Editing an article vs starting over

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   Jessica Beasleyposted 5 years ago

   Hi fellow hubbers! I’m wanting to see what you all do in this case. I’m wanting to improve some of my articles that I have already written. Do you find that it helps their score and traffic when you do edit them? Does it really help or do you think it’s just best sometimes to start over completely with an article? I’ve had a great experience so far, but I’ still very new to this (about 6 months.) I want to be better

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      lobobrandonposted 5 years agoin reply to this

      For me it all depends on the URL if the URL is good, it's better to update instead of writing a new hub.

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         Jessica Beasleyposted 5 years agoin reply to this

         Ah good advice! That makes sense because why re-do an article that is getting good traffic.

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      OldRosesposted 5 years agoin reply to this

      I do both.  If a hub is "not bad", I just edit the content.  Add or change a few paragraphs, change some photos, etc.  If I look at an old hub and hate it, I will completely re-write it offline,find new photos, then go into edit mode, delete the existing capsules and start fresh. Either way, traffic always rises.

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         Jessica Beasleyposted 5 years agoin reply to this

         It's good to know that things can get better traffic be doing a little extra work on what we already have!

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      chef-de-jourposted 5 years agoin reply to this

      If the aim is to get all articles to the niche sites - and if you want to earn some money then to the niche sites ye must go - then edit, edit again until they're ready to go.
      
      
      I do quite a bit of editing and updating, adding bits here and there, losing dead weight, moving on again. Depends how much time you want to invest but editing is a good habit to get into.

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      TessSchlesingerposted 5 years agoin reply to this

      The dozen or so articles I updated went nowhere fast. At this point, they don't get traffic, I delete.
      
      That said, a lot of those topics were to do with politics, religion, environmentalism, economics, capitalism, etc. Those topics just don't do well.
      
      I've personally never updated anything that did well as a result.

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   theraggededgeposted 5 years ago

   Edit. Every time

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      Jessica Beasleyposted 5 years agoin reply to this

      Absolutely! I've been trying to get better at going back into old articles and editing and adding more content so that they are more complete and richer. Then there is always that dreaded error you find that you can't believe slipped by! Lol!

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   Glenn Stokposted 5 years ago

   I have updated almost all my hubs since they were first published. Every time I re-read by own content, I find some improvement that I can make.
   
   In addition, older hubs have the advantage of building up a useful stats report where I see what search strings people have been typing into Google to get to my hub. That information has great value because it gives me ideas for making beneficial changes to titles and/or content.
   
   Any time I make these improvements, it helps eventually increase the traffic. You just need to be patient for Google to react to the changes.
   
   I learned my lesson about deleting bad hubs: Don’t do it. You lose the views in your stats. It took me much longer to finally get the “1 million views” accolade because I deleted many of my initial hubs that I wrote when I first began writing on HubPages.
   
   Time spent updating top-performing hubs is worth the effort. It’s much harder to pull low-performing hubs out of the dumps. They usually need much more tender loving care and sometimes require a major rewrite, which I’ve done. It’s better than deleting.

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      TessSchlesingerposted 5 years agoin reply to this

      Well, yes. That goes without saying. All the hubs that I'm talking about had somewhere between 30 and 70 view over 2 or 3 years. They were deader than a dodo, and there were no search strings.
      
      One should certainly update sites articles with good potential, but spending time updating articles just because hubpages says one has to do a blank update of all one's articles?
      
      I don't think so.

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         OldRosesposted 5 years agoin reply to this

         I have to respectfully disagree.  Earlier this year, HP notified me that they were updating all of the hubs on Dengarden to increase traffic.  Because I have complained in the past about the way my hubs have been edited by their well-meaning but horticulturally ignorant editors, they gave me the option of updating all of my Dengarden hubs myself.  It happened at the worst time of year for me when I am busy prepping for plants sales and prepping gardens for planting, but I squeezed it in and updated over 100 hubs.  The increase in traffic was pretty spectacular.  Each month since I finished the update, I have exceeded last year's earnings as well as the targets that I have set for myself.  I have also continued to edit hubs every two weeks that are still on HP so that they can be moved to Dengarden.  Moribund hubs had little or no traffic for years suddenly started getting significant traffic since the update and move to Dengarden.

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            TessSchlesingerposted 5 years agoin reply to this

            Um. Yes. You are writing about a particular topic - which is what I said. If you were writing about some other topic that was not highly desirable, no matter how much they were updated, they wouldn't rank.

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               OldRosesposted 5 years agoin reply to this

               Gardening is an extremely competitive topic.  Kind of on a par with  politics, religion, environmentalism, economics, capitalism, etc.  My traffic per hub is actually quite low.  I have accepted that I will never have thousands of views on any one hub.  Instead I depend on volume.  More hubs = more views.  By updating my hubs so that they all have a 2019 date on them, I merely moved them up a bit in Google rank which resulted in more traffic.

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                  lobobrandonposted 5 years agoin reply to this

                  You should really try looking into what others are saying about a topic and add in angles you are not talking about. My hubs on dengarden (2 of them) which are about plants too get 2k views a day more or less during the 3 peak summer months. So don't take it for granted that it's not possible in the niche.

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                     OldRosesposted 5 years agoin reply to this

                     You're right but I have too many horticultural topics that I want to write about to really concentrate on one plant as you do with tomatoes.  So many topics, so little time.

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                        lobobrandonposted 5 years agoin reply to this

                        True.

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                  TessSchlesingerposted 5 years agoin reply to this

                  For me, it's not worth it. I took off 14 hubs yesterday - just under 2000 views. I transferred most of them to Quora where people read that type of thing and deleted the rest. My hubscore went up as a result.
                  
                  I honestly don't see any point in trying to fix up hubs that aren't working. The half dozen or so that I repeatedly tried fixing got nowhere fast.

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         lobobrandonposted 5 years agoin reply to this

         Update to make your piece of content the best on the internet for that topic. That's all there is to it.

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            TessSchlesingerposted 5 years agoin reply to this

            I have done so in the past. It hasn't helped. I did geology courses iny science degree, Brandon. I know what I am talking about when I speak about climate change. There are topics on HP that simply do not do well. Some of these topics I have written about are 3500 words long.
            
            And I don't think anyone can accuse me of writing badly.
            
            I have always been data intense.
            
            Yesterday I transferred a lot of stuff to my Quora blog.
            
            There are, maybe, three or four articles on HP where the topic may work if updated. I will work on those, but it is simply easier to write new articles.

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            TessSchlesingerposted 5 years agoin reply to this

            Oh, come off it. Even a genius can't make something that doesn't work work.

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               lobobrandonposted 5 years agoin reply to this

               If you go back and see what this reply was to, you will see what I am saying. You say HP asks you to update stuff. They are only asking you to update stuff to make it the best piece of content on the topic. They don't just say update for the sake of hitting the update button. The advice is not directed at you, I have not read even a single of your hubs to give you advice on your hubs.

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                  TessSchlesingerposted 5 years agoin reply to this

                  Okay. Point taken. Sorry. I've just transferred an article from another site and updated it. Spent three hours updating it. I suppose that's better than the five hours I spend normally writing a hub.

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                     lobobrandonposted 5 years agoin reply to this

                     Transferred from somewhere onto HP or the other way around?

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      Jessica Beasleyposted 5 years agoin reply to this

      Thank you so much Glen Stock!! Very good information. It makes so much sense that deleting articles that can simply be edited and made better overtime have value. Thank you so much!

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   TessSchlesingerposted 5 years ago

   I transferred from another content site to here. It used to be on hubpages about 8 years ago (I wrote under another name) So I just transferred it back. I have about 2000 articles lying around. I'm just beginning to go through them now to see what I can use. But things date.

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      lobobrandonposted 5 years agoin reply to this

      2000 wow.

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   TessSchlesingerposted 5 years ago

   Well, I've been writing articles for a lifetime. I started writing on the web in 1999 (that's when I first got hired to write on the web.) My first job on the web was in early 1999 in London as a moderator for some sites.

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      lobobrandonposted 5 years agoin reply to this

      I see. Interesting

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