It plagued one. And now another hub seems to have caught it.
I'm seeing significant drops in traffic to a couple of my hubs. Maybe it's just because they're not new and intriguing any more, but I don't want that little blue icon to appear all over my stats. Help! What do I do?
Any tips or advice for keeping a stable flow of traffic?
If your traffic began to fall on May 21st, it was because of a change in Google's Panda algorithm and an adjustment called the "Payday loan." See this forum post:
http://hubpages.com/forum/topic/121989
I'm not alone! I guess it's just an inevitability...
Amy - it's boring and trite but you need to write what people are looking for. It needs to be better than the competition. And you need luck. A deal of it.
I think you're right Mark. Well, actually, I know you're right, I'm just in denial! Haha, hard work ahead for me my friend, hard work ahead.
Mine often go from red to blue and back again. Make a small change to the title? Or just wait and see?
I'm planning on taking the route of minor edits and changes for the better. But I am taking my HP stats with a pinch of salt, my lowest rated hub is my most successful engagement wise. Since I'm not yet interested in making money from here, I'm more interested in the people who do visit my hub liking what they read. I like to converse with my readers!
You're learning an important lesson - HubPages' scores and accolades have very little to do with how successful a Hub is! So I wouldn't worry about them.
What you should worry about is the risk of your Hubs becoming unFeatured. If they don't get enough traffic, that can happen. If a Hub becomes unFeatured, it effectively becomes invisible - there's a marker on it which tells Google to ignore it. If you give someone a link to the Hub they can still read it, but you're likely to get few, if any, visitors once it's unFeatured, because most of HubPages' traffic comes via Google.
Unfortunately it's the nature of your subjects that's the problem. To get traffic, you need to attract readers from outside HubPages. Most of those are people searching on Google - so to make money, you need to write about things people are searching for on Google. Looking at your current subjects, I can't think what people could type into Google to find those Hubs - and even if I could think of the phrases they might use, I doubt many people would be typing them.
I think that's a problem common to all writers down the ages. If you want to make a living from writing, you need to be prepared to write what other people want you to write. Writers who write what they want to write often end up starving in garrets! In the old days, writers would become a journalist writing for an editor, or a freelance writer for hire, or would churn out cheap romances while they worked on The Novel. These days it's Google that calls the tune.
Falling traffic is going to be a regular occurrence from now (Memorial Day) through Labor Day (first weekend of September) as most folks here see the bulk of their traffic from the USA.
It will be regularly irregular until we hit "back to school."
Welcome to summer, folks! Remember to wear plenty of sunscreen and anything resembling regular traffic will be back in the fall.
It's a pattern of media consumption that has been visible/tracked in the USA since the invention of the monitoring of tv watching habits. When the Internet got invented, they started monitoring how we consume that and it matches all the decades of television data. This is a "basic" of how our country/culture functions in North America.
Memorial Day (end of May) to Labor Day (start of Sept) in the USA, aka "summer"
Longer hours of daylight
Warmer temps
Kids mostly out of school (right up through college)
Time of year our culture takes their longest vacations
In short, people get outside more and watch less tv and are on the Internet less in the summer.
Wow--that's quite a photo! We need a "like" thumbs-up button in the forums!
A "harbinger of doom", courtesy of NASA.
I've haven't taken a look at what topics you are writing about, but I can share my experience. Every now and then I will see traffic drop on some of my hub. Sometimes the traffic remains steady at the lower level, sometimes it drops to zero for a while, and sometimes it picks back up. My advice is to keep writing. Ideally someone will read one of your newer hubs, like it, and want to read more of your hubs. Best of luck!
Good advice from Isharbait to keep writing. Write evergreen hubs that will do well regardless of the season. The slow months will give them time to get indexed, get a few views, and "ripen" after 4 months or so. By the fall and winter months, if it's a quality hub with information people are searching for, it will do well.
Right now I have four of those blue arrows and one red arrow. I may come back later and on (or more) of the blue arrows might have changed to become a red arrow. Or it might disappear and reappear. They are unpredictable.
No, no they are not. The red and blue arrows are a direct response to short-term rising and falling traffic trends. They were meant to be an at-a-glance way of seeing how your Hubs are doing overall.
HOWEVER, go visit a whole bunch of your own lenses, and your own visits will cause red arrows to appear, making you falsely think your Hubs are getting new traffic. This is especially true for Hubs that have an extremely low number of visits.
It is also natural that Hubs which get red arrows to show they had a quick burst of hot traffic then later show blue arrows as the traffic trend cools down.
I have visited my own Hubs many times to update them or check on them for future updates - I have not seen red arrows appear.
I was also talking before about seeing my stats one night before I sign out and checking the stats again when I sign in the next morning. The red arrows are there in the AM which were not there in the previous PM and I was not in my Hubs overnight. Who did it? The boogieman?
I know that about the traffic speed up/slowdown.
According to the Google Analytics for my Hubs, it's visitors and not the boogieman. And I get a lot of info about those folks.
You might want to swap better statistical info in for some of that unpredictability.
I know it is visitors. I check GA too. I was just making a point that I did not put the arrows there.
And to add another cheerful note...
I just now noticed that my Q&A traffic has truly been slaughtered. Yes, sports fans. Summer has arrove.
by Nathan Bernardo 9 years ago
On a different account, somewhat "experimental" account, one of my Hubs is unfeatured. Generally my inclination was to unpublish it and move it or just delete it. But I kept it and put it in a Hub group. Meaning, if the Hubs before and after it get traffic, possibly the unfeatured one...
by Joween 8 years ago
Well, when you are suffering from depression and you opened your hubpages stats then you notice that 9 of your supposed to be featured hubs got unfeatured due to lack of traffic.. Very disappointing indeed but, can you guys here suggest some tips in improving hits? I don't want to spam my facebook...
by Lizzie Edenfield 8 years ago
Lately I have noticed how most of my articles that have been there for a long time, are being marked as not featured. And even after trying to "fix" them they are placed in the same stage over and over again. Considering the kind of "pay" we get for our effort, it seems kind of...
by Chace 9 years ago
Some people say you should never, ever delete a hub...only edit it and such. What makes you just completely trash your own hubs?
by Barbara Fitzgerald 9 years ago
Your arrival has eclipsed a new feature that we were discussing in earnest when the merger was announced.HubberPro is a new feature. In a nutshell, HP has hired 7 excellent editors to help bring our hubs up to snuff. They will be doing fact checking, editorial corrections, updating images...
by Jemuel 10 years ago
What inspires you to write quality hubs when you know they can be unfeatured for low engagement?Making a quality content hub requires effort and dedication. With the update of Google Panda and low engagement of some hubs, which sometimes results to getting hubs unfeatured, what keeps you inspired...
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