Articles on HubPages Website

1. 94

   eugbugposted 6 months ago

   I notice I still have some articles published on Hubpages.com. What's the story about those? Are they visible and indexed on the web? The URLs are appearing in a search, so they must be.

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      WriterJanisposted 6 months agoin reply to this

      Most of my articles are on the niche sites, but I have one on Discover which has been in the editor's cue for almost a year and it ranks very high on Google.

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2. 96

   PaulGoodman67posted 6 months ago

   As I understand it, they are visible to the search engines but you won't earn any money off them. I've always attempted to get hp.com articles promoted or deleted them in the past.
   
   HP.com is effectively a dumping ground, a giant trash can or rubbish bin, depending on your style of English. Even if your article isn't that bad, it will tend to be dragged down by the rest of the content.
   
   That said, getting articles into the niches doesn't seem so great either nowadays. Earnings depend on high views. If the views are very low, the ability to earn seems academic.

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      Venkatachari Mposted 6 months agoin reply to this

      I hope Discover is different from simple hp.com.
      Unfeatured or semi-featured are the leftovers at HP. Featured appear on Discover.

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3. 94

   eugbugposted 6 months ago

   Yes, no ads seem to be appearing on them. Traffic to several Dengarden articles seems to have dropped to one or two views per week so I guess they'll be moved to Discover soon.

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4. 94

   eugbugposted 6 months ago

   Just to be clear, these articles are on Hubpages.com, not Discover.com.

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5. 96

   PaulGoodman67posted 6 months ago

   Yes, for some reason there's confusion. Discover is a separate thing from HP.com.
   
   Discover is a dumping ground too but above HP.com in the hierarchy. HP.com is for the ne'er-do-wells, Discover is for the almost-made-its.
   
   I believe that HP.com material has been rejected by machines. Discover stuff has got through the automated filters but has then been rejected by humans.
   
   The system is an attempt to provide a realistic workload for editors.

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      Venkatachari Mposted 6 months agoin reply to this

      Yes, that is an intelligent perception. I agree with you, Paul.

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6. 94

   eugbugposted 6 months ago

   Meanwhile in other news, traffic seems to have nose dived again somewhat. I think I'm down to around 15% of three years ago at this stage.

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      Venkatachari Mposted 6 months agoin reply to this

      Traffic has come down by 30 to 40% for my blog sites also.

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   2. 99

      Gregory DeVictorposted 6 months agoin reply to this

      I have six articles on ToughNickel. Since the end of May, all of them have lost a considerable amount of traffic. One of these articles has done quite well for over five years, but not anymore.
      
      I have also noticed over at Semrush that the overall health and wellness of ToughNickel is not good at all. The amount of organic traffic to the site is quite low.

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   3. 96

      PaulGoodman67posted 6 months agoin reply to this

      Yes, for the past few weeks, I've seen consistent drops across all of my accounts. Traffic used to fall a little in the summer but this is on a larger scale and seems sustained. It may continue.
      
      RE: What Gregory said above, Toughnickel looks like it's on the sea bed in the SEMRush graph! The authority score is 35, which is the lowest I've seen for any niche! I'm convinced that low authority is a big reason why we're suffering but HP doesn't seem to know how to fix it!
      
      I believe Google has changed how it assesses authority over the past two years or so and it's killing us.

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         Gregory DeVictorposted 6 months agoin reply to this

         Paul, I am astonished at how poorly ToughNickel is doing overall. The amount of organic traffic to the site over the past month is awful.

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            PaulGoodman67posted 6 months agoin reply to this

            There’s been a tremendous amount of volatility in the search rankings in recent weeks and another wave very recently. In the past, I’d have been hoping we’d reap some benefits. Nowadays, I just expect more falls, it’s sad.

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            1. 99

               Gregory DeVictorposted 6 months agoin reply to this

               You made some very valid points above regarding HP.com and Discover. Nice job.
               
               I also noticed over at Semrush that both Axle Addict and Remedy Grove are not doing well just like ToughNickel. I think that Remedy Grove's authority score today was 22, and the organic traffic to the site over the past month was very, very low.

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               1. 96

                  PaulGoodman67posted 6 months agoin reply to this

                  Unfortunately, my expectation is that pretty much all the niches will end up with virtually zero views unless something drastically changes. The general trend over the past three years has been very much downward and, if anything, has become more intense.
                  
                  I've heard it counterargued that some individual hubbers or articles are doing okay, so we still have the power to save ourselves as individual writers. That misses the point, in my view, as low authority scores are dragging entire sites down. It's like trying to maintain a nice apartment in a block that's slowly collapsing.
                  
                  One or two years ago, it seemed that there were a few niches that were doing relatively well. I don't believe that's the case anymore. I think there's just different stages of collapse.
                  
                  Pethelpful, for example, seemed at one stage like it might be recovering but it turned out to be only temporary.
                  
                  I hope that HP can glean something helpful from the recent Google leak. However, I suspect that if the Big G wants us gone, there's little future for the niches, as things stand. The old approaches, which generally involved adjusting the SEO to suit Google algo changes, don't seem to work.
                  
                  Goodness knows, the editors have done a lot of editing here, attempting to improve how Google sees the niches. So far, though, it's not been rewarded and I do wonder whether it ever will. Optimism is in short supply.

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7. 94

   eugbugposted 6 months ago

   Did I see somewhere that Reddit is doing well? At least there's the possibility for people to interact on the site.

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   1. 99

      Gregory DeVictorposted 6 months agoin reply to this

      I read somewhere that both Reddit and Quora are doing well. Maybe HP was doing better when people could interact with one another by commenting on articles. I'm just guessing though.

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      1. 90

         WriterJanisposted 6 months agoin reply to this

         Can someone please refresh my memory? Why were the comments discontinued?

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            Gregory DeVictorposted 6 months agoin reply to this

            Personally, I don't know, but I remember that it caused quite an uproar. Maybe another veteran HP writer or two knows more than I do.

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            eugbugposted 6 months agoin reply to this

            It was when they switched to the new look network sites that looked like the ones TAG already had. The downside was that code couldn't be altered to allow comments to be added. Some network sites allow, or used to allow comments, but I think it just sends readers off to another site rather than having them on the site itself. I thought Delishably was one of the sites that allowed comments, but not anymore it seems when I checked. Modifying code to add new features or fix things seems to be an ongoing problem. It appears to be difficult to do for some reason. So either it's a technical problem with the new code, there are no longer staff to do it or some other issue. Maybe the new code for the network sites was an off-the-shelf template and wading through it to change things is a nightmare. As far as I recall, one of the reasons we were given for the site updates was that more types of ads could be added that would hopefully make us more money. Also the idea I think was that sites across the TAG network would have a uniform look.

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               WriterJanisposted 6 months agoin reply to this

               Thank you so much for the explanation.

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               1. 96

                  PaulGoodman67posted 6 months agoin reply to this

                  I don’t recall any full official explanation for comments disappearing. There’s been hubber speculation but few hard facts, as with most things that go on here. I’ve given up on comments returning.
                  
                  The fact that Google has awarded more authority to Reddit and Quora just about sums up the state of things. They’ve sidelined SEO, which some might see as positive, but done it through promoting the big companies and Reddit and screwing the rest of us!

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                     Venkatachari Mposted 6 months agoin reply to this

                     One main reason for the disappearance of comments is that, when you click on the comment button, you can't see the box for posting your comment -unless you are patient enough to scroll down through tens and scores of posts/advertisements that obstruct your path in reaching out to the comment box.

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8. 99

   Gregory DeVictorposted 6 months ago

   Just so everyone knows, Matt told me recently in an email that HP cannot remove "existing" comments from our articles at this time.

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   1. 94

      eugbugposted 6 months agoin reply to this

      Presumably because they're hard wired into the code so they'd have to be stripped out manually, which would be a big job for thousands of articles. I wonder how they were added in the first place? Maybe someone wrote code to do a batch job to process lots of HTML files and append the comments.

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      1. 99

         Gregory DeVictorposted 6 months agoin reply to this

         I didn't know that it was that complicated.

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         1. 94

            eugbugposted 6 months agoin reply to this

            I must look at the Wayback Machine and check old versions of the site to examine the code and make sense of how it was done.

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               PaulGoodman67posted 6 months agoin reply to this

               I'm pretty sure that we could have websites with working comments if the will and resources were there.

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      Kenna McHughposted 6 months agoin reply to this

      Thanks for the info, Gregory.

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         Gregory DeVictorposted 6 months agoin reply to this

         You're welcome.

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