Is Google Overwhelmed By Old Articles

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   Ben Aidooposted 9 years ago

   Is it true that Google is inundated by billions of articles that it's suffering from a system overload, and unable to give quality attention to new and better written articles? Just imagine, the poor Google crawler had to sift through 14 million articles to come up with 10 results on page 1 for a searched I made recently. That would overwhelm any crawler, however agile and dexterous it might be. Could this explain, perhaps in part, why fallen traffic has not recovered on HP. Or is it my imagination taking too big a leap?

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      Kylyssaposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      Maybe Google views on HubPages have dropped off while views on other sites have increased because our domain names and the HubPages domain are associated with pages that host spam, malware, and spun content?
      
      You can see more details in my post here: http://hubpages.com/forum/topic/128525
      
      I thought perhaps it was a cyber attack of some kind but it really just looks like HP hasn't addressed the issue of this class of perhaps unintentional negative SEO created by thousands of businesses trying to coattail on HubPages SEO. My use of the word 'thousands' in the post is not meant as hyperbole. There are literally thousands of the highly spun pages per hub I've checked. If it were only a few, we could knock them down ourselves with a dozen or so spam reports filed per day per hubber, but it's on too big a scale to do so.
      
      Google is not overwhelmed. In my opinion it's trying to deliver good search results to users and sites associated with hundreds of thousands of pages of spam, malware, and spun content are too risky to deliver up for users to read. Imagine the backlash Google would face if thousands of users picked up malware from front page search results every day.

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   psycheskinnerposted 9 years ago

   Google has insane amounts of computing power. And if anything it prioritises new material over old.

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      Ben Aidooposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      Yours is a new twist to the question. If I recall correctly, Google lets new articles simmer for a good while before touching them, since they don't yet have backlinks, which Google considers the mark of authority.

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         Richard-Bivinsposted 9 years agoin reply to this

         It depends on where the article is posted.  If it is a new article on a brand new blog then it will be lost in the sea of competition.  If it is a new article on a high authority site, then it could probably be found on page 1 of Google.  The authority of the site has more weight than the article itself.

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            Susana Sposted 9 years agoin reply to this

            So true.

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            Marisa Wrightposted 9 years agoin reply to this

            +1

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            colorfuloneposted 9 years agoin reply to this

            That does make sense with a blog, @Richard-Bivins.
            Would that be true of a HubPages sub-domain and a newly published hub on it?

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            seraphicposted 9 years agoin reply to this

            So if you had a profile on here for a few years but had never written anything, does that mean you have an aged page?
            
            I also have a second profile on here which is from the transfer of a Squidoo Account. That site page is only 5 months old.
            
            Which profile would be better?

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               Richard-Bivinsposted 9 years agoin reply to this

               If you're older profile has no content on it then it is just the same as a new profile. Nobody has been visiting it, sharing content, engaging with it, etc. so there is no reason to think it would do better than a new profile with engaging content.
               
               @colorfulone  content on a newer hubpages subdomain that follows the guidelines for a stellar hub will outperform any thin content on this entire site, no matter how long the content has curated.  Find topics that are moderate to highly searched using Google's Keyword Planner then use Google Search while you are signed out of Google to determine how many competing pages there are.
               
               Here are the guidelines I follow before I decide to write a hub:
               1. I find a topic that fits in with the overall theme of articles I write under my profile. 
               2. Use Google Search to find related terms with their auto complete.
               3. Plug those terms into the Keyword Planner to find a minimum of 1000 monthly searches.
               4. Plug those searches that get over 1000 back into Google Search to find out how many competing pages there are.  If there are less than half a million then I keep them.
               5. I keep the keyword phrase with the highest search volume and lowest competition and build my hub around that keyword phrase.
               6. I use the other related keyword phrases (if they fit with the overall topic) as sub heading and capsule heading, and photo captions.
               7.  I research the top 10 in Google SERPs to determine what is lacking then write my article.
               8. I research Hubpages to see how many competing hubs there are, and to determine the best category to place my hub. (you would probably be amazed at how many hubs are in the wrong category here on this site.)
               9. I go to Pixabay.com and Morguefile.com to find free to use images that relate to my topic.
               10.  I take those images and make them Pinterest friendly using Picmonkey.com
               11.  I choose a URL that uses my chosen keywords.
               12. I create a Title that has a hook and also uses my chosen keywords.
               13. I create a unique summary that is not also found in the body of my article and contains only one instance of my keyword phrase.
               14. Determine my layout, break up content into small paragraphs to make it mobile friendly, place photos, polls, videos, charts.
               15. Preview the hub on web and mobile, re-read every sentence for proper use and misspelled words and over used words.  Only use my main keyword phrase in the first and last paragraph of my article.  Use related keywords sparingly.
               16. Publish my hub with between 1100 and 1400 words.
               17. Share hub once with my social networks.
               18. Move on to the next topic.
               
               This works well for me.. it may not work for you or the theme of your profile if you have a theme. But creating stellar hubs will be better than thin content any day.

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                  Barbara Kayposted 9 years agoin reply to this

                  Thanks for showing how you do it.

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                  Ben Aidooposted 9 years agoin reply to this

                  Great tips you have here Richard, but you may be sailing against the wind. I read somewhere in the forum that trying to make a living on writing contents is a dying trade, in the same way as the street paid phone, for a good number of years, a great source of revenue for the telephone companies has died away. With the content writing business we've already seen examples of what could happen after the Pandas and Penguins hit, and took away the revenues of companies like Helium, Ezine Articles, Bubblews and Squidoo. The lessons from the precipitous fall in traffic of these companies highlight the reason why we should aggressively diversify our traffic streams, so that a fall in traffic from one stream would not throw us out of business. As we do now, concentrating our efforts almost entirely on gaining traffic from Google is a recipe for disaster. I may be wrong, but the trends are foreboding.

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   makingamarkposted 9 years ago

   It used to be the case that any site more than six months old which hadn't generated traffic and traction would sink without trace in the Google Index.
   
   Put it another way, Google isn't spending too much time searching through the back catalogue of rubbish. It's paying far more attention to preventing it appearing in the future!

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   goatfuryposted 9 years ago

   A crawler that is 10 times more powerful than it was a year ago can handle ten times as much information as last year, and that's where Google has been at for the last 15 yeras in a row, quite literally.

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      Ben Aidooposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      You right, a crawler can be very powerful and still do crazy things. I don't want to believe that hubbers are now writing low quality articles compared with the articles they wrote before the Panda hit. Yet well seasoned hubbers have been complaining in the forum that their traffic has fallen anywhere between 50 to 90% since Panda. If the Google crawler is not overwhelmed and choosing articles it shouldn't, then why is the traffic of HP seasoned writers free falling? Maybe, this explains it. I read in the forum that HP is on Google's gray list. Well, HP is not on the bad list. It's not on the good list either, but HP is on the in-between list. What that means is anyone's guess. Meantime, has HP broken any Google requirement that we should know about?

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         Barbara Kayposted 9 years agoin reply to this

         Ben, There was another forum post about this. Paul talked to Google and was told that there were too many spammy pages. That is why there are new rules about how many Amazon and eBay ads can be on a page. After a site is hit by Panda it can take awhile to get back into Google's good graces.
         
         I don't think it always matters that we have our own subdomains. Once the site gets hit, it can have an effect on many writers here.

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            Ben Aidooposted 9 years agoin reply to this

            Your comment is reassuring in making the point that traffic is falling not because hubbers are producing mediocre articles, but because HP is being penalized by Google for past rules infringements, and until HP works its way back into Google's good graces, we will suffer the effects of Google's displeasure visited upon us from falling traffic. Looking at it from this angle, I'm pretty sure HP management is doing everything to get us back into Google's good graces, because it's obvious everything depends on pleasing Google. And by the way, do we get any significant traffic from Bing and Yahoo?

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               Barbara Kayposted 9 years agoin reply to this

               I get some from Bing and Yahoo, but Google has always been the one to send the most.

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   Uzochukwu Mikeposted 9 years ago

   My view is the same with that of Richard.

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   Maffew Jamesposted 9 years ago

   Panda is a ranking modifier. If a website has a low quality rating through Panda, this dilutes the effectiveness of its inbound links and other search ranking attributes.
   
   This is because all of the different attributes which contribute to ranking in search pages are multiplied by the quality factor. The SEO of a site with the maximum quality rating is multiplied by 1 and the site will experience the full effect of its SEO. Sites with a lower quality rating are getting less value from the same SEO because the full value of everything that helps it rank is multiplied by a number that is less than 1.
   
   The end result is that if two sites have equivalent ranking and one has a lower quality rating, that site will rank lower than the equivalent site with a higher quality rating because Panda decreases the value of ranking factors.
   
   Hubpages traffic as a whole remains lower after the update because the Panda quality rating continues to dilute the value of its inbound links and authority.

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      Ben Aidooposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks or whatever to Panda, HP quality rating factor is below 1, and as a result all the efforts been made by hubbers and HP are having limited effect on boosting traffic. That's clear enough, but how do we get off this slippery slope? Can hubbers do any more than writing stellar hubs and tweaking the configuration of their SEO? It seems all we can do is hunker down, and wait until Google smiles upon us again.

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   firstcookbookladyposted 9 years ago

   How to Ensure Newly Featured and Re-Featured Hubs are Quickly Crawled by Google
   
   google that... easiest way to find the tutorial in the learning center

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   Richard-Bivinsposted 9 years ago

   The only people that will tell you that you can't make a living writing content are the same people that have failed at it.  Certainly, Panda and Penguin were, and continue to be, game changers but they are not end game.  The most successful content producers will never rely on one site to produce their income and they don't produce content solely for themselves. 
   
   Believe it or not, there are PhD's out there that can't put together a coherent paragraph that would translate well to the average layperson. Also, there are countless individuals that are masters of their chosen professions but greatly lack the expertise to convey information and that is where the professional content producer steps in.
   
   While I laid out the process I take at producing content here at HP, the process differs depending on the site where the content is going to be published. But, no matter where you publish your content, you must produce Google friendly content, if not for yourself, for our clients.

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      Ben Aidooposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      Talking about a game changer, the introduction of Google Adword was and continues to be a game changer as Google seeks to maximize ads revenue from its search platform. Google's paid ads customers and super-authoritative websites would always be given priority on page 1. I've come to realize it's dabbling in false hope for one to believe that writing a stellar hub and SEO optimization would put his article on Google page 1 for highly searched keywords. Even for less competition keywords, it's only a matter of time when they will also become competitive, as this may be one of the reasons HP traffic is falling.  I know this sounds pessimistic, but you are right. Those who succeed in content writing rely on multiple traffic sources, which I believe is our escape route from the effects of another Panda or Penguin hit.

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         Barbara Kayposted 9 years agoin reply to this

         I agree also. We can't depend on the whims of Google. There are other avenues of traffic.

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   Suzanne Dayposted 9 years ago

   One day, Facebook appeared and changed the world. In 10 year's time, who knows what will be the god of hub marketing?
   
   There's heaps of rubbish for Google to crawl. Google has been implementing artificial intelligence into functions for search results for some time and I expect it will get smarter and smarter at choosing what is rubbish and what is not.
   
   The moral if you want to plan for the future? Don't write rubbish! Be more professional and more engaging than you would be for any company you work for. This will stand you in good stead

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    Peggy Wposted 9 years ago

    After reading all of the comments, one thing becomes very clear.  Writing good content is necessary but diversifying sites on which to write is also more important than ever.

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       Marisa Wrightposted 9 years agoin reply to this

       I don't think that's the message at all.   The message is that if you want to earn from your writing, you need to be brave and learn how to freelance:  revenue-sharing sites can give you a steady trickle of income but you are missing out on the main game if you don't spread your net wider, because rev-share sites will always be fighting Google.

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          Richard-Bivinsposted 9 years agoin reply to this

          +1 Exactly...

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          makingamarkposted 9 years agoin reply to this

          You got it! +1

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