Traffic Down 50% and Featured Snippet Lost

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   eugbugposted 3 years ago

   
   I've lost the 6 or 7 featured snippets I had in the past for articles on Turbofuture, Owlcation and Dengarden. This tutorial has dropped from 2000 views per day last February to 1000 per day this year. There's not much more I can add to it. Maybe it's just all the ads pulling the rank down.
   
   https://owlcation.com/stem/Everything-A … and-Cosine

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      OldRosesposted 3 years agoin reply to this

      Traffic is down for all of my articles compared to last year.  With CPMs down even more than the traffic, my earnings are a pittance.

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      Kenna McHughposted 3 years agoin reply to this

      In general, I see which sites are ranking and how they relate to the search.

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   S R Mendozaposted 3 years ago

   My earnings are down 50% from this time last year.

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3. 65

   eugbugposted 3 years ago

   The thing is, maybe it doesn't even making a lot of earnings, even though it pulls in lots of views. If stats giving earnings per article are available to Hubpages, I wish we had access to them, rather than wasting time trying to remedy articles that have lost lots of traffic, but aren't actually generating much revenue.

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      JerryFisherposted 3 years agoin reply to this

      Totally agree. I used one article as an experiment that like yours had always consistently generated above average views. I spent three months revising and adding to it weekly and then took a break from it. Six months later with no further revisions and it has even fewer daily views than nine months ago. Weirdly it has always been a first page article on Google and has never slipped in its ranking for a fairly popular topic, yet sees fewer views. But I also agree on the advertising. I loathe it. This is a 14,000 word article and if I came across it for the first time trying to duck and dive through the ads I'd give up after one to two thousand words.

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      PaulGoodman67posted 3 years agoin reply to this

      Guessing roughly how much an article earns isn't that difficult, I believe.
      
      For example, the CPC (costs per click) values that you see on sites like Ubersuggest give an indication of the relative value of keywords.
      
      It's an inexact science but good enough to give an idea of revenue, which is all you need when you already have the overall income.
      
      I have multiple accounts too, which helps. It's easier to see which articles earn more in smaller accounts, when you can cross-compare.

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   eugbugposted 3 years ago

   It also had four basic edits and one premium edit.

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5. 65

   eugbugposted 3 years ago

   Time on page however has increased, so maybe impressions haven't changed.
   
   

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6. 82

   Solarasposted 3 years ago

   For whatever reason - Thesprucepets is beating out HP and several other sites right now for the top spot.  They are not superior articles to my view, however their advertising resides in the sidebar, and does not interfere with the reading of the article.

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      eugbugposted 3 years agoin reply to this

      It's also fast. In comparison, Hubpages network sites are incredibly slow to display photos and ads on a mobile device. Also that video still takes up 1/3 of the top of the screen and it's not obvious how to get rid of it.

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      Kenna McHughposted 3 years agoin reply to this

      Spruce has it nailed. The articles grab your attention with the information you need, though lacking details, and the ads don't get in the way.

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         Solarasposted 3 years agoin reply to this

         The ads were slow to load, but everything else got loaded quickly.  I thought, at first, that they had no ads, lol.  They do, but they prioritize the content.  Imagine that.

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            Shesabutterflyposted 3 years agoin reply to this

            I'm honestly not surprised Spruce ranks higher. I've always thought it would over take HP. Their articles are not always 100% accurate and could do with some further expanding and some grammar checks, but I do like the straight to the meat of the article concept and the fact that most of their articles contain a table of contents. They also have better designed tables/charts/color theme, ect and their "related" articles are actually related! I noticed they recently added fact check and reviewed by links below the author on some of the more authoritative articles. I wonder if that actually helps their rank in any way.
            
            Spruce is basically HP now that they have greatly diversified into several niches in the last few years. The fact they do not let just anyone write for them is likely a huge advantage. The top ad was a bit slow to load for me, but when I started scrolling it disappeared right away and the ads in the margin were all loaded.
            
            I am entering peak season for my top Owlcation articles and they are seeing the increase I was hoping for after a dismal January. My CPMs are still not the greatest, but I'm trying not to get too discouraged yet as the new impression calculations seems to make up at least a little bit of the difference for me.
            
            How do you accurately determine if you have lost a snippet? When I am in incognito mode, it shows I have lost the snippet on Bing. I still hold the first spot on Google, but there is no longer a snippet for any article with those keywords which I thought was strange. When I tried in a normal browser I was still at the top and no snippet for Google, but I was appearing in the snippet on Bing. I'm assuming incognito mode is more likely what the rest of the population would see?
            
            When I searched for another Owlcation article that I saw had an increase in views (0-1 a day to over 20) I noticed it on the first page of Google, but not on the first three pages of Bing, unless I typed in the majority of the title then it appeared in the snippet. I'm really surprised if this article somehow managed to make the leap to the first page. It has not done well at all since I published it in 2014. It was last "updated" in Sept. so nothing recently I did that would have caused this to happen either.

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7. 66

   PaulGoodman67posted 3 years ago

   HP is for sure doing worse than it was at this time last year. But then 2021 was a good year (at least up until Summer). 2020 was an awful year.
   
   This year so far has been like 2020. I still hope it will become more like 2021!

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8. STAFF

   Larry Slawsonposted 3 years ago

   I've noticed an overall increase in the total number of views I have, but my earnings are way down compared to last year.  I'm also saddened by the fact that my top-performing article is only garnering a fifth of its daily views (when compared to prior years).  At one point it had its own snippet and was the number one spot in search results.  That doesn't seem to be the case anymore though...  Hopefully things will start changing for the better this year.

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