What’s suddenly wrong with Q&A?

1. 66

   Glenn Stokposted 6 years ago

   For a long time I’ve been very happy with the Q&A feature. I've been motivated to make them into mini-hubs (as I call them). The Q&A traffic accounted for over 5% of all my daily hub traffic, which wasn’t bad.
   
   In addition, the view duration on my Q&A pages showed people were spending the time reading them, as I could see by watching with Real Time GA. And the GA behavior flow showed some people even clicking to the related hub to read more.
   
   However, for the past week the traffic on Q&A pages has dropped by 90%. (Traffic on hubs has not been effected).
   
   Are others experiencing the same drop in traffic on their Q&A? Does HubPages staff know why?

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      TIMETRAVELER2posted 6 years agoin reply to this

      No, but I realized today that some of the emails that come to me from the team are winding up in my spam folder!  Don't know why, because all of them don't do it.

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      1. 66

         Glenn Stokposted 6 years agoin reply to this

         If you’re having that problem, put hubpages.com in your whitelist so that anything ending with it is accepted.

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            TIMETRAVELER2posted 6 years agoin reply to this

            Have no idea how to do that!

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            1. 66

               Glenn Stokposted 6 years agoin reply to this

               Your email program should have settings you can adjust. If you don’t have a whitelist, you want to be sure you allow email from people you already have in your directory. In other words, don’t spam filter people you already know.

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               1. 73

                  TIMETRAVELER2posted 6 years agoin reply to this

                  I don't mark anybody with a spam filter unless I don't want to hear from them.  Can't figure this thing out.  Oh well.  Thanks anyhow.

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                  1. 67

                     lobobrandonposted 6 years agoin reply to this

                     When you find one in your spam folder, open it and look around your screen there should be an option to say not spam. If not in words find an icon of sorts.

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      DrMark1961posted 6 years agoin reply to this

      I have been seeing the same thing with traffic from QandA. Every time one of my questions has great traffic the answer is taken off of a separate page and put views go down to 0, of course.
      I do not think that this increases the hubs ratings. (The hubs this has been done to already has the featured snippet and the number one rating on Google.)
      Anyway, I have been answering 5-10 questions a day. Since I am no down to 3% views, which is not enough, I am going to hide almost all of them and answer just a few a week.

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      Natalie Frankposted 6 years agoin reply to this

      Is it possible this is because some are getting moved back to the hub due to not enough traffic?

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      1. 66

         Glenn Stokposted 6 years agoin reply to this

         I thought the same thing, but I checked. Although I found some that did really well had been moved back into the various hubs, I also found many with little traffic history that were still on their own pages. Go figure?
         
         With the present state of Q&A traffic, I lost interest in putting so much attention to answering them as mini-hubs. Now if any effort is involved I just hide them. Not worth it anymore unless I see it go back to the way it’s been in the early stages.

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         1. 73

            TIMETRAVELER2posted 6 years agoin reply to this

            I get tons of questions and try to answer all of them.  One good thing is that the questions often give me ideas for hubs!

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2. 72

   theraggededgeposted 6 years ago

   Not really. Mine goes up, then it comes down. Fluctuates throughout the day.

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3. 83

   Kenna McHughposted 6 years ago

   What is "GA"?

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      theraggededgeposted 6 years agoin reply to this

      Google Analytics?

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4. 79

   Natalie Frankposted 6 years ago

   I have found the same things as Sondra.  Sometimes I start what I think will be an answer to a question, but it then goes on to become a hub of it's own.  At this point I don't see a ton of traffic for any of my answers yet have several that are quite detailed and could become hubs with only a little more work. I am waiting to see it traffic seems to go up when these types of answers have been moved back to the hub from an individual page as well whether the traffic before they were moved seemed like it was enough to warrant it.  If there's no difference after a while, I will likely go through and start expanding answers into hubs. 
   
   I think this is a valuable function of the Q & A though not what was intended.  In regards to the function as originally described by HP staff I think overall they haven't proven so successful at least in terms of what I have seen.  I know others have had more success with them.   Given we aren't allowed to know what it takes for a questions to remain on it's own page it seems a bit like smoke and mirrors in terms of having any idea if bothering to answer them is worth it from that standpoint.
   
   At first I made all of mine mini-hubs and answered all of them rewriting the questions when necessary to be able to turn it into a mini hub but have largely become discouraged as well.  It seemed like a good way to end up with another page of content with separate ads that was less work than a complete hub. Now unless I think I will eventually be able to turn an answer into a separate hub if it doesn't seem to contribute to traffic, I don't bother with them either.

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