tweaks to the profile and some ways to help people find potentially problematic content. We'll keep you posted.
For more details on this update see
http://searchengineland.com/google-pand … ted-135291
"Google’s Matt Cutts sent us after asking about this update:
Google began rolling out a new update of Panda on Thursday, 9/27. This is actually a Panda algorithm update, not just a data update. A lot of the most-visible differences went live Thursday 9/27, but the full rollout is baking into our index and that process will continue for another 3-4 days or so. This update affects about 2.4% of English queries to a degree that a regular user might notice, with a smaller impact in other languages (0.5% in French and Spanish, for example)."
Unfortunately this means that there is not much chance of traffic recovery for many (Panda squat). Squidoo fared much better! Why?
Thanks for that update, Paul - I did lose traffic, but interestingly, it is recovering quickly as of today. I think whatever you are doing at the site level has helped quite a bit. Thank you, thank you!
That Panda update is messed up. The hub I had with the highest page views is a very good hub. I had a lot of page views every day. It was showing up on page 2. My traffic is totally tanked now, including that hub. I checked the main search term for that web page, and my page is not listed up through page 15. On the pages in between 1 and 15 are several not very good pages with lots and lots of repeats of variations of those pages on the same web sites. So Google hasn't accomplished anything for quality. They've just cut me out of the running.
I have yet to see a Panda update that wasn't messed up...
I agree, Marisa.
Well, whatever it was, it seems to be resolving itself (that's English for lots of programmer bodies sweating over problem in the background). My page views are suddenly up to 50% of what they were before this problem, and steadily rising.
I a "ATTA HERE" as far as considering this as a real source of revenue. It is fund to communicate with others but I will NEVER put 100 % effort into this or even consider it as any kind of reliable income source.
Nada.
That's a good question about Squidoo. They seem to do very well through these. The main differences I see is that Squidoo has 1.4 million pages indexed and we have nearly 6 million. We've taken steps that will take us down to a million or so, but it's not happening quickly. Google indexed lots of URLs that are URL only since they were blocked in the robots.txt. We switched these to be a no index tag to get them dropped.
Structure wise from their site hierarchy they link to less pages than we do. We now have similar systems for idle content, but we still link to the pages. I had a conversation with Google the other day and they recommended we don't link to these pages, so we are looking into some ways to address it.
And of course we are on subdomains.
So "idle" hubs will become "dead" hubs. RIP
I wonder whether the links to idle hubs and retaining idle hubs works at the subdomain level. I have made sure there are no idle hubs left in my subdomain just in case. Can Hp staff please provide some feed back on this. Also please confirm that the only links to an idle hub are within the hosting subdomain as idle hubs no longer appear in the topic and other directories.
Yes, I've read that google no longer likes pages with loads of links on. I've scaled back the links on my hubs, even though all my links are relevant to the content.
Any idea of the number of links that are idea for Google purposes? Do all links count the same whether it is to our own related content or outside sources such as Wikipedia? Would be interesting to know that answer.
Not really sure, it was my Dad who told me, and he's a bit obsessed with google rankings lately. I had a hub with more than 10 text-links so I reduced that to about 5. I think anything that's not a necessary reference can be removed from text-links, and to stay at 5 or less. As for links at the end of hubs, the new format adds a load anyway. So I've scaled back my own end-of-hub-linking to about 3 or less. That would be for a 1000-1500 word article. This is just my opinion though, please DYOR
Woah, I missed this. You're aiming to deindex 5/6 of this site's hubs?
What's the rationale for this draconian target?
I'm actually curious about something here, and perhaps you can give me an answer. Of the five million hubs you plan to deindex, how many would you say are out-and-out spam, and how many are just OK or even decent hubs that just don't get very much traffic?
Upon reflection, I find these changes understandable. Wise? Maybe not so much. I am leaving the site as a result of this change, as most of my hubs are admittedly idle. I hope that decision will be understandable as well.
Haven't seen you around in ages, WE! Sorry you're going.
I just saw a profile this AM where the user said they they recently started making Hubs again because they had first joined a few years ago and recently got an email from HubPages saying that if they didn't become active they would have their account deleted. This was a person who had only made two Hubs previously.
There are are easily a few hundred thousand accounts that are just like that on this site, stuff that really isn't adding value, not to mention all the people who signed up years ago and then never did anything. Perhaps this is the sign of a large housecleaning on HubPages' part...?
Along those same lines, the site overview stats page has been removed and the URL now redirects to the "about us" page. That used to show overall site signups (millions) and actual publishers (closer to 150,000 and dropping) and of course the rough stats for views per month.
I don't see the post where HubPages is going to remove 5/6th of the hubs. From the stats pages, which appear to be gone now, there were only a bit over a million hubs on the site. The thing about HubPages was that they indexed all forum posts, question pages etc. Hubs were actually a small part of the pages indexed on the site.
Incidentally something really strange is going with indexing (assuming you can believe the numbers Google gives). In August there were about 4.6 million pages indexed, After the idle hubs were introduced this dropped to 3.5 million, but now suddenly we are at 5.9 million. I suspect the no-indexing of idle hubs, or possibly the mass introduction of new profiles, caused something strange to happen with indexing of the site.
OK, I see what you mean - "pages" doesn't just include hubs, but also questions and forum threads/posts. Where can I find the info you give in your second paragraph, about numbers of indexed pages versus time?
To find out the number of indexed pages do a Google search for: site:hub pages.com. That will return everything that is indexed on the site and will give you the number of results, i.e pages in index at the moment. You can't really see what it used to be in the past, I think GreekGeek had the number of pages indexed before september, possibly in the hub comparing HubPages to Squidoo.
You can see some HubPages statistics under http://hubpages.com/about/team
what I think is really fascinating is that there are only 141,575 published hubbers, and the average number of hubs per user is less than 10. In the past there also was information that about 65% of the hubs get less than 10 views per month.
Dunno if this was pointed out, but that increase easily could have been when they accidentally indexed pages they didn't mean to include (as per Paul's original post). Q&A would add a huge number, and all would appear as short (substabdard, in Panda's beady little eyes). I think Greek Geek has made some great points here, BTW.
I have 116 under my site with that formula and many are questions. I hesitated to delete questions, as we get some pay for them from Adsense. I don't know what to do, and wish we could figure this out. I know everyone on the site is trying to figure it out.
Brakel2 - if HP has adjusted things so those pages (the questions you asked, or forum threads you started) don't get picked up and indexed by Google, then traffic should return. It may take a while, but if that has been the factor, the fix will address it. So it should be okay to post questions now, I think.
If Paul is reading this, it would be great to get an update from the site's perspective - and thanks, again, for being on top of it!
I don't know of the official rationale, but I can suggest a rationale.
For over a year, I've been puzzling over why Google was treating Squidoo nicely and punishing Hubpages, when Squidoo pages are more cluttered, have more in-your-face advertising, and allow many more affiliate links. It made no sense!
Last summer, I noticed that Hubpages was showing search engines ALL its content, both the good stuff and not so good stuff, whereas Squidoo's ranking algorithm only shows search engines its top 500,000 pages and says, "never mind the rest; we'll show you those if their authors improve them."
So? Well, the Panda part of Google's algorithm looks at an entire domain and assigns it a rating based on the total ratio of good stuff to lousy stuff. Then, every page on the site will get ranked higher or lower in Google's search result pages based partly on that rating. If two college students have the same amount of dirty laundry, but one shoves it in the closet, the one with the hidden laundry hamper will come out looking tidier. That might explain why Hubpages was being hurt by Panda.
I emailed this idea to Hubstaff late last summer. I have no idea if they implemented idle hubs after discussing the point I'd raised, or if they had already thought of this, but... Mea culpa.
I actually like the basic idea of idle hubs, although I think it could use fine-tuning.
Squidoo has this artificial, complicated lensranking algorithm where it tries to GUESS what pages are the best.
Whereas Hubpages (I think?) just considers one factor: have search engines come by this hub in a really long time? No? Well, then, let's hide it from search engines until the author gives it a spit and polish. If idle hubs weren't getting search traffic anyway for a really long time, then hiding them from search engines won't change the amount of search traffic they're getting. As long as they're still visible to human visitors, who cares? And if the author wants to give a hub another chance, he or she can edit it to remove idle status, and tweak it to try and make it more search engine friendly. If the edit brings some search traffic, the ZZz will not come back.
The only problem I'm seeing with Idle Status is when the "Idle Status" trigger gets tripped too soon, before a hub has found its traffic potential, or if it gets tripped on a hub that gets traffic at only certain times of the year. We don't want the Idle filter blocking search engines from crawling hubs that COULD get search traffic, only those that, frankly, don't.
Good points. May I add a couple.
=> There is a quality component for the ZZZ which is weird. I have had hubs get ZZZ when they were published in July, others in the last 6 months. I think they were 'flagged' as link type hubs - which they weren't.
=> There is a Catch22 in the notion that idling hubs, decreasing number of hubs indexed will generate more traffic. Removing hubs and their links is likely to reduce traffic for the remaining hubs. More will be idled, less indexed, less traffic, less income.
=> The front door is still open. HP has admitted that they would require 44 staff to check all the newly published ones - impossible!. So new poor quality ones are streaming in every day. Idle hubs does not fix this. I suspect that Squidoo does not allow this as new lenses have a low score and so are not 'featured' unless their predictive system works.
I'm not following your catch22, unless you refer to the 'google juice' a link might provide. Removing a hub with zero traffic won't decrease traffic, and it never provided any traffic via it's own links anyway.
There has to be a point of diminishing returns on the number of outgoing links and 'google juice' as well, and I suspect that HP provides enough links anyway to take care of this anyway. Again, loss of links between hubs won't make much difference if that is true.
I get a good deal of traffic to my hubs from within my own subdomain, via links I provide, but the hub giving a link has to have traffic in the first place to induce a reader to move on. If they aren't coming to it, they aren't following the links there to other hubs. Losing those links won't hurt at all.
"Removing a hub with zero traffic won't decrease traffic"
The point is that few hubs have zero traffic - my gestimate is that the threshold is less than an average of 1 hit every two days ie hubs get ZZZ when they have 100 hits in last 12 months.
"I get a good deal of traffic to my hubs from within my own subdomain, via links I provide"
Presumably these are reciprocal links A=> B and B=>A, B=>C, C=>A.
If they are related hubs a search might bring a user to A who then follows the link to C then to B. If C does not exist B misses out on the hit.
Think of the big picture - HP wants to ZZZ - 5 million pages - that has to mean a loss of traffic, loss of PR for both home url and subs. Its a long road back to recover the lost hits
All my idling hubs have no links going into them that is why they are idle, I thought. I also think that if a hub has external links coming from other sources you would think twice about making it idle, as there would be some juice coming from those links into the page. Hence that's why I thought idling hubs have no inbound links from external sources.
Because Squidoo is as you so eloquently describe "in-your-face advertising, and allow many more affiliate links" it encourages affiliates and link builders, who build valuable links constantly into the site to gain advantage. I just think that is why it out shines Hubpages. Squidoo even though it is an ugly, hideous site is successful because it's only the rich who are terribly good looking, money really is the root of all evil.
The Squid has many tentacles reaching in and out all with an underlying purpose, traffic, the community is social business media driven so attracts people who will build a site to make money.
I don't know but I think Hubpages has a very different community, yes they want to make money but they are not prepared to do more than write. They are not as driven as the crowd on Squidoo otherwise they would be on there and not here.
They have had an easy time of it because Hubpages has given them the security and authority that a big site brings with it but the internet is ever changing, even if the mighty Google doesn't want it to. The internet is people driven and they are such fickle creatures.
Let me explain something, build twenty Squidoo lenses all with links going to a page that you make money from, all in the same niche and related. Then get twenty articles written and spun to produce multiple articles, lets say you end up with ten good versions of each, that's 200 articles. So you post ten different articles on ten different sites all with links pointing to your squidoo lenses that makes money. As well as them pointing with links to your main money page, usually an affiliate page. You can do this with a number of tools online, that you can even train to set up accounts, with any site, log in and post articles to them all automatically, even set up fresh email accounts.
Then get it to set up another set of accounts at social bookmarking sites, Facebook accounts, G+, Gmail accounts and anywhere else you can get a decent link from, Pinterest. Set your automation tool to post to them all in sequence over a number of days with links all pointing to your Squidoo lenses and articles that you posted onto ten others sites. If you do this do you think your lenses are going to do well? They will have ten links from articles on other sites like Wordpress, Blogger, Wizly, Infobarrel or any of another hundred sites similar, all pointing to your lenses and money page with link juice flowing. Plus links from different Facebook accounts, G+ accounts, bookmarking sites all pointing to them all. All seemingly coming from different people on different sites using different accounts. Do you think your money page is going to have the potential for a lot of traffic? Do you think your Squidoo lenses are going to rank well? Do you think you are going to make more money?
I do.
If a hacker attacks your sight, takes your front page down replacing it with their own, saying I hacked this site, ha, ha. Then builds pages to sell pharmaceuticals on it, Google quickly de-indexes your site but the traffic doesn't stop. This is very true because it has happened to me.
Even if Google doesn't pass any link juice through the links you will still get visitors traveling down them. Even if your site is not indexed by Google you will still get visitors.
That's how affiliate pages survive not always because they are at the top of the search pages but because they have thousands or even millions of links bringing traffic. You can rank your Squidoo lenses and it doesn't matter about your affiliate page because they will come. Squidoo lenses and all the rest of these types of online sites are good for disguising these type of link networks so google can't tell.
Next time somebody is Google bashing they want to imagine what it is like trying to protect your business against highly automated pirates.
There are people doing this all the time with Squdoo Lenses and Google can't tell, even if it does keep trying. They are doing it with Hubpages as well but it is more difficult with Hubpages and less valuable to them so not as hot as The Squid.
I think that's why Squidoo does better, the systems rigged in it's favor.
Squidoo
External Backlinks
37,060,823
Hubpages
External Backlinks
6,327,283
Squidoo only has 30 odd million backlinks more than Hubpages.
Based on my own experience with Squidoo's WIP filtering, it's much closer to only 400,00 lenses which they actively show to Google.
Also, since the inception of Squidoo the forums have actually been located on an entirely separate domain from the lenses. All the idle chit-chat has never been a part of squidoo.com.
Ditto. It's useful and reassuring to know that known issues are being tackled. One of my HP accounts went up 20% and two were hit on Thursday - any help with identifying problems from HP will always be helpful.
(My Squidoo accounts seem unaffected by the algo change)
Thank you Paul for the updates! Hopefully I will see my traffic climb back to normal soon.
Back to the linking problem - I have many links to resource websites showing where I got my information. I only select the ones with Google page rank. Could you please tell us what kind of links we need to stop using. .
You should not be concerned if the pages you link to are of high quality. If you find a recipe on someone's non-spammy well-designed blog and you cite it as a resource, that won't hurt your page. Such a blog might have a low pagerank just because it isn't very old yet. However, if the blog is filled with ads and lots of scraped content, you shouldn't link to it. You have to use your best judgment.
Regarding pages our hubs or pages link to - Could there be another potential issue with Q&As resulting from hubs inspired by our questions that are well-intentioned but might have quality issues? Do those show up as links? Just asking - maybe someone here knows how that works.
Seldom have I seen so much fear-mongering and random speculation as in this thread. Very little knowledge or valuable know-how seems to be generated.
i used to have 1000 views..on 28 september it went down to 350..last week it came up around 500..views again fell on friday....now only 450..
dhannyya--my traffic seems to have followed a similar pattern to your's, but in the past two days appears to have perked up and approached Pre-google update levels. My traffic is often a bit lower on Saturdays.
My views suddenly perked up yesterday. Not sure why, but I had just deleted 2 questions that had 2 or less answers. Can't believe it would have such a quick effect though, so if anything changed with hubpages around yesterday, well done from me!
Mine started picking up, too, Thomas. I don't know deleting a few Qs helped, but they probably needed to go anyway. I think HPs fix of undoing their connection to our subdomains may have been the driving force. Good job, HP!
My traffic is starting to pick back up today.
Copyright © 2024 The Arena Media Brands, LLC and respective content providers on this website. HubPages® is a registered trademark of The Arena Platform, Inc. Other product and company names shown may be trademarks of their respective owners. The Arena Media Brands, LLC and respective content providers to this website may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website.
Copyright © 2024 Maven Media Brands, LLC and respective owners.
As a user in the EEA, your approval is needed on a few things. To provide a better website experience, hubpages.com uses cookies (and other similar technologies) and may collect, process, and share personal data. Please choose which areas of our service you consent to our doing so.
For more information on managing or withdrawing consents and how we handle data, visit our Privacy Policy at: https://corp.maven.io/privacy-policy
Show DetailsNecessary | |
---|---|
HubPages Device ID | This is used to identify particular browsers or devices when the access the service, and is used for security reasons. |
Login | This is necessary to sign in to the HubPages Service. |
Google Recaptcha | This is used to prevent bots and spam. (Privacy Policy) |
Akismet | This is used to detect comment spam. (Privacy Policy) |
HubPages Google Analytics | This is used to provide data on traffic to our website, all personally identifyable data is anonymized. (Privacy Policy) |
HubPages Traffic Pixel | This is used to collect data on traffic to articles and other pages on our site. Unless you are signed in to a HubPages account, all personally identifiable information is anonymized. |
Amazon Web Services | This is a cloud services platform that we used to host our service. (Privacy Policy) |
Cloudflare | This is a cloud CDN service that we use to efficiently deliver files required for our service to operate such as javascript, cascading style sheets, images, and videos. (Privacy Policy) |
Google Hosted Libraries | Javascript software libraries such as jQuery are loaded at endpoints on the googleapis.com or gstatic.com domains, for performance and efficiency reasons. (Privacy Policy) |
Features | |
---|---|
Google Custom Search | This is feature allows you to search the site. (Privacy Policy) |
Google Maps | Some articles have Google Maps embedded in them. (Privacy Policy) |
Google Charts | This is used to display charts and graphs on articles and the author center. (Privacy Policy) |
Google AdSense Host API | This service allows you to sign up for or associate a Google AdSense account with HubPages, so that you can earn money from ads on your articles. No data is shared unless you engage with this feature. (Privacy Policy) |
Google YouTube | Some articles have YouTube videos embedded in them. (Privacy Policy) |
Vimeo | Some articles have Vimeo videos embedded in them. (Privacy Policy) |
Paypal | This is used for a registered author who enrolls in the HubPages Earnings program and requests to be paid via PayPal. No data is shared with Paypal unless you engage with this feature. (Privacy Policy) |
Facebook Login | You can use this to streamline signing up for, or signing in to your Hubpages account. No data is shared with Facebook unless you engage with this feature. (Privacy Policy) |
Maven | This supports the Maven widget and search functionality. (Privacy Policy) |
Marketing | |
---|---|
Google AdSense | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Google DoubleClick | Google provides ad serving technology and runs an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Index Exchange | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Sovrn | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Facebook Ads | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Amazon Unified Ad Marketplace | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
AppNexus | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Openx | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Rubicon Project | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
TripleLift | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Say Media | We partner with Say Media to deliver ad campaigns on our sites. (Privacy Policy) |
Remarketing Pixels | We may use remarketing pixels from advertising networks such as Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and Facebook in order to advertise the HubPages Service to people that have visited our sites. |
Conversion Tracking Pixels | We may use conversion tracking pixels from advertising networks such as Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and Facebook in order to identify when an advertisement has successfully resulted in the desired action, such as signing up for the HubPages Service or publishing an article on the HubPages Service. |
Statistics | |
---|---|
Author Google Analytics | This is used to provide traffic data and reports to the authors of articles on the HubPages Service. (Privacy Policy) |
Comscore | ComScore is a media measurement and analytics company providing marketing data and analytics to enterprises, media and advertising agencies, and publishers. Non-consent will result in ComScore only processing obfuscated personal data. (Privacy Policy) |
Amazon Tracking Pixel | Some articles display amazon products as part of the Amazon Affiliate program, this pixel provides traffic statistics for those products (Privacy Policy) |
Clicksco | This is a data management platform studying reader behavior (Privacy Policy) |