Article Being Edited and Title Changed

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   eugbugposted 9 months ago

   This doesn't make sense. My article "Gardening for Beginners: 10 Easy Steps to Sowing Seeds which currently ranks in fourth place (despite all the deranking) for "How to Sow Seeds" has had its title changed to "How to Sow Seeds( Plus A Definition)". I'll change it back when they're finished. I've contacted the team about this because it's ridiculous to change something that isn't broken. This used to get 1300 views daily with this title previously, so it's not the title's fault that views have dropped.
   
   Edit : Fourth place in my region. First place when the region is set to the US. So I'd like to know why they decided changing a title was a good idea?

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      chef-de-jourposted 9 months agoin reply to this

      Did you get to know the name of the editor or was it the team who performed surgery?
      
      I think sometimes there are edits based on personal whim, in good faith but there's no set strategy or template only vague ideas about improving SEO.
      
      And nowadays with the decline at full pelt what will editing achieve?

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         eugbugposted 9 months agoin reply to this

         Not sure, I emailed them. I just received a generic email about all the things which are going to be done.  It annoyed me anyway to see something changed when there was no need for it. So maybe editing policy should be changed to check ranking of titles before they're altered. The thing is, it was perfectly fine and received lots of views. Every one of the articles edited in the past several years have plummeting views. So unless they know some way of changing content radically which magically improves views, I don't see the point, unless it's to correct grammar and spellings. They'll probably lump all my photos into thumbnails too, which are awful. This article has already had several snips and a basic edit, and this is another basic edit, so it's grasping at straws, I think.

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            chef-de-jourposted 9 months agoin reply to this

            It's all a bit peculiar. We as writers are in the dark about the future but fully aware of the rapid decline, the HP team are still randomly editing our better achieving articles ignorant of or fully knowing that their efforts are in vain due to TAG and their wretched approach to layout and ads. Farcical.
            
            I have to say the whole sorry saga is sending me nutty. God knows what new writers are making of all this.

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      OldRosesposted 9 months agoin reply to this

      There are new standards for articles on HubPages that the editors think will make our articles and the niche sites rank higher on Google.  Surely you have seen the posts on these boards about experiments they have run that prove their new standards are better and will result in more success for us and HubPages.  But our traffic, earnings and HubPages continue declining. 
      
      I with that they would stop fixing something that's not broken.

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         Jayne Lancerposted 9 months agoin reply to this

         The one thing that's really broken on this site is the amount of ads, which they seem to be completely ignoring.

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            OldRosesposted 9 months agoin reply to this

            But, according to their "experiments," more ads equals more revenue so all of those ads that are cluttering up our hubs and making them difficult to read, are a good thing.

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               chef-de-jourposted 9 months agoin reply to this

               I recommend everyone email the HP team to ask why the decline is so rapid. Perhaps if enough of us write they'll be stirred into action? You'd think they'd want to try and arrest the drop but they seem to be in complete denial.

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               eugbugposted 9 months agoin reply to this

               Well that's just stupid logic. If there were no other factors, more ads might mean more revenue if we drew the curve of revenue versus ads. However that curve would plateau because eventually because there are so many ads, not all would be seen, so there would be a limit to the number of impressions. There's also the curve of number of ads versus how Google ranks an article. That's possibly exponential with an inverse relationship between ranking and number of ads. So as ads increase, ranking decreases. Put the two curves together and you get an operating point (as it's called in engineering) or sweet spot where you get max revenue.

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      Kenna McHughposted 9 months agoin reply to this

      This is scary, Eugene, because I don't think TAG and HP are listening to us. Here we spend, particularly you, trying to figure out what the heck is going on when all they do is ruin our hard work. TAG/HP are not the experts here. Form letters, same-old-same replies show they don't want to work hard. That is the problem with AI. The developers say AI is supposed to make writing easier. Hah!

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      OldRosesposted 9 months agoin reply to this

      I just received an email announcing that one of my articles had been "chosen" to have its title changed and extensively edited.  I took a look at the proposed changes, including the title change, and told the hapless editor that the suggested changes were so profoundly wrong, if published, I would have to resign as  Master Gardener.  Just as important, I pointed out to her that it is the middle of the growing season and I don't have time to be re-writing articles.  I suggested we circle back in October when I am less busy.  Her deadline was in three days.
      
      What's wrong with these people?  Why are they constantly changing things that don't need changing?  Why do they expect us to drop everything at a moment's notice to participate in their little experiments? 
      
      LEAVE US THE HELL ALONE.  We are making money for you (and us).  If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

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         eugbugposted 9 months agoin reply to this

         I told Hayley I'd give them the benefit of the doubt and see if there are any improvements in views (Which have fallen about 97% for this article). Traffic to the article starts to fall from now on, so there's not going to be any benefit really until next year. I'll revert it then if things haven't improved. I think the title change was stupid though.

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         Kenna McHughposted 9 months agoin reply to this

         I don't understand why an editor would work on an established article. I suggest they go to the queue of articles that HP promised writers they would edit. Remember that queue?

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            eugbugposted 9 months agoin reply to this

            Mine got 1500 views per day peak. Now it's down to 40. It's not the article that's at fault, it's the ranking of the sites.

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               Kenna McHughposted 9 months agoin reply to this

               A+

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         Shesabutterflyposted 9 months agoin reply to this

         I received an email a month ago, because one of my articles came up as one of the top growing pages on a niche. I never understood the need to make changes to articles that are climbing. Clearly something is working.
         
         I never received an email back answering my questions, and now I'm afraid to edit the few things I noticed could use some tweaking in fear they will take that as an opportunity to change whatever they had in mind. I don't mind collaborating, but in my experience, major changes have never worked in my favor for articles already doing well.

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            eugbugposted 9 months agoin reply to this

            I wish resources were put into fixing site load  speed and ads splitting capsules. I still haven't got any word back from The Street about that. I guess they're going to just ignore me.

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               Shesabutterflyposted 9 months agoin reply to this

               Me too. I think fixing some of the technical issues could boost views more than editing at this point.
               
               I miss the old layout. I wonder if they have a tech team specifically for HP now that all the sites are suppose to be on the same template. Do all the TAG sites have this seemingly random haphazard ad layout?

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                  eugbugposted 9 months agoin reply to this

                  They all have variations on the same theme. Sport Illustrated doesn't appear to have any ads. The Street has inline ads that seem to break up text, just like on the network sites here.

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   5. STAFF

      HubPagesposted 9 months agoin reply to this

      Hi Eugene. Your original title buried the essential concept ("sowing seeds") at the end, and the keyword phrase "easy steps to sowing seeds" gets zero monthly search views. As such, there is no benefit to having that phrase in your title, whereas "how to sow seeds" is a very popular search query and one that your article is performing very well for.
      
      Moreover, just because an article may have received traffic with a particular title in years past does not mean that title will always generate the same results. Keyword phrasing often changes over time. Remaining flexible and adaptable is beneficial.
      
      With regards to traffic, the biggest spike for this article was in May of 2020, when COVID lockdowns had more people gardening at home (many for the first time ever). The article experienced a much smaller spike again in April of 2021, likely for the same reason. The easing of lockdown restrictions and return of many folks to non-remote work has likely had an effect on your traffic, as fewer people are gardening at home. By the time this article was edited, traffic was already low and stagnant.
      
      I hope this clarifies the intent behind the title change made to your article.

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         chef-de-jourposted 9 months agoin reply to this

         The HP team should be seriously taking action to halt the rapid decline in traffic across all the niche sites. This decline is due to Tag's ad&text regime - too many low quality ads, text capsules broken up resulting in poor reader experience on the page.

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         Kenna McHughposted 9 months agoin reply to this

         Hi Matt, What about the ad and text format interfering with the flow of the reader's experience and understanding of the article?

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         eugbugposted 9 months agoin reply to this

         Before the pandemic, traffic was 200 views per day at this time of year. That's down to less than 30 now.
         Also putting photos into thumbnails makes them difficult to view. Captions are below ads and there's an ad in the middle of the thumbnails? Is this done to avoid white space due to the really slow loading issue on mobile?

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      Natalie Frankposted 9 months agoin reply to this

      This is one of the reasons I stopped writing here. At one point they went through in in the course of about 4 days managed to edit and alter for the worse literally over a hundred of my articles. Before this they were doing it one at a time and I argued each one until it became clear that these folks aren't editors. For the most part the are new graduates only tasked with using every white hat technique at the same time to try to get as many views as possible, Unfortunately, even when I showed they had altered some of my psychology articles in ways that made them inaccurate and in one case potentially harmful, the only answer I got was something along the line of it's relative and they know best. When all my articles started getting overhauled and rewritten with what had to be some kind of ai tech to be crappy with my name still attached I left. I'm back for now but have already decided not to look at edits since whenever I've changed them back they just reverse the changes again without giving me a say.

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         MizBejabbersposted 9 months agoin reply to this

         I agree with you that "these folks really aren't editors." I hate that this is happening. Before I became an editor, I spent nearly 20 years as a broadcaster. When the bean counters took over broadcasting and it became an entity of colorless recorded programming, I got out and found a new career. It looks like the bean counters are taking over here. That's when creativity goes down the sewer.

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   eugbugposted 9 months ago

   Thiese are the views stats. I experimented with lots of new titles to see if I could recover traffic, but eventually went back to the one when there was peak traffic. Now they've changed that, even though the article is in first place for the search term (but presumably has lost rank for related keywords, causing the traffic drop)
   
   
   
   

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   eugbugposted 9 months ago

   There's a new waffly bit that's been added at the beginning too, but it's not me talking. I like to get to get to the point in an article, like I'm writing a lab report, not turn it into creative writing, but that seems to be the style of articles, so maybe it keeps readers engrossed.

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   MizBejabbersposted 9 months ago

   I haven't written anything since I had a stroke just before covid, and I'm not sure that I will publish anything again. I am a professional editor (retired) and the one thing that was stressed to me, and that I stressed to people whom I trained during my 30 years is that an editor SHOULD NOT remove the author's personality from the article. I have one article that has been edited, re-edited, and again re-edited until it looks more like an AI wrote it. In one instance the editor didn't like the way I stated a sentence, and his edit moved my front stairs to 20 feet behind our back deck. I put it back, and it was moved again. Finally in the last edit I noticed that the editor had completely removed the sentence, which provided a description of why it was unusual. So my now AI-style article sounds like the advertising hype that I was trying to counteract in the article. The only reason I don't completely remove it is because after over 10 years, it is still making a little money for me. I possibly could expect that if I were a salaried employee, like reporters were when I edited for a newspaper. But if they want "stellar articles" they should leave our creativity alone and only smooth out the rough spots like REAL professional editors are trained to do. Otherwise they should just use AIs to write their "stellar articles." Frankly I'm not sure that they aren't using AIs for editors anyway.

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      chef-de-jourposted 9 months agoin reply to this

      Firstly let me say I hope you're on the road back to good health and a reasonable quality of life. Secondly I too suspect that TAG is steadily advancing towards automated article output. As a digital media forerunner it needs to stay ahead of the game and has already invested in AI. It won't be long before we as writers are all dumped - I hope someone can rescue HP before that happens but the odds are lengthening daily. TAG's deplorable ad and text layout regime are fast sending HP downhill, the brakes loosening with each Google update. Help!!
      Thirdly, what are the chances of you unretiring and bringing your expertise back to the editing world? You are needed now more than ever!

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         eugbugposted 9 months agoin reply to this

         This is what Andrew Q. Kraft said in February when I queried him. He's Chief Operating Officer of The Arena Group since October 1, 2020:
         
         "We aren’t publishing AI-generated content - we are publishing human created, AI-curated, human-edited content. Great tools to amplify the productivity and capabilities of talented people!"
         
         So I've asked him for an update.

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            chef-de-jourposted 9 months agoin reply to this

            OK thanks Eugene. 
            
            Can I boil Kraft's statement down to: Human + Robot = Published Article.
            
            Now, what is the latest definition of curated? It's a word I associate strongly with museums! Museum of Human Creativity.... coming to a town near you very soon!

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         MizBejabbersposted 9 months agoin reply to this

         Thank you for your nice words, chef-de-jour. Chances of my unretiring from editing are very slim. I usually don't tell my age, but I retired just two months shy of my 75th birthday. I have sorely missed my work every day since then. If I do any editing, it probably will be on a freelance basis. My doctors tell me that I am going blind, news that I refuse to accept although I've had a couple of retinal hemorrhages and injections in my left eye to stop them. When one gets my age, I'm now 80 years old, sometimes the body makes the decision for them. I'm a perfect example of "my can do can't keep up with my want to."

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            WriterJanisposted 9 months agoin reply to this

            Doris, you are gorgeous for 80 and you look so many years younger than that.

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               MizBejabbersposted 9 months agoin reply to this

               Thank you, Writer Janis. I was 75 when this photo was taken. My hairdresser took it right after he cut my hair.

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            Brenda Arledgeposted 9 months agoin reply to this

            Doris...
            It saddens me to know you have been facing so much.
            I truly hope you are on the mend now.
            
            I totally understand that you don't wish to stop believing in yourself ..
            I argue with doctor's all the time.
            
            I'm not willing to give up just because someone says this is the way it is...I'm a bit stubborn.
            
            I do hope you can find a bit of freelance to help keep your mind satisfied.
            It's hard to stop writing and editing once you've caught that bug.
            
            Regardless...be happy.  Just be you..
            And do whatever you want to...it's your life.
            
            But it really sounds like HP is in a bit of trouble...these edits dwindling an article down to nothing sounds awful.
            
            perhaps u can send them an office memo...
            Maybe they'll listen to one who has been here and seen firsthand.
            
            Take care of yourself.

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               MizBejabbersposted 9 months agoin reply to this

               Thank you, Brenda, I appreciate your suggestions. However, I've already argued with them a couple of times. Just because I'm a professional editor doesn't cut any ice with them. They'll keep using their robotic-like editors to make their AI sounding articles, and I'm not sure that it is worth fighting them anymore. I do appreciate it when they find a typo or an error that I missed in an article, though. One of the things we were taught is that no matter how good an editor is, he or she will always miss a few simple typos, especially in something we write, because the brain just overlooks its own creation. At our office we had at least four pairs of eyes on each document (bill, act or published page) that came through for that very reason. I was at the top of the "food chain", as senior editor, the last person to review and edit the document before it was sent to the attorney for review. After my edit` came the attorney and then the Code Revisor. We had one of the most carefully edited codes of law in the U.S. I understand that they are changing things around in the office now, so I suspect that it will affect the quality. I know you didn't ask for this soliloquy, but I thought you might find it interesting.

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                  Kenna McHughposted 9 months agoin reply to this

                  This is informative. Thank you.

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   eugbugposted 9 months ago

   The latest is that the article has been chopped in half and all the content in the second part removed. Also, most of my photos have been stuffed into one of those stupid thumbnail capsules. It's been totally decimated. Maybe they're still editing and have hidden capsules. I'm not sure. Is there any way of reverting an article, without having to rebuild it again from a previous version by copying and pasting?

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      Kenna McHughposted 9 months agoin reply to this

      Oh my gosh, it sounds like a nightmare.

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   psycheskinnerposted 9 months ago

   I have no idea what "AI curated" would mean. 
   
   Technically every single thing an AI spits out is human-created and AI curated because even the smartest AI recombines rather than originates.

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   Brenda Arledgeposted 9 months ago

   Oh my...this does not sound good.

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   eugbugposted 9 months ago

   Pre-pandemic traffic in 2019 versus current traffic for this article. A 90% drop.
   
   
   

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      chef-de-jourposted 9 months agoin reply to this

      Wow, yes, that's stark reality and hurtful to hard-working writers in a way because this decline is either being managed by TAG (essentially dumbing-down, going for short-term quick in and out visits) or ignored, which is just plain nuts because they're the paymasters of HP editors? Little wonder they're confused!
      HP, once top-dog now a bottom feeder.

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         Kenna McHughposted 9 months agoin reply to this

         It will happen as soon as TAG realizes they can turn HP around. Anything else is reasonableness and stupidity.

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      Shesabutterflyposted 9 months agoin reply to this

      This might be an irrelevant question, as I'm not sure if 2 weeks is actually enough time; however have you seen any changes in traffic after the new title?
      
      I recently had a major title change where they removed the top keywords bringing in traffic. After some back and forth they are finally accepting it, but I'm still not happy with the title.
      
      My article was getting nowhere near the traffic yours was, but I still don't understand why they wouldn't choose more search friendly terms (honestly I don't know how it is meeting the unknown traffic threshold for niches). The whole point of editing is to bring in more traffic, or at least it should be. This topic is pretty saturated and the new keywords are not very good, which is why I'm not understanding the changes.
      
      Are there any actual free keyword tools available? I tried using SEMrush, answer the public, and ubersuggest but I could not do much. Enough to tell me what I already knew, but I'd like to find some better options for keywords/phrase research so I can create a title I'm happy with, and that has a better chance of bringing in traffic. Otherwise I might try shortening my original title which was their reason for changing it, although their second generated title is longer than the Google search allows for too.

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         eugbugposted 9 months agoin reply to this

         No, there hasn't been an improvement. Traffic is still declining. However it's matching the downwards trend for last year, so not really getting worse. It's just a seasonal decline.

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   eugbugposted 9 months ago

   I've changed the layout and reworded this article a bit, especially the bits where it wasn't me talking. There's no point putting my name to an article if someone else words it different to the way I would speak or express myself.  I might turn ads off for a while to see if it gains ranking. It's a bit late in the season though to expect much, so I'll have to wait till next February or March to see if there's an improvement. Anyway it's currently 90% down in views since pre-pandemic. I'll have to think about the title and maybe make it more enticing.

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    Daughter Of Maatposted 9 months ago

    I'm getting really sick of these "editors" who apparently don't understand basic grammar and add commas where they don't need to be. But they are also now adding links to articles I've never read which is unacceptable. I've already started moving my articles to Medium. The last article they just edited they added not one but FOUR links to new articles on the site that I have never read. I don't mind supporting other authors but I should get to choose the articles.
    
    They also edited my best performing article and removed the lead photo and the links to other articles I had specifically chosen because they are pertinent to the piece. I do not understand these editors at all. Why touch an article that literally ranks #3 when the keyword is searched? WHY??? It's infuriating.

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    eugbugposted 9 months ago

    What annoys me about editing is one editor does things one way then another does things completely different, there's no consistency. Editing is fine if it corrects spelling and  grammar and cuts out the waffle and superfluous stuff that we may add. I though that's the whole purpose of editing, not adding their own content which happened with my article. So I've removed that and reverted a lot of the changes. And those thumbnails with the ads in the middle of them and detached captions totally piss me off.

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       Daughter Of Maatposted 9 months agoin reply to this

       Wholeheartedly agree. I had one editor who actually emailed me before they made changes and told me what they were going to change and their edits actually improved the article. But all the other editors have just made their changes and many ADDED grammatical errors.
       
       And the ads on this site KILL the flow of our articles. Especially the thumbnail ads and breaking up the captions. There are just too many ads. When you are scrolling to read an article a video ad should not pop up and block your screen. That's not promoting the article. It just infuriates readers and makes them leave, increasing our bounce rate.

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          eugbugposted 9 months agoin reply to this

          I think the problem is they can't control the ads even if they may want to. Technically there doesn't seem to be any way of deciding where they go, they just end up at the end of paragraphs and therefore in a block of text. The only way I can see that could be changed is if we could place ad placeholder capsules at design time and then ads "know" they have to go into these. Behind the scenes, the ad placeholder would put a dummy HTML tag in place. Then ads would place themselves in those locations.  I don't know enough about HTML or CSS to know whether that's feasible and the ad systems that's used probably currently can't be set to do that. There also seems to be a limit on the number of ads. On my longest article which runs to 10,000 words, the ads run out eventually when around 37 are shown and no more appear towards the end of the article.

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       Shesabutterflyposted 9 months agoin reply to this

       The inconsistencies are very frustrating. In one of the edits an editor actually used an ampersand to try and shorten my title. I would never use one in the title.
       
       When I searched the title on Google it was still cut off, so not sure why they used it when it did not return the results intended.
       
       I'm all for interlinking, but I agree we need to be able to add our own. I deleted quite a few sentences and reworded phrases to eliminate them. Just because topics might be related doesn't mean we completely agree with the articles being linked to. If I'm linking to something I'm responsible/representing that content. I need to know it aligns with my article/beliefs.
       
       It did not happen often for me, but I miss the days where editors actually contacted you with ideas or asked for edits. It's more work for me to fix all the mistakes and edit what I do not like than if I would have been asked to work on it.

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    eugbugposted 9 months ago

    Bounce rate and average time on page stats. I think the title video is responsible for changes in time on page.
    
    
    

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