Why Does Adding Pages to HP not Boost Traffic?

1. 52

   janderson99posted 11 years ago

   A simple question. About 100 pages or so are added to HP every day. Recently HP changed its mind, and allowed thousands of un-featured pages to be indexed. You can see the spikes in the stats in the image, but the stats dropped back to the 'normal' level.
   
   I recently added a lot of pages to my HP sub => same outcome - overall traffic declined a tad.
   
   Why does this occur? Why does the overall traffic count not increase? If you add extra pages, and they get extra traffic, the counts should rise. Why don't they? Quota perchance?
   
   

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      wildernessposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Experience has shown me that while google will give a spike in traffic with publication of a new hub, it will nearly always take months to an increase after that initial spike subsides.
      
      So...wait 6 months or a year after indexing unfeatured hubs.  Then factor in that most of those were not featured because of lack of traffic and you might expect to see a small, modest increase, mostly because some of new hubs will be winners in the traffic game.

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         janderson99posted 11 years agoin reply to this

         OK, but a hundred or so extra pages are added to HP every day. HP has about 900,000 published hubs. 37,000 are added each year (5%). Why doesn't traffic increase? There has been a tiny rise recently, but traffic now is about the same as it was 12 months ago. OK G's animals have contributed to that. But the fact remains that adding pages does not seem to boost traffic.
         Stats over last year.
         

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            wildernessposted 11 years agoin reply to this

            Traffic is indeed about what it was a year ago - before HP unpublished massive quantities of hubs with the QAP system.
            
            It is also up about 50% from two months ago.  Considering the actions of the animals, that doesn't seem unusual and certainly doesn't indicate that traffic is not rising as hubs are produced.
            
            I mean, looking at the first 6 of the last 12 months, there was quite an increase.  Then the animals began to feed (around May) and traffic fell dramatically for several months.  Now it is rising again, at about the 5% rate - just what you suggest it should be.
            
            This has gone on since Panda - traffic slowly rises, then takes a tremendous, quick drop and begins to slowly rise again.  Opinion only, but after several examples of just that since the Panda, I do believe G has a quota that it is enforcing.  I am unable to conceive of anything else that might cause such a long term pattern as we have seen the past few years.

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   rebekahELLEposted 11 years ago

   I remember years ago hearing advice not to assess traffic stats on a frequent basis, but more on a quarterly, bi-annually, yearly basis.  It makes sense to me.

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   relacheposted 11 years ago

   You're imagining a non-logical progression.
   
   Just because people have full pantries doesn't mean they will begin to eat more meals or larger helpings.  Just because you have access to more books doesn't mean you'll automatically read more.
   
   All the people who came to Hubpages on a Monday do not all automatically come back the next day and look at more pages while bringing more friends with them.
   
   Also, how many pages get deleted from HubPages every day?  What if higher quality pages with established backlinks and credibility are being taken down while new content by inexperienced writers is what's replacing it?

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      janderson99posted 11 years agoin reply to this

      In my case I added 90 pages over the last month (transfers - deleted and de-indexed from another site), which generated 4,000 or so extra views, Yet my overall traffic remained static. It did not increase. This mirrors what occurs on HP overall. More pages are added, they get extra traffic, yet the overall count remains static.

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4. 41

   Writer Foxposted 11 years ago

   Adding extra pages does not automatically mean more traffic.  Traffic from search engines only comes when search engines rank the new pages highly on search results.  Sometimes that can take a while and sometimes pages will never rank highly. 
   
   Also, 'published' and 'indexed' are two different things.  Only about 360,000 Hubs are available to search engines, and not all of those will find their way into the index of search engines.

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5. 52

   janderson99posted 11 years ago

   Let's say there are 1000 good pages that get good traffic out of 10,000 indexed.
   The traffic from those good pages is 5000 hits average per day.
   Let's say we add 100 pages, they get indexed, and 10 of these are good ones that get traffic at the same rate.
   They generate 50 extra hits per day.
   So the traffic should rise to 5050 hits average per day.
   If the traffic remains at 5000 per day, one hit must be lost, for every extra hit gained.

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      Jodahposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      I just enjoy the experience of being able do what I love...write, and receive encouraging comments. I understand how some people are concerned about traffic and earnings, but I think if this becomes your major focus then your writing loses something and what was once done for fun can become stressful and a chore.

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         Marisa Wrightposted 11 years agoin reply to this

         Jodah, HubPages has only recently changed its focus to emphasise writing for fun.  Most "older" Hubbers joined when the site was advertised as a place to make money from your writing.  So you'll find that is the focus of many of us. 
         
         Besides, HubPages wasn't founded as a charity, it's a business that needs to make a profit to survive.   HubPages makes its profit by taking a share of everything we earn.  If we don't earn, they don't earn, then the site goes broke and we all lose out.  I don't think that's likely any time soon, but don't think it can't happen - there are plenty of other writing sites which have gone bust in the past. 
         
         So if you want your writing to be showcased here for the long haul, you should give some thought to how it can best earn its keep!
         
         Besides, I don't buy the idea that writing for money somehow cheapens the process.  I was just watching a program on Haydn yesterday. He was employed by the Esterhazys to write music for their events, and the comment was made that he was very clever at writing music to please his patrons.  I don't hear anyone suggesting Haydn's music is bad just because he wrote it for money.   I could give you plenty of other examples from all the arts.

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            Jodahposted 11 years agoin reply to this

            OK point taken Marisa. I wasn't aware of the changes and how it started out.I have actually applied to have adSense etc but am still waiting. So I thought I may as well join the club, it's just taken me 4 years to do it. I didn't mean to insinuate that being paid cheapens the art of writing. I'm sure it actually helps encourage people to put pen to paper instead of keeping things to themselves. So that's good, and the more you write the better you get at it. I admit when I am wrong.....cheers.

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      relacheposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      The reader audience are not robots who do the same things, and go to the exact same websites every single day.

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   3. 88

      wildernessposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      You're talking a change of 1%.  Traffic is not stable enough to detect that with any surety.
      
      Change the hub count 20%, look at traffic after a year and for a multi-month period, and you might learn something.  Might.

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6. 60

   Mark Ewbieposted 11 years ago

   I agree with the quota idea.  Just a dial on a box somewhere that Matt Cutt adjusts for his own sexual pleasure.  Google have less idea about policing quality than they do about selling information to the NSA.

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      janderson99posted 11 years agoin reply to this

      I think the fixed quota idea makes sense from an advertising perspective. G makes more money if there are more baskets with slots for advertisers to compete for.

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         Jean Bakulaposted 11 years agoin reply to this

         When we add a new hub, it used to bring our score down, the average one. Now when I add a new hub (and I rarely do) it has the blurry gray circle around it, and then usually shows up somewhere in the 80's in my account. There are a lot less readers here now, I have a whole series that I wrote over the summer that has been virtually ignored, and it's well written and would be interesting to people who like the subject.
         
         I, too, have seen a small spike in traffic. Had it not been for about $2.00, I would have made the monthly payout. But that's nothing to be proud of after three years, especially when I used to do better. Hubs do take time to get noticed, so if you put a large amount on at one time, that won't help you.

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7. 41

   Writer Foxposted 11 years ago

   If you added 90 new pages about topics which you already have Hubs, the older ones could take a dive and be replaced by the newer ones.  Also, I think you keep way too many Hubs on the same account.  You just added 90 new links (suddenly) to your Profile, which means none of your other Hubs are getting PageRank from your Profile page.  The previous 90 just lost the PR juice they had.
   
   HP should really only show 50 Hubs on a Profile, and then go to a Page 2, 3, 4, etc. Google is not going to crawl more than 100 links on a page, and that includes all the links in the header, the footer and the sidebar.

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   1. 52

      janderson99posted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Silly me

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   2. 52

      janderson99posted 11 years agoin reply to this

      That's probably why HP moving 14,000 or so hubs back to the mother ship (EC) did not boost traffic.

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8. 85

   aa liteposted 11 years ago

   But what about all the pages, on other sites that are added everyday.  A lot of these pages are direct competitors of our hubs for Google rankings.
   
   I think the question is whether the rate of increase in hubs on HP equals the rate of growth of the web overall.
   
   Alternatively, it's possible that Google keeps ranking HP lower and lower, so if we didn't keep adding pages we would actually be losing traffic.  A case of having to run just to stay in place.
   
   But the quota idea works as well.
   
   It is weird isn't it.  Over a year after HP introduced QAP, idling and de-indexed a huge bunch of bad hubs, traffic is still in the same place.  If all these bad hubs, and I do think that many of them were very bad, were what caused the Google slap, surely removing them should help.  Admittedly Google might still find things it is unhappy with on this site, but surely not as many things as a year ago?

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9. 52

   janderson99posted 11 years ago

   Hey, I just got an email back from Matt.
   
   He confirmed that it was true that Google had a secret quota for all major sites which was part of its 'Do no Evil' policy. This prevents one site wiping out all the similar sites in the genre, which would be unfair to the hosts and contributors.
   
   It is complicated but this is the way it works.
   
   HP's quota is currently 750K. This is reviewed each month and depends on quality, user engagement, revenue to Google, Spam and feedback from users. It partly depends on how Squidoo and other similar sites are going with spam etc. but other things as well.
   
   The algorithm G has developed uses the 7-day average traffic score. At midnight each day, the Algo compares average traffic with the quota. It then tweaks the ranking for every page on the site by a tiny amount to bring the quota within the specified range.
   
   Its not perfect, and there is a lag in the response, but it works to keep traffic within quota, long term.
   
   The HP traffic is a little above quota at the moment because a large number of pages were re-indexed on the site. The stats over the last couple of days show that the Algo is working to pull the traffic down within range. There can be over-shoots and under-shoots but the system works well over the months and years.
   
   Well there you have it.

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      Marisa Wrightposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      I assume this is a joke?

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10. 85

    aa liteposted 11 years ago

    Seriously?  I thought Google always beat its chest and denied that they have quotas.  Which doesn't mean they don't, of course.

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11. 41

    Writer Foxposted 11 years ago

    HP may set a crawl quota so its servers are not overloaded by bots, but there is no such thing as a traffic quota.  Google controls search rankings, not how many people actually click through from a search result. Google also controls how many listings a single website will receive for a given search query on a search results page. What you have written here is ridiculous and I think if Matt had something to say he would post it here himself.

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12. 92

    Will Apseposted 11 years ago

    Google creates algos that rank pages. Then it tinkers endlessly with those algos to see what happens. Nobody controls where a particular page ranks although some sites will receive manual penalties.
    
    Of course, there are certain watch lists that target individuals who jump to silly conclusions on the basis of no evidence at all.

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13. 60

    Mark Ewbieposted 11 years ago

    I love people who claim to know how Google works.  Plenty of in-house experts pontificating as though they are in direct communication with those who control the traffic.
    
    The sad thing is that despite their wonderful knowledge there is f--- all they can actually do about it.
    
    How many SEO experts are there?
    
    Answer: All of them.
    
    As for quotas.  Given that NO-ONE on here knows how the algorithm works it is a reasonable conclusion.  I watch my traffic stats, or used to because I no longer give a crap, and it is amazing how 'controlled' the traffic is.  How reliable and regular.
    
    Perhaps it is not a quota.  Maybe it is fate.

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    1. 92

       Will Apseposted 11 years agoin reply to this

       You are not quite the ray of sunshine that you used to be, Mark. More like one of those Radio 4 shipping forecasts, in fact.
       
       North Finisterre: bad becoming worse, smoke, drizzle.

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          Mark Ewbieposted 11 years agoin reply to this

          Yes well - you can blame Matt Cutts for that.

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             Beth37posted 11 years agoin reply to this

             What did I tell you two about not getting along? I wont have it. You belong together! Mates for life!

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                Will Apseposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                Ok Mom but Mark is very competitive.

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                   Beth37posted 11 years agoin reply to this

                   You clearly started it.

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                   1. 92

                      Will Apseposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                      You always take his side.

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                         Beth37posted 11 years agoin reply to this

                         He doesn't talk back.

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                         1. 92

                            Will Apseposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                            He is a bit of coward.

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                               Beth37posted 11 years agoin reply to this

                               Now you've done it.

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14. 92

    Will Apseposted 11 years ago

    He can't hear. He's over on Blubbers pretending to like things.

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       Beth37posted 11 years agoin reply to this

       lol. You're truly wicked.

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    2. 60

       Mark Ewbieposted 11 years agoin reply to this

       Lol.  Bubblews is down.  But I have chores.

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          Beth37posted 11 years agoin reply to this

          Do you see? He's doing his chores. He's obviously the good one.

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       2. 92

          Will Apseposted 11 years agoin reply to this

          Counting big piles of cents?

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             Beth37posted 11 years agoin reply to this

             Do you have any real life friends?

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                Will Apseposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                Only when I can find the foot pump.

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                   Beth37posted 11 years agoin reply to this

                   What do you do with a foot pump that would cause ppl to want to be your friend?

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                      Mark Ewbieposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                      Oh dear.  Will?

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                         Beth37posted 11 years agoin reply to this

                         Will I what?

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                      2. 92

                         Will Apseposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                         I think that you should explain. You are better with these kinds of issue.

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                            Beth37posted 11 years agoin reply to this

                            And you know that b/c?

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                            1. 92

                               Will Apseposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                               He is obviously a lady's man. And he has a delicate way with words.

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                                  Beth37posted 11 years agoin reply to this

                                  We're right back where we were. You both need to take a time out, though you appear to be the instigator once again. I am pretty sure I am your only friend left, how soon before you turn on me? Where did I go wrong with you?

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             Mark Ewbieposted 11 years agoin reply to this

             It goes direct into Paypal these days Will.

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15. 92

    Will Apseposted 11 years ago

    I don't understand. I was playing nice!
    
    Can I have my Ritalin now?

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       Beth37posted 11 years agoin reply to this

       No, it might dull your senses. I like you the way you are.
       
       Have you ever thought about making friends with ATM? You two might actually hit it off.

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          Will Apseposted 11 years agoin reply to this

          Sometimes when I am lonely I go talk to the ATM, but I wouldn't say that we were close.

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             Beth37posted 11 years agoin reply to this

             Do you talk to him in the mirror? Inquiring minds...

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             1. 92

                Will Apseposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                The mirror misrepresents me so cruelly.
                
                Below is the real me:
                
                
                But in the mirror I would like a shriveled potato.

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                   Beth37posted 11 years agoin reply to this

                   You're so tiny I can't see you?

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16. 92

    Will Apseposted 11 years ago

    That URL bombed. Now I will have to show you one with the woman who stalks me.
    
    
    
    I am the one with the strange grimace.

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       Beth37posted 11 years agoin reply to this

       I don't think you're trying hard enough.

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       1. 92

          Will Apseposted 11 years agoin reply to this

          Someone is sabotaging me! Honestly. Maybe a mod has a hatred of handsome French movie stars from the sixties (in some of my pics I look remarkably like Alain Delon).
          
          I am scared I will break something if I try again. But perhaps I should...
          
          Just as an experiment I will try a potato. If that loads it must be an envy stricken mod.
          
          
          Above is what the mirror thinks I looked like when I was young.

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             Beth37posted 11 years agoin reply to this

             What an adorable tot you were.

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                Will Apseposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                Thanks. I will stay here quietly for a while and just keep a few eyes on things.

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                   Beth37posted 11 years agoin reply to this

                   It's all just a mish-mash today.

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