Google Dumps Article From Search

1. 95

   eugbugposted 8 months ago

   An article called "How to Convert Decimal to Binary and Binary to Decimal" which used to have the featured snippet for "convert decimal to binary" is now missing completely from SERPs for that term. This is the guide I posted a forum post about before when I copied and pasted and republished it, but the experiment wasn't successful and it didn't improve traffic. I republished the original version (i.e. took it out of its unpublished state), but traffic didn't improve and is only around 10 views per day now (used to be 1500 per day for the first year after publishing).
   Is there anything I can do?

   replyreport
   1. 100

      chef-de-jourposted 8 months agoin reply to this

      I googled your full title and found your article, dated 17th Oct 23 at No8 (after all the videos and people also ask questions) but couldn't see your article when googling the shortened titles.
      
      Not sure what you can do next? I guess you've thought about updating, restructuring, sizing up or down?
      
      Could you ask a question on Google forums? Go straight to those who know?
      
      I try to live in hope but underlying all this is the fundamental notion that no matter how much we tweak, improve, update, enlarge and creatively republish Google will still slap us down due to you know what.

      replyreport
      1. 95

         eugbugposted 8 months agoin reply to this

         I have asked on forums and the thinking was that Owlcation as a site doesn't have authority. It seems to have a lot less now.

         replyreport
2. 95

   eugbugposted 8 months ago

   I did email Hubpages several times about shifting it from Owlcation to Turbofuture to see if it would do any better there, but never got any reply.

   replyreport
   1. 87

      JerryFisherposted 8 months agoin reply to this

      Well from where I am - the exact search term 'How to Convert Decimal to Binary and Binary to Decimal' ranks number 3 after about four or five videos - out of something like 14m results. But you're right about 'convert decimal to binary' - nowhere to be seen out of 30m results. But it is in the system if you type 'convert decimal to binary Owlcation' it comes up

      replyreport
      1. 95

         eugbugposted 8 months agoin reply to this

         But originally it had the featured snippet for that term. So it's a huge downranking.

         replyreport
         1. 87

            JerryFisherposted 8 months agoin reply to this

            Yeah the whole site is under water in that regard. Great articles have gone down with the bad. HP originally used Adsense and my belief is that when Arena stopped using it and used their own ad network,  then there was no little reason for Google to keep HP in their high ranking list and especially when Arena took it upon themselves to place an ad every second sentence. In the earlier days maybe ten or fifteen years ago when many of us wrote our own Wordpress sites on an article or two throwing Adsense in, Google back then sent out a warning that too much Adsense would kill your ranking. And that was way back then so Arena have only themselves to blame. Such a shame that all of us have put so much time and effort into the articles and Arena’s greed has been self explosive.

            replyreport
3. 74

   Miebakagh57posted 8 months ago

   Google is now the Police of the internet, or more specific the the search engine.                                    So Almighty Google can dictate, programme, manipulate, and control the search results, and more.                                                  And the various updates that serves as a pointer, seems perplexing, and somehow undermines our existing articles.                                  Why is not this happening with other search engines like  Bing, Yahoo, and Yadex in comparison?                                    Google is too complex.

   replyreport
4. 100

   Gregory DeVictorposted 8 months ago

   Eugene, I live in western Pennsylvania and found your article in #1 place after a string of videos. I keyed in your title using quotes as well.
   
   Following your article is another one with the same exact title. It is written by Adam Turner and was published on Medium. The Google date for Adams' article was two years ago.
   
   I checked this information on both my phone and Chromebook and the organic search results were identical. Sometimes, that doesn't happen.

   replyreport
   1. 95

      eugbugposted 8 months agoin reply to this

      From my experience, an article will generally be in first place when the full title is searched for (unless it's a relatively short, generic title). What's happened in the last couple of years is that they don't rank for fragments from the title. Maybe this has something to do with Google providing search results that more closely match a search or a combination of that and down ranking of an entire site.

      replyreport
5. 100

   Gregory DeVictorposted 8 months ago

   When I removed the quotes, your article is way down on the first page. But it is there.
   
   This time, Adams' article with the same title is nowhere to be found.
   
   Once again, I checked this on both my phone and Chromebook.

   replyreport
6. 96

   PaulGoodman67posted 8 months ago

   I think "Google dumps article" is an unfortunate turn of phrase as the article hasn't disappeared from the search engine, as far as I can tell, but rather suffered a drastic drop in the rankings.
   
   This has happened to a lot of high-achieving articles in my experience. Hubs that at one time achieved 1000+ views per day now achieve 25 or less.
   
   The higher they flew, the harder they fell, it seems.
   
   I no longer have anything here that I could really point to as a success story.

   replyreport
   1. 95

      eugbugposted 8 months agoin reply to this

      Either have I. Maximum traffic is now 200 per day for one article, but mostly less than 100 or zero for all the others. I wonder how big an effort it would be to further split sites to improve their authority by making their coverage narrower? There's probably not much enthusiasm or manpower available for major changes to be made like there was years ago.

      replyreport
      1. 96

         PaulGoodman67posted 8 months agoin reply to this

         I'm not convinced that splitting sites would have the desired effect and yes, investors and companies are increasingly focused on AI. Indexing isn't sexy.
         
         There's supposedly a new Google update happening. I've not seen any big changes to traffic so far.

         replyreport
         1. 95

            eugbugposted 8 months agoin reply to this

            My traffic is stagnant or dropping slightly, whereas traditionally at this time of year, it would have started rising in spring.

            replyreport
            1. 69

               OldRosesposted 8 months agoin reply to this

               Same here.  After a dismal November and December, my traffic always starts rising in January as people turn their attention to the plant catalogs arriving in their mailboxes.  This year, my traffic is falling.  In December, I barely made payout.  In January, I earned less, not even equal to payout,  when I should have been earning more.  CPMs are abysmal when they should be rising.  Hub Pages is a rapidly sinking ship.

               replyreport
            2. 100

               Gregory DeVictorposted 8 months agoin reply to this

               Since Monday, my 7-day traffic total has fallen by several thousand page views. This is concerning. My top three performing articles are still doing well, so this surprising decrease is from an overall loss of traffic from my other lower-performing articles. Maybe this Google update hit me early.

               replyreport
            3. 96

               PaulGoodman67posted 8 months agoin reply to this

               This update only started a few days ago, so it's early days. My traffic seems similar to Eugene's, stagnant/down slightly.
               
               Things are so bad nowadays and my expectations so low that I feel relieved when I only lose 10 or 15% of my traffic!

               replyreport