Best Performing Hub Dropped From 1st to 26th Place

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   eugbugposted 3 years ago

   This one's on Owlcation. Traffic has fallen by 40% in the last fortnight and it's dropped from first place to 26th place for several important keywords from the title. It used to have the featured snippet. Has anyone else lost page one ranking for articles on this niche site? All the algorithm updates this year had no effect. The last two were detrimental.
   
   Edit: Several other tutorials are down about 30%.

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      chef-de-jourposted 3 years agoin reply to this

      Most of my articles are on Owlcation, with good ranking, stable so far. Traffic fluctuates as per the half-term breaks in college/uni/schools etc, this being normal.
      Why your article dropped so drastically is solely down to the recent algorithm? New rivals to challenge for top ranking? Have you altered any keywords?

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         eugbugposted 3 years agoin reply to this

         No, I didn't change anything. An editor fiddled with it but made no drastic changes. There seem to be some new rivals, so maybe Google's policy is to get rid of top ranking content every so often to give other websites a spot in the limelight.

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            chef-de-jourposted 3 years agoin reply to this

            New rivals you say? Perhaps they have a different angle on the same subject from a keyword perspective? More useful content? Together with the H1 issue Brandon has mentioned, plus the unfriendly algorithm, (and HP edit?) somehow your article got knocked off. Hopefully it'll bounce back.

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            Solarasposted 3 years agoin reply to this

            I would double check the fiddling, and see if people are using new search terms for your subjects. I find they change up every couple of years.

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               eugbugposted 3 years agoin reply to this

               I've proportionately lost more views from the UK than the US. I  think it's the combined effects of school holidays and the Google algorithm change that caused the larger decrease in views than last year at the same time.

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   Gregory DeVictorposted 3 years ago

   Eugene, I lost about 25% of my traffic over the past 10 calendar days. However, I have not lost my rankings in the organic search listings. It appears that right now less people are looking for American nostalgia-related information.
   
   A lot of Americans received stimulus checks this past Wednesday, and perhaps they are out shopping, or shopping online. After abominable weather throughout February, the weather is now getting better, and maybe people are spending more time outside. I live in Pennsylvania, and a lot of the COVID restrictions have been lifted over the past several weeks. A lot more people are outdoors now.

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      OldRosesposted 3 years agoin reply to this

      I agree with Gregory.  Traffic on my gardening hubs is skyrocketing now that spring has arrived and more people are gardening.

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         eugbugposted 3 years agoin reply to this

         Traffic is increasing to my gardening hubs too. Possibly the drop in traffic to the math hubs is because there's a spring break for kids in the US? Or are they still in lockdown?

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            OldRosesposted 3 years agoin reply to this

            Definitely!  If it is math hubs, then the problem is spring break.  Unfortunately, more and more states are opening up so students are able to gather pretty normally for spring break.

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            lobobrandonposted 3 years agoin reply to this

            You say you dropped in rankings. That has nothing to do with seasons.

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               eugbugposted 3 years agoin reply to this

               I know, but traffic has dropped which could be due to spring break (there was a dip for a few weeks mid to late March 2020). It has also dropped in rankings for two keywords, from first place to 26th place. Traffic is still higher than this time last year though.

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                  lobobrandonposted 3 years agoin reply to this

                  I see similar trends on Dengarden. Much higher traffic, but a loss in main keyword positions. That is why I looked into what could have changed and pointed out the H1 issue. Unfortunately, that is not fixed yet.

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                     eugbugposted 3 years agoin reply to this

                     Is that double H1 thing recent, or did it exist from when the new look sites were implemented?

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                        lobobrandonposted 3 years agoin reply to this

                        I guess from when the new sites were implemented. Can't say for sure. But my tracking shows my rankings lost 2-3 spots since september/october.
                        
                        How recent is your ranking drop? Did you only notice it because of the drop in traffic?

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                        PaulGoodman67posted 3 years agoin reply to this

                        Looking at Alexa, the views trend for Owlcation is generally downwards over the past few months, but not that dramatically so. The explanation(s) for such a big drop in rankings of an individual hub are potentially manifold but seem likely to be specific to that hub.
                        
                        That said, as rank to views generally follows an exponential pattern, a relatively small drop can easily halve the number of views or worse. Losing a snippet spot is always crappy.

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                        Glenn Stokposted 3 years agoin reply to this

                        Eugene, To best answer your question, I just checked the HTML of a hub on hubpages.com and it has only one H1. But all the hubs on the Maven niche sites have two.
                        
                        It's really an easy fix. All the staff programmers need to do is change the H1 for "Related Articles" to a DIV.

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                           eugbugposted 3 years agoin reply to this

                           Possibly, but there's probably lots of red tape behind the scenes that impedes fixing simple things and maybe a little politics too.

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                              Glenn Stokposted 3 years agoin reply to this

                              You could be right. Guess we'll never know what they are up to. The strange thing is that they did make a temporary fix. Matt said in another thread that it was done to satisfy Google. But I don't see how, because they left it as a second H1.

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                                 lobobrandonposted 3 years agoin reply to this

                                 That is not a fix. If anything making it a bold H1 may give it more weight than it previously had. I did not want to say it directly on that thread as I feel negative feedback may lead them to not do anything at all.

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                                    Glenn Stokposted 3 years agoin reply to this

                                    Thanks for agreeing with me Brandon. I mentioned to Matt in an email a few times that it doesn’t work.  But he keeps insisting that it’s a temporary fix. I don’t see why he can’t change the second H1 to a DIV as I suggested. What do you think about that solution?

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                                       lobobrandonposted 3 years agoin reply to this

                                       Not a div but a <p> tag or a H3 with an id that is styled with CSS so that it looks like an H1. What you mean with a div is the same idea, but your div would have to have the CSS styling instead.
                                       
                                       If I have access to the site code it would take me all but 2 minutes to get done. This is why it is frustrating when such changes cannot be made. I wonder what kind of system they use where they can't make the smallest of changes. I feel they need approval from their board of directors lol. The non-removal of the video at the top being one of the early indicators that they do not have control. The reason they got videos commissioned is that they could not get that out of the theme, at least that is what Samantha had let us believe from her conversations with the rest of the team.

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                                          Glenn Stokposted 3 years agoin reply to this

                                          I agree with everthing you said. Any of those would work when the proper styling is set in CSS. If they are hesitant because it might mess up something else, they could always specify the style in a class.

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                                             lobobrandonposted 3 years agoin reply to this

                                             Yea, I meant to use a class. But, if they are building a website and designing changes on the site, they definitely have the competence to handle this change without the thought of messing something even occurring. I feel it is something in the chain of command that is causing all these problems. That's what I hope it is, because anything else makes me worried.

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                                                Glenn Stokposted 3 years agoin reply to this

                                                That makes sense, and the constant changes with the chain of command might be causing confusion too. James Heckman, Maven’s founder who I met at their Coalition Conference in 2018, has been replaced by Ross Levinsohn as CEO.

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                                                   lobobrandonposted 3 years agoin reply to this

                                                   True. I hope that changes don't need to be approved by the CEO though xD

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   Gregory DeVictorposted 3 years ago

   Like I said above, “I lost about 25% of my traffic over the past 10 calendar days. However, I have not lost my rankings in the organic search listings.”
   
   I checked everything again this morning, and I still have not lost my rankings. I guess that people are looking for other topics now, such as travel.  According to NPR.org:
   
   “As COVID-19 vaccines roll out across the U.S., more travelers are taking to the skies.
   
   Friday marked the busiest day for the nation's airports since the middle of March 2020, when COVID-19 caused air travel to plummet.
   
   About 1.36 million passengers passed through security checkpoints Friday, according to figures from the Transportation Security Administration. That is the highest volume since March 15, 2020, when checkpoints reported more than 1.5 million passengers.”

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   Gregory DeVictorposted 3 years ago

   Eugene, there was a Google search ranking algorithm update on or about March 3, 2021. Maybe this affected your rankings.
   
   Here is the link at Seroundtable.com:
   
   https://www.seroundtable.com/google-sea … 31028.html

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      eugbugposted 3 years agoin reply to this

      That one didn't seem to affect me. Mostly all the ones from mid Feb. to mid March improved things. It's the ones in the last couple of weeks or so that cut traffic and returned it to mid February levels.

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   Shesabutterflyposted 3 years ago

   Not on Owlcation, but my top Delishably article is dropping in ranking for certain keywords. It is now on page two from the top of page one last year. It was hovering at the bottom of page one a few months back so I guess I shouldn't be surprised it has fallen again.
   
   There appears to be one new competion on the first page that I noticed, but it doesn't even answer the keywords I put into Google, so honestly not sure why that is on the first page. My traffic has slowed quite a bit for that article the last year. At first I thought it was the design of the new pages and Covid (although I saw an inital uptick from Covid in the beginning), but now I'm not sure what to think. This article is also having some swings in traffic the past 6 months or so verses holding steady like it has the past two years.

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   eugbugposted 3 years ago

   Seems to be getting worse.
   
   

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      lobobrandonposted 3 years agoin reply to this

      Got a comparison to last year?

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         eugbugposted 3 years agoin reply to this

         This is from April 1st last year to yesterday.
         The last few Google updates seem to have reversed the effects of all the others this year.
         

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            lobobrandonposted 3 years agoin reply to this

            Give it a week or two. I notice that you had an increase mid-April, maybe this year is a slower uptick?

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               eugbugposted 3 years agoin reply to this

               Could be Easter break for schools affecting traffic too, compounding the Google update. I notice last year there was a dip around April 12th

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   eugbugposted 3 years ago

   I mightn't be earning much from this anyway. Chances are that if views are from schools, many of them have ad blockers turned on.

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   eugbugposted 3 years ago

   Has anyone explored whether there are other forums in parallel, Maven site universes where authors complain about these issues on websites that use the same theme?

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   eugbugposted 3 years ago

   Has anyone explored whether there are other forums in parallel, Maven site universes where authors complain about these issues on websites that use the same theme? Or is Hubpages the only one of their acquisitions that uses sign-up authors?

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      Shesabutterflyposted 3 years agoin reply to this

      I believe HP is the only one and as far as I can tell we are the only one that has this exact theme.
      
      I still find it interesting we HAD to have this design, but all the other Maven Channels were able to keep their original design or they have a variation of this, but none of them have this exact set up. Honestly, I don't think any of their acquired sites have the exact same theme/design. Although most are very similar despite topic/who writes for the site.
      
      None that I have found have the large video. With the exception of SI (doesn't start like HP's) & History (Only on their this day in history section, this video is actually more obnoxious than ours as it jumps several times before it gets to the margin). There are quite a few sites who have a related section (with the H1 I believe). Honestly, not entirely sure how to tell the difference but it appears all the subheadings are the same as the main heading whether it be related, news, ect.
      
      I found one site that looks very similar in design to what we have here, that appears to have some one time writers in addition to the staff, but I don't think they accept just any internet sign up members. At least I didn't find a way to simply sign up. They write travel articles and appear to have found a way around the bombardment of ads, but the few ads I saw do appear in the same haphazard way as the placement here. They write short articles with a gallery of photos. I didn't find many lengthy type articles on that site though.

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    eugbugposted 3 years ago

    Traffic still dropping. Down to 1/3 of what it was in March. This happened to a couple of guides before and I never recovered traffic. Organic and direct traffic have dropped by the same proportion. I wonder does google impose a penalty for editing webpages too often?
    

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       PaulGoodman67posted 3 years agoin reply to this

       Traffic generally has been very bad over the past week (down by around 15%?). I am blaming Easter for the general fall and hoping I'm correct.

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          eugbugposted 3 years agoin reply to this

          There was also a Google update or some form of heightened activity according to Semrush on the 5th (and today, the 9th too).
          https://www.semrush.com/sensor

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             PaulGoodman67posted 3 years agoin reply to this

             Damn!

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    eugbugposted 3 years ago

    Traffic has improved somewhat, but didn't return to February levels.
    Would it be worth adding on extra keywords to this title to reflect what's in the tutorial? Or would it make it too long?
    
    "How to Calculate the Sides and Angles of Triangles"
    

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