We're Moving Content To Discover HubPages
We constantly strive to ensure that articles achieve the best possible visibility and engagement. Discover HubPages has a higher domain authority than many of our network sites, which means your content’s potential to attract more traffic and generate higher earnings will be improved by moving it to the Discover HubPages domain. By relocating content, we hope to give it a better opportunity to reach a broader audience and increase traffic. We will start by moving content off of FeltMagnet.
The move to Discover HubPages is intended to be a permanent one. We believe this transition will be beneficial for your content in the long run by leveraging the higher domain authority of Discover HubPages.
While your articles will remain on Discover HubPages, there are still steps you can take to optimize it for better performance:
Update Content: Add new, relevant content, including photos and/or videos, or update existing content to provide current information or a fresh perspective. This will help engage readers and potentially result in more shares and backlinks, as well as longer visits to your page. If needed, add reputable sources to lend credibility to your article. Research your competition to get inspiration for adding or improving content and updating formatting.
Optimize Title and Structure: Revise and optimize your article's title and add or change headers to help readers and search engines understand the structure and purpose of your article. Consider how you might update the title to set it apart from the competition and highlight the unique angle of your article to gain traction in search results.
Improve Formatting: Enhance the article’s formatting, including adding headers, tables, and bulleted or numbered lists. This will improve readability and encourage readers to stay on your page longer, reducing bounce rates and indicating your content is valuable to readers, which is a positive signal for search engines and may ultimately improve search rankings and increase traffic.
Thanks for writing on HubPages, and let us know if you have any questions!Thank you for the update. Is there a list of which niche sites will have their articles moved or will this be a see how it goes process? Will articles that aren’t doing well on Discover be taken off entirely?
Will the articles that have been sequestered to the HP domain be moved to Discover? I have many articles that did well on HP but have faltered once the niche sites (including Discover) came into play. Give our articles a fighting chance on Google by not hiding them beneath a domain Google doesn't recognize or respect.
Hi Lisa. What's going to happened to Feltmagnet once the transfers are completed?
Thank you for sharing this information.
Interested to know about other niche sites too, besides FeltMagnet.Interesting! I just received 20 or so notifications advising me of the move back to HubPages. Not sure that I will benefit as originally the name Felt Magnet was created for my articles because they did not fit the categories available at the time. Guess I benefitted from that and I can only hope that this further move will prove beneficial.
Haha! Lisa-Winter, I can condense your sweet paragraphs into the following....Another TAG Money Saving Exercise.
We all need to closely monitor traffic numbers for those articles transferred from the niche sites to Discover. I hope for the best but am pessimistic about the outcomes. It shouldn't take long to find out if Google still detests TAG's layout and ad regime. If recent CPM figures on Owlcation are anything to go by things can't get much worse!!My Discover articles have done well and rank high, so this makes sense. I do have some questions. I hope you will answer them. We no longer need to submit articles to the Network/Niche sites every two weeks? Is this a last-ditch effort? The rest of your announcement is a cursory message from the Learning Center. I wonder if some writers will maintain their articles per your message because it's not worth it in the long run. How can you change their point of view?
I'd like to answer a few questions. FeltMagnet is the only site to move for the moment, but we do plan on moving others soon. I haven't decided which sites will move or what the timeline will be yet, but I'll keep everyone posted as best I can.
It's going to take some time to see the results of moving the articles. I'm keeping a close eye on traffic, but it'll be a few weeks until we can see what effect this has, if any.
I want you to know that we have the authors’ best interests in mind. We want traffic to increase as much as you do, and with Discover having a higher domain authority, we think your articles have a greater potential of ranking well on Discover.Ranking and traffic is the most important concern, but we've never had an answer to why ads are so badly placed and whether you have any control over this? If there're going to be a lot of them, they should at least be neatly laid out, aligned and "pretty". Is this a staff and cost issue and there just aren't the people to make alterations?
Thank you for the information.
Are you going to put any kind of structure in place on Discover other than the latest articles are promoted and everything else must rely on SEO to attract traffic?
Is Samantha still on staff?
I notice that the old related forum discussions are no longer appearing at the bottom of the page. Can you explain that?
Reddit and Quora are being treated very well by Google these days, presumably they like the interaction of real people. Any chance comments can be setup again, since Rojo appears to have been a bust?
Thanks again for checking back with us.Lisa, Thanks for clarifying that you are the one making this decision. What I don't understand with your plan is the discrepancy with past regulations.
HubPages has always told us not to link to articles on HubPages because it ranks low with Google. That has been posted in HubPages' weekly newsletter.
Since Discover is a subdomain of HubPages.com, it falls under that rule. I don't see how a subdomain ranks higher than its underlying domain.
In addition, before Maven/TAG took over the HubPages platform, individual niche domains were created to successfully counter the issues with Google frowning upon content farms.
So, can you please put our concerns to rest? What was the deciding factor that did away with previous directives, leading to returning to a content farm under a low-ranking domain?Lisa, thank you for your answers. They are helpful. Yes. Please keep us posted on any new developments.
Thanks, Lisa, though I wish you'd be a little more transparent. For example, if domain authority is the main factor in moving articles, then surely you must have a list of niche sites HP intends to close out.
A few more questions if you can find the time:
1. Will editing occur on Discover now?
2. Will an editor or any staff member even look at an article before it goes to Discover?
3. Will you be unpublishing the low-quality drivel that currently resides on Discover?
4. Will you raise the bar so no more low-quality drivel lands on Discover?
5. You know this makes no sense, right?
That last one is kind of rhetorical, but I think a lot of us would really like to understand.
The stated purpose of Discover is to house lower-quality articles that aren't good enough to make the cut on the niche sites.
That means not only articles that are decent quality and close. It's also hundreds of trash pages written by people who couldn't have been bothered to check out the Learning Center, but mashed their palm on the keyboard and hit publish anyway.
These pages are poorly formatted, contain wonky grammar and even wonkier logic in some cases. Yet, somehow, they not only passed QAP, but made their way to Discover.
We were always told not to worry about it when we complained, because, after all, it's only Discover, and those article can't harm the niche sites.
Now, you are taking curated, highly edited pages from the niche sites, and lumping them in with this nonsense.
Please, without using the words "domain authority" explain, how this makes sense.
You have a bunch of people in this forum who are trying to find a reason to love writing on HubPages again. We all probably seem angry, but this is a confusing move, and we just want to understand. Because, right now, it really looks like nothing more than a cost-cutting measure.
Please, tell us there is some kind of plan other than expecting traffic to improve because "domain authority."Eric, you expressed all the concerns better than how I did in my reply to Lisa yesterday. I hope she answers our questions since I'm as concerned about understanding their agenda as you are.
As someone who wrote almost exclusively felting articles this has been a total disaster for me. Earnings are dismal too. Not sure I feel that this move has been in my best interests.
Your articles are high quality too Sally, based on practical expertise over many years. It just doesn't make sense - to undermine our contributions, our skills, essentially demoting the work. Baffling. The last 3 years or so on HP have been maddening. TAG set HP on a course straight towards the rocks it seems. No change of direction. No attempt to experiment with the ad and layout regime in an effort to stop the inevitable crash. Weird. And the strange thing is, they're still making minor editorial tweaks to improve articles!
I hope someone can turn it around and quick but the prognosis isn't good.The ads are a huge problem. I don't know why TAG refuses to acknowledge the many articles Google has written concerning intrusive ads. If they'd get rid of those, I think all niche sites would fare better than they are now.
I think that the elephant in the room here is that HubPages doesn't have really any competition in the form of other writing platforms that offer a similar or identical compensation plan as HubPages does. The writing platform that fits that same description the closest would likely be MEDIUM; and from what I've heard, publishing on that writing platform and being successful at attracting a wide audience is a substantial roll of the dice. Back in the day when HubPages competed with a number of other writing platforms that offered their content creators similar or identical compensation to that of HubPages, HubPages had no other choice but to pamper its writers with generous rewards.
My guess is that the positive results found in the move of the first 3 niche sites was experienced by the articles already on Discover. They get a bump from massive amounts of content being added to the site, while those being moved have redirects and have lost their categories, based on the structure of their niche old sites.
I think it would have been better to put together feltmagnet, hobbylark, holidappy, howtheyplay and levelskip as a big hobby/crafting/games siteI was thinking the same thing. Hard for a former niche article to gain traffic when it's moved and becomes completely lost within Discover. The homepage of each subcategory mainly feature the newest/popular content, neither of which apply to moved articles as far as I can tell as I have yet to come across any.
Instead I'm seeing pages of plagiarized content, stolen images, AI generated articles, and author's that have been around for years despite their utter lack of knowledge regarding the English language or how to write. It's disheartening to see how easy it is to pass QAP, which sadly is the only requirement to get your articles on Discover.
I don't know how any niche article can improve so quickly hidden amongst this layout. I agree combining a few select and related niche sites would have been a much better experiement if the objective was truly to try and save HP.
I'm still baffled how a webpage that is completely neglected and void of any real editing can rank higher than any niche site which was supposedly currated with the best content.It's turning into one big slush pile.
I think it tells us that Google is currently full of Sh!t.
I love Google, and I think Hub Pages rocks. I only joined yesterday, and I published four articles, and I just looked and one of them has hit Google search already.
I think Hub Pages and Google Rock - Yes, I think I am going to love it here. And a big thank you to my large Facebook following that helped me get on Google search. I am really excited.
Will this mark the beginning of the end of niche sites on HubPages? That is, everything will ultimately be on Discover HubPages?
Update: We're going to start moving more niche sites to Discover. The results of moving FeltMagnet, Soapboxie, and YouMeMindBody have been positive with an increase in traffic and revenue (for both you guys and us). I'm continuing to keep an eye on rankings and traffic as we move forward over the next few weeks.
From now on, we'll be moving sites on Thursdays, with the exception of next week, when I’ll be out of town.Lisa, How was it determined that the move to Discover had an increase in traffic so quickly? The editors always said any move from one domain to another takes time until we see any effect from Google.
Most of my articles moved to Discover have zero or one view per day. That's not an increase.
I'm deeply concerned about this drastic modification to the platform. Several times, I've suggested a less invasive experiment, making the ad placement less intrusive to readers. Why was this not considered before such a significant change with all the articles?
When HubPages still had control before TAG took over, they limited the ads to three per page. In those days, I earned tremendously much more than I do today. That means TAG is also losing, as reflected in its stock evaluation.I agree with you, Glenn. I've had 427 views in the past 7 days (big whoop, right?). Of those, only 27 are for Discover articles.
I think that the only hubbers that will either come out of this change unscathed or ahead of the game will be the ones who either have over 1000 articles published on HubPages or have over 1000 followers or both. Those of us who have an average number of articles published or an average number of followers on HubPages might lag behind in our views as a result. In other words, this large transfer of articles over from the niche sites to Discover will likely benefit the big shots the most and the average hubbers the least.
I haven't been active on HP - other than the forums since 2020. I haven't written/posted anything new since then. Articles that I wrote years ago are still getting views. Not a lot, but they're hanging in there. I may consider updating the 73 articles that are still on the original HP site(abyss) to see if I can get them moved. That's a big "may".
Jason, I beg to differ. I've observed other writers and see some doing well with fewer articles. I don't have time to go into details.
If that has been the case since HubPages began eliminating the niche sites, according to your observations, then perhaps we may all come out of this transition better off. I would certainly like to see everyone benefit from this decision of HubPages in one way or another. I guess only time will tell.
I'm also very concerned and agree it's too early to tell.
I have a hard time believing Discover in it's current state is any better than the niches sites. There appears to be an AI created article on the home page with a stolen logo for the main picture and the "article" is essentially an advertisement for different websites. Discover was created to be the new HP slush pile for anything that passed QAP, but wasn't up to snuff for a niche. QAP seems incredibly easy to pass these days, and without curation our articles are stuck with the bottom of the barrel articles and we don't even have a way of flagging or reporting easily.
I could have MAYBE got on board with this move if there had been a massive overhaul of Discover prior to this move and a better control of new content being released to Discover, but I realize that takes too much time and resources HP either doesn't have or doesn't feel is necessary to prioritize.
I'm not seeing any noticable chances, but my current Discover articles and the 2 that have moved so far were not doing well before the migration anyway. I'd be happy to see positive change, but I honestly have a hard time seeing how that is possible.
Thanks, Lisa. Can you please help us understand how you are measuring traffic and revenue changes?
Do you take a sample of articles and compare their traffic and earnings before and after the move?
Well, this is an interesting development!
Discover does seem to be doing better than the niches nowadays.
I wish I had more stuff in feltmagnet and could reap the benefit.
However, the implication appears to be that you'll move other niches over to Discover after feltmagnet, is that correct?Great. I don't have any stuff at fellmagnet. But it's okay.
Very nice announcement. I believe that it is for good that our articles stay on Discover rather than on network sites. Thanks, HP.
And, Cooper. Discover Hubpages is for featured articles whereas HP showcases both featured and unfeatured ones.
Does this mean you are shuttering some of the niche sites?
Can you tell us which ones?
Can you give us a timeline?
I want to feel optimistic, because at least HP has some kind of plan, but this strategy doesn't make a lot of sense.
Crossing my fingers, though.I think the "logic" might be seen by looking at the domain stats on SEMRush. While the niches have low authority and tanking viewing figures, Discover has a reasonable authority score and viewing numbers have been increasing since November 2023.
How long that will last is difficult to say, but it's a glimmer of hope. The moving process is kind of radical, though, and difficult to reverse easily. It looks like an end to the niches.
There must also be reasons why Discover is doing better than the niches. It's odd, though, because the material there has been rejected by editors and therefore one would expect a lower authority score, not higher.
The change in strategy therefore seems promising but a little mysterious to me.We've discussed our opinions on "domain authority".
I know you won't agree, but I don't see it as a valid reason for such a dramatic move.
I have a few ideas on what is really going on here, but I hesitate to post them. I know HP staff has their marching orders and is doing the best they can."I have a few ideas on what is really going on here, but I hesitate to post them"
I'd love to hear your private views, Eric. You can always message me at Pinterest or X/Twitter where you're free to be candid?
Eric, I have many Discover articles that are doing quite well. Yet, the niche editors repeatedly rejected my submissions. It baffled me, to say the least; if they are doing so well on Discover, they should do better on a niche site. It appears that is not the case. The last rejection I got, the editor said, at least it's making money on Discover. Now, the joke is on me. Did I waste my time, or did the continual edits to get into a niche prove beneficial on Discover?
Can you define what you mean by "quite well" if you feel comfortable?
If anyone remembers, when HP scrapped personal subdomains back in 2015-ish, they moved everything back to the main domain.
It did not go well.
Discover is not its own website. It is a subdomain of hubpages.com.
Reverting to a strategy that HP decided had failed almost a decade ago is baffling.
Edit: Also, the reason HP moved to personal subdomain in 2011-ish is because the main domain got crushed by the Panda update.
We are jumping into a time machine and going back to pre-Panda HubPages.My Discover articles rank higher than my Niche articles.
I don't get it. There is some absolute crap on Discover and I can't grasp how this doesn't negatively impact its "domain authority."
Just another of the great internet mysteries that baffle this old fart.I'm with you on that Rupert! It doesn't seem to make sense!
When I read HP's newsletter with the news about Feltmagnet I did feel a bit confused. In a way, I am pleased HP is taking a proactive approach to giving our hubs a better chance.
For context, I have two hubs on Feltmagnet and they are currently both still there, they haven't been moved to Discover. Those two hubs only get 1-2 views a day.(shrug) Whatever. My article views are so low that a shakeup like this might be a good thing for them.
All along I believed that excessive overlapping advertisements had something to do with it. Silly me.
I’m fairly certain that ads like that do have a negative influence.
Hmmm. Interesting.
In a way, this development lets me feel that HP is truly concerned and trying another approach to save this site.
Yes, maybe such changes never worked out positively in previous years, but who knows what’ll happen this time around.
The internet is constantly changing. Never static. What worked well in the past may not in the present, and vice versa.
Many of my hubs on Discover are doing fairly well, so I’ll try to stay optimistic. Do I even have a choice?Won't this just create a new "content farm" which Google dislikes? I thought the whole idea of network sites was that they specialised in a topic which is better as regards ranking and SEO?
For sure, it's going to create one big site of mixed-quality material, the thing that HP was trying to avoid when we moved to niches.
I wonder if changes to the algo effectively mean that "big is better" now.
I don't think we'll get a more detailed explanation of the change in strategy but it would be interesting to hear one.
It's certainly true, though, that Discover views have been rising for over six months, whatever the reason... a continuation of the niches seems like extinction.When they're at it, maybe they could resurrect the old site format.
When I joined HP, the appearance of the article page was very busy/messy with interruptive ads everywhere.
I think the big breakthrough was HubAds, which enabled using a few higher-value ads rather than multiple low-value ones. It meant they could adopt a cleaner look.
For whatever reason (nothing's ever explained anymore), we lost Hub Ads, so I just can't see the old format returning. That's my speculation anyway.
Eugene, I totally agree with what you are saying.
Or, has Google changed its mind recently and now favors "content farms" like EzineArticles.com and Amazines.com? Remember those sites?
Perhaps Google is done with specialist sites, and is leaning into sending readers to massive sites that cover all information.
Little niche sites will wither and die (after scraping all their info for their AI Products) and there will only be 3 pages of SERPs following sponsored results, videos and the AI answer.Yes! I vote for bringing a neater look and better reader experience!
I have to agree with Eugbug and Paul. Is bigger actually better? Well, time to fasten our seatbelts and see where this new ride takes us.
Genna, I agree with you here. Like you said, all of us just have to "fasten out seatbelts" and see how all of this works out.
Projecting into the future, I wonder what things will be like a year from now.
I wonder if this has to do with bringing back a community-oriented approach? While it can be scary to embrace change, I have seen some websites gaining a renewed interest from Google when moving content from one platform to another.
Just had five articles moved back today. Views now less than 1000 daily for the first time in maybe 10 years. Most articles have lost 90% of views in the last year.
Maybe Discover is doing better because it has a better name than the stupidly named network sites.
Yeah, they are stupidly named, Bev. They make no sense and don't offer a cohesive clue as to what lies inside the ill-named titles.
I presume it takes time now for Google to index the articles on Discover to benefit from the move (although the original network site URL are valid until that happens). Isn't the redirection going to get complicated? So there will be original Hubpages URLs which redirect to network sites and also redirects from network sites back to Discover.
The easiest way is to just remove the original redirect. Most if not all niche hubs languished for days on Discover before transfer.
But that possibly means a loss of all backlinks. Which in the authority game will plummet page authority like nobody's business.
I’m really wondering about this too. It seems TAG is doing away with everything HubPages did that worked. The reason for the niche sites was to combat the Panda algorithm. But I agree with Bev that the choice of domain names was poor, and that might be why they no longer work. But they did work very well for quite some time. Let’s not forget that.
Nevertheless, it might have been a better experiment for TAG to try making more meaningful niche domain names. But I don’t think they care for that expense since they are losing a lot of money. The stock is below 80¢ — down from $4 not long ago.
Anyway, I tried doing a Google search for “Does Google like content farms again in 2024?” but didn’t find anything that would indicate that. If someone else finds anything that confirms this new strategy, let us know. I’m skeptical but it hard to believe. One hub of mine has just been moved from FeltMagnet, so I’ll be watching its stats before making any judgment calls.Gonna say it. This sudden announcement feels bizarre and abrupt.
Just last week, I had a link snipped from a hub. I originally linked to a Dengarden hub, I think. But that hub must have been downgraded to Discover and the link quickly got snipped.
Which is it. Discover has been a holding ground too unattractive to even link to and suddenly, it's the preferred platform, because it has a high DA. But Discover had long had this high authority because it's a variation of Hubpages.com.
I frankly think the whole move is just a brushed up excuse for canning the non profitable niche sites.Discover is definitely doing better in terms of views, the numbers are going up there.
It's almost certainly something to do with the links, like you say.
What's interesting is that HP seems to be snipping links nowadays, rather than creating them.
It's highly possible that Google have found a way to make the algo punish certain link strategies that have helped the site in the past.
Discover was largely left alone by HP and its SEO strategy and is, perhaps ironically, benefitting.
Although the obvious question then would then be why not just make the niches more like Discover?The link snipping seems like a new thing but they have been happening for years. In fact, didn't someone just posted about it in the forum?
When mine was snipped, I had the same template warning about never linking to Discover because it's bad for Google and all that. This was last week.
I'm not optimistic about the transfer too, whatever third party analytics are estimating. The domain authority reason is not convincing because, you know, you can pay a Fiverr freelancer a couple of hundred dollars and they will manipulate the numbers overnight.
I feel complete disaster is on the horizons.I believe that the disaster threshold was passed some time ago.
I suspect that a sustained high authority is harder to achieve and maintain than you think. The fiverr people are generally just fixing small sites run by people who possess limited SEO knowledge.
When I joined HP, they were all about creating as many internal links as possible (on top of external links, of course) to gain a good reputation with Google.
That style of linking was then dropped and we moved to the "recommended hubs" period, which seemed to work for a time.
Recently, we went back to the internal links.
Now, I'm not entirely sure what's happening.
It's always been a cat-and-mouse game, or maybe an SEO arms race, I can't think of the perfect metaphor(!) The bottom line was that whatever Google did with the algo, HP was able to respond.
However, our last good period was now over three years ago and it only lasted for five months.
The bad times have consistently been longer than the good since late 2019.
I think there's nothing to lose at this point and don't object to the Discover move, but I am wary of hoping for anything more than a temporary reprieve...The attention on authority is meaningless because for a start, whose calculation is it? Ahref's? Semrush's? Or some other smaller engine's?
Did HP pay any attention to maintaining the authority of Discover. If so, it's strange, isn't it? Why didn't they do the same for the niche sites?
But it's pointless to debate. I don't know about you but it's quite clear the bulk of us have little say or importance in the matter. As someone already pointed out, even the bulk of the announcement is a lift from the learning center. It's not even a proper announcement.Yes, we have zero influence. I find debate useful for my own learning and understanding but I don't see it as changing anything at HP. Those days ended some years ago.
SEMRush's authority calculation is an attempt to mimic Google's rating. While it's not the same, and indeed the Google algo almost certainly doesn't "think" in terms of a single ratings figure, I still believe it to be useful. The authority score certainly corresponds with the relative fortunes of the various niches.
However, I would accept that it's a simple indicator designed to give a general insight into a massively complicated formula. SEO with entire sites is a wide and complex area.
Most companies are going to use some sort of rating assessment of authority and I believe that the move to Discover is based on views and authority.
Most people in the forum go on things like intuition, emotional reactions, etc. but the online companies and internet generally are data-driven, even more so than traditional businesses.
I trust data more than anecdotal evidence myself, as I'm from a science/rationalist background. SEMRush will almost certainly use an algorithm to assess its authority score and it will draw on things like link info, as Google does.
The Discover move is a major announcement in my opinion and the biggest change in strategy for a long time. I don't agree that it's somehow not significant or a restatement of previous info.You are way overthinking this, Paul. And you refuse to consider the data on the table. Despite your claims that you are a data person.
The data is that the niche sites have been mismanaged for a long time. The mismangement clearly reflects a lack of attention to data.
And please don't pull that passive-aggressive gimmick of yours any further. Don't insinuate I'm not looking at this from a data-driven, rationalist position, or unable to interpret information, like you do. Frankly, I think you are the one who is grasping at straws in the hope a transfer to Discover will earn you the cents you lost.While we all have an opinion on this recent change - and certainly have the right to express our thoughts - let's please remember to be respectful of each other and keep this exchange friendly.
Come on, bravewarrior, he has a right to mock me for being emotional and I don't have a right to tell him to back off?
I didn't see Paul's comment as mocking you, Ced. I'm also a very emotional person, as you'll see if your read the comment I left earlier in this post. As long as no one is being attacked, it's better to just let things roll off your back. The bottom line is, TAG has made a decision and there's not a damn thing any of us can do about it. I haven't posted anything new in three or more years because I feel my attempts are in vain and I just don't give a shit anymore.
Well, I see barbs all over his words as is his usual style, but I will stop if he stops. He is free to embrace the transfer. I am free to reject it. He doesn't need to do a data analysis for me. It's not welcomed.
And you're right, there's nothing we can do, which was what I was saying earlier before someone ... never mind. Our only choice is to forget about what we wrote or transfer them somewhere else.I've found that since comments were eliminated and ads have infiltrated, it's a waste of my time to read anything new that's posted to this platform. I'm trying to concentrate on setting up a freelance editing/proofreading business. I've completed courses and have earned certifications. Recently, my time has been spent in researching the various web building platforms to see which meets my needs, and writing copy for my site pages. This endeavor is taking up a lot of my time. Reading HP articles are an interruption, especially since I can't comment or even let the author know I've read. My time is better spent elsewhere, IMO. HP has gone down the tubes and is now nothing but a time suck at best.
I agree with you 100%, Shauna. It's annoying when I try to read other people's articles on HubPages because of all the ads breaking my train of thought. And occasionally, the page reloads (due to overuse of resources) and starts from the beginning again. So, I completely lose my place. I don't know how our visitors deal with that! More likely—they don't.
Glenn, I think the stats speak volumes for how visitors deal with the interruptions. They simply DON'T! They close out of the page and go elsewhere. The only newly posted HP articles I bother reading are those that are still on Hp.com and haven't been moved to Discover because I don't want to deal with the interruptions. I just wish we could still comment. It seems pointless to support our fellow hubbers when we can't give them feedback or even let them know we have read their work. And using the forums to do so is even more of a time suck.
TAG, if you didn't like HP's platform and the community of authors, why in the hell did you take it over???? TAG fucked up in my opinion, and so did HP in allowing infiltration/buyouts of corporations that don't give a flying you-know-what about the authors that make/made the platform possible. We were doing quite well on our own. Shame on HP for reaching out to the big guns that only shot us all in the foot!Shauna, I react the same way as you. I give up reading after getting sidetracked too often. And I hear the same from friends who like to read my content. So, I’m surprised TAG isn’t aware of that yet. Or maybe they just don’t care, which would be a shame if true.
To your last point, Maven purchased HubPages because they wanted a profitable enterprise to build on, which it had been before TAG took over Maven. They had so many wonderful plans for HubPages that they told us about at the Maven Coalition Conference I attended. All that was discarded since then.Glenn, in my many decades in the outside workforce, my experience is that any time a small business got taken over or bought by/merged with a business that has stock holders, all went to pot. The existing employees were replaced with those who worked for whatever corporation was behind the takeover, or they voluntarily left because conditions were no longer friendly and the overall atmosphere had gone from family-feel to dictatorial with no concern for or input from those who made the original business successful. That's what's happening here. Most everyone I've followed for the past 13 years have jumped ship, including me. I don't see a promising new batch of writers joining HP. Most of them (from what I've seen) have no writing talent whatsoever. When will TAG see the forest through the trees?? Give this site back to the people. I don't see that happening. I see it slithering away into the abyss. So sad.....
Well said, Shauna. I think you described the situation very well. Interestingly, as for giving it back to the people, I discussed on my website about how its stock price dropped so much that all presently active Hubbers can acquire The Arena Group among ourselves for $655 each, based on its present market capitalization. It’s more fantasy that reality, but the numbers are real.
CYong74 - I agree with some of your ideas and disagree with others. It's reasonable to ask someone to back up and explain, especially when they're making sweeping statements, such as:
"The data is that the niche sites have been mismanaged for a long time. The mismangement clearly reflects a lack of attention to data."
My question(s) would be: What do you mean by this, which data are you referring to, and why do you believe it?
Employing ad hominem attacks is not really an answer.This happens too often here. Staff drops a bomb and then disappears, and we speculate, argue, and fight about what's going on when HubPages could just tell us.
The last line of Lisa's post was "...let us know if you have any questions!"
Well, plenty of questions have been raised in this thread so far. Hopefully we get some answers today.Perhaps she has no answer. Seems like it, too, was a bombshell dropped onto her.
Thursday was a holiday, so maybe she took Friday off too. Trying to give the benefit of the doubt.
If we don't hear anything today, it will be pretty frustrating.
Paulgoodman67. I repeat, I'm not interested in debating with you. I already said that yesterday. I'm also uninterested in your endless putting down of others while humble bragging. Back off.
If you are not happy about this, if you find this un-academic or ad hominem, please, go report me. You can also encourage TAG to sue me for defamation.CYong74 - This is a public forum. As far as I'm aware, anybody can say what they want provided they stay within the rules.
If you don't like something that I say then make an argument or just ignore it. Attacking me personally is not an appropriate response.
I am perfectly calm and happy and have no intentions of reporting you. I have no connections with TAG or their legal team, and I don't know why they would wish to take legal action against you.
I have no idea why you are upset but genuinely wish you all the best.
I hear you! The tragedy is HP does not hear you.
I really can't say if this new move is going to be for the better. I also agree with Genna's sentiment that we have to fasten our seatbelts and see where it takes us.
Let's hope it makes a difference. Views are rapidly plummeting.
My views have increased over the last seven days, but the increase hasn't been to my Discover articles. Most of the uptake in views is seen in my Dengarden articles.
Probably. On a side note, all of my Spinditty and Delishably articles have been moved to Discover. And my Letterpile articles, along with many others have been sequestered to the abyss of Hubpages.com They all did better where they were. I've pretty much given up on HP anyway, so it really doesn't matter. I've had absolutely NO inclination to write for HP after the last two take-overs. As far as I'm concerned, it's a waste of my time, effort, and talent.
Historically, my page views always decrease about 3-5 days before Independence Day and stay low until several after days after the Fourth of July.
People are traveling as well as shopping. Costco, Target, and the supermarket were all mobbed today, at least where I happened to be.That's pretty much a given but it doesn't change the overall picture. HP has fallen to the bottom of TAG's totem pole. Period. And HP no longer has control over it's rung on TAG's ladder. That has become blaringly obvious over the last few years.
Yes, things are pretty bleak right now. I was pretty shocked at how low my CPM was for July 4. That was probably my lowest CPM ever.
Most of my articles are on HobbyLark, but I see that another HP author above remarked about the dismal state of CPMs on Owlcation. Did you see that remark?4th July or not, the general trend is what matters and that's catastrophic.
Might as well put everything in Discover, as views there have been improving, but why it's doing better, I don't know. The average article quality there is lower than the niches but it has better authority. Go figure!
My DenGarden views should be high at this time of year, but that traffic has collapsed in the last couple of years. Most of the high traffic guides have lost 90% of their views.
The obvious question is that if views are going up in Discover and down in the niches, why not just make the niches more like Discover?
Discover has always been the place for content that didn’t have sufficient EEAT or the quality standards necessary to be considered for a network niche site. Now TAG wants to put everything on Discover. If that fails, the damage might be irreversible!
I don’t understand TAGs reluctance to try more beneficial experiments first. For example, fixing the way excessive ads are counterproductive, with their inappropriate placement every few sentences and breaking bullet lists into incomprehensible pieces.Glenn, frankly, I don't think HP knows what they are doing. Discover's EEAT or quality? I have pointed this out to editors several times with my Discover articles, and the EEAT and quality were at a high standard. Then, they were moved over.
I see your point, Kenna. This entire thing confuses me. It seems TAG goes against everything HubPages did that worked. HubPages is not in control. TAG is. It’s their server (which is why they could never support functions programmed into HubPages’ server, such as reader comments).
Curious . . . Paul Edmondson is the Platform President. Wouldn't this change fall under his responsibility? I would think he has an eye out that HP would be successful with his personal investment in it not just financially, but the 'dream'.
PAUL EDMONDSON / President, Platform
https://thearenagroup.net/paul-edmondson/
Then again, looking from afar, I may be confused.It’s true that Paul Edmondson is President, Tim. But it’s questionable what role he plays in decision making. Everything I learned when I was with him at the Maven Conference in 2018 has changed once TAG took over Maven. Perhaps Paul might chime in here to add some clarity to what’s happening.
How will this change affect writers and publishing content? Will there still be the same professional editors for specific topics?
I'm not sure if this change will be good for the future or not. I remember the niche sites being implemented because of certain Google Algorithms that affected content farms like HubPages.
I'm still worried about artificial intelligence and how it will affect authors, especially sites like HubPages.
In my early 20s, some of my most successful articles (1000+ views daily) were published before the niche sites existed. But I have had some success with articles featured on network sites. Of course, the internet continues to change, so the future is never certain online with AI, apps, social media, etc.EricDockett: I doubt anything meaningful would be shared. This is a major move with profound implications. If we can't even be told right away what would happen to a niche site after a transfer, I don't see any other info forthcoming.
Was it you who asked the important question about schedule? I doubt we would be given a timeline regarding the rest of the niche sites.When they launched the niche sites, HP kept us updated with their schedule as best they could (it seemed). We always knew what was going on and what they had planned.
It is a shame it has come to this. Five days later and still in the dark.
Did I miss the answer to this; are all the niches to be moved to Discover, or is it only certain sites?
While Pethelpful was holding up pay wise; since the new quarter CPMs are halved and views are 1/4 of their peak with half as many published articles.
As an experiment, they should begin by moving a couple of sites over, and waiting to see how it works over the next few months.
I went to see what was left on FeltMagnet, and it is empty, lol. I am surprised they moved everything wholesale.We haven't gotten clarification about anything, even though there are a bunch of questions hanging in the air.
According to the stated reason for the move, PetHelpful should remain on its own since it has a higher domain authority than HP.I suspect it's not about domain authority, but dollars. If a site falls below a certain income/expense ratio, then it might have to be assimilated into the Borg.
All the decisions are being made by money people, as far as I can see. There is a consulting firm whose priority is making TAG profitable, who are running the show since the Sports Illustrated debacle played out.
I don't see any SEO genius taking up the reins. I don't see how 5 hour energy's owner's original plan to turn TAG into a 5 Hour Energy Theatre is in the future either. Now it's a matter of keeping the lights on while they waste money suing Authentic Brands for doing what was their right, when they failed to make their payments.
I liked Glen's idea of buying out majority ownership of TAG. I only wish we all had a better idea of what Google is planning in the next few years, and if organizations like TAG have a future. Hopefully the antitrust people will wakeup to Google's monopoly on information and start asking questions about how they plan to mind control the planet in the near future.
Yep, all mine have been moved - about 15, I think.
Eric says, "Five days later and still in the dark." I have a suspicion that HubPages is also in the dark.
Another question I have: If everything is now going to Discover, does that mean that articles will no longer be curated by human editors?
My understanding is that previously, the niches contained curated articles, and Discover held uncurated. It sounds like there will be zero human curation in future.Is Discover a subdomain of Hubpages.com? I thought anything linked to the HubPages domain was bad?
“Now everything's a little upside down, as a matter of fact the wheels have stopped / What's good is bad, what's bad is good, you'll find out when you reach the top / You're on the bottom.”
- Bob DylanThe traffic at HP.com has also been doing well. While people have (rightfully) labeled much of the material in Discover as "drivel", the stuff in HP.com is much worse and total dross.
The hubs I have on the old HubPages don’t receive traffic. I occasionally rewrite those to get them back on a niche site. The old HP articles, I believe, don’t receive any earnings.
I think partly why Discover is doing well is because it’s constantly receiving new content. I think some of the niche sites don’t receive a whole lot of new stuff… I also don’t think this is the only problem for the niches that have low authority scores.
I think streamlining some of what’s happening here is a good thing, even if the process is chaotic. Some niche sites are receiving basically no traffic, and it would be wise to close them. My hope is the stronger niche sites can survive and then receive treatment for their own particular brand. Delishably makes sense as its own thing. Pethelpful is one of the most consistently strong ones with name recognition, so I imagine it will stay.
Those are some of my thoughts on all this. I think I’m getting long winded, so I’ll stop for now.The overall traffic to HP.com has trebled over the last seven months.
The graph is essentially the same as Discover, which perhaps shouldn't be a surprise given that Discover = discover.hubpages.com.
I'm not basing this on my own, anecdotal experience, but rather the stats sites like SEMRush which give impartial info about domains.Yes, I use SEMRush too. The problem is if HubPages is receiving an uptick in traffic instead of Discover, I don’t think the articles there receive earnings.
It is unusual if the old domain is receiving traffic. Discover I can understand. Is it possible that the old domain is reporting traffic that actually belongs to Discover?Discover is a subdomain of HP.com, they are not separate entities.
That is what I meant when I wrote: Discover = discover.hubpages.com
One of them is a domain (hubpages.com) and the other is a subdomain that belongs to it (discover.hubpages.com).Yes, I understood all this. That wasn’t really my issue.
Does SEMRush count Discover’s traffic as HubPages? You said the traffic to HP.com has trebled, so I’m trying to figure out why when it has even lower quality than Discover, and the content there is kind of hard to find. I assume subdomain traffic is counted for domain traffic.
I don’t normally look at the regular HubPages traffic since it wasn’t a goal to have content there.
I see where this is going. Editors are a cost centre that the bean-counter mind that is said to be leading this platform can't tolerate. So, replace salaried editors with non-salaried machinery (okay, they might swallow up a bit of electricity and a diode or two) and HP will be led into the promised land of profitability. Of course, machines can't really distinguish between good and bad copy, but look at the cost savings. That's the theory. In practice, we have evidence it doesn't work.
This strategy has been used throughout the world of print media. Editors and reporters are fired, the quality of the product declines, subscribers stop subscribing, advertisers stop buying space because their audience has vanished, and the owners close the whole thing down, and spend time on their yachts and golf courses.
The Boston Globe is reporting that 360 newspapers have closed since just before COVID. Before the pestilence, the number of closures was in the thousands.Sadly, people can put anything on the Internet, even falsehoods, nonsense and "reliable" sources.
Eric. Extremely well put. Those questions are exactly the ones on my mind.
How does blending my niche articles, judged by HP editors to be of the highest quality (their words), with Discover's garbage improve my traffic?
Just one example. There are articles on Discover that promote a wild conspiracy theory about a plan to poison us all with airplane contrails loaded with nasty chemicals. I reported a couple as being complete bilge but they are still there. Do I want my writing on the same platform as this sort of nonsense? Of course I don't.
I recently cancelled my membership on Medium because of quality issues. I cited the acceptance of profanities as tolerable discourse, the presence of articles such as "Balls-Out Sports: Dick Pics, Nip Slips, and Double Standards," and the tardiness in banning AI as reasons why I no longer want to appear on Medium.
Although I am a career journalist, I do have standards.
So Lisa, to echo Eric, what measures, if any, will be in place to sort the wheat from the chaff on Discover in order to discard the chaff?You know, after posting I felt bad about calling them "low-quality drivel" so I went and checked a few.
The first three I looked at were clearly AI generated, posted by the same author in the past 24 hours.
The fourth one had to be plagiarized from somewhere, because the perfect writing style did not match the clunky syntax in the person's bio.
*shrug*
I stand by my drivel remark.Eric, these are valid points, and they concern me too. However, as I said earlier, even well-written articles have falsehoods. People can put anything on the Internet.
HP needs to close the drawbridge or filter these wannabes until Lisa sorts out this significant change. She said she's watching for the next few weeks. Let's see what happens and hope for the best.
At least something is being done.Agree with 'closing the drawbridge'. Make new writers apply for membership by completing a form with a sample of their writing. Have HP's AI checker check it.
Check your account page. Use the filter option for FeltMagnet, then again for Discover. You'll see all articles that lie within those sites.
You'll get an email. You can also use the filter on your stats page to display articles on any of the sites.
Bev, unfortunately, the filters removed the niche site as well. I didn't receive and email.
Do you mean FeltMagnet? Yes, it's gone from the filters. However, you can see Discover articles.
I get an email every time an article is moved, edited or snipped.I've had more articles moved, this time from Delishably. My sense is that they're moving everything to Discover and doing it as quickly as practically possible. It may only take a couple of weeks or so at this rate.
There is no reason to move Delishably. It has the same authority score and still receives more than 150k in traffic. Recipes don’t need to be mixed with everything else! This is very bad.
My recipe articles are still on Delishably.
I haven’t had articles moved from Delishably yet… I will be very unhappy if they close that niche.
I agree. From what I have seen, Delishably is one of the healthier niche sites. In my case, I hope that HP doesn't close HobbyLark, since it too is one of the healthier niches.
The niche sites have such stupid names. Many of them give the reader no clue what the site is about. Even worse, they're misleading. I have an article on Turbo Future that is about combating plagiarism. To me, Turbo Future indicates the articles within are about mechanical or maybe even IT issues. How in the h-e-double l does plagiarism relate to Turbo anything?????
I agree, Shauna—some of those domain names could be part of the problem.
Yeah, I’m hoping they move over ones that have very little traffic and low authority scores and then leave the others alone… at the very least they can pause to see what happens before overhauling the healthier niches.
My guess is that the move to Discover may well work at first, traffic there has certainly improved over the last seven months or so.
However, it's difficult to see things staying that way, given that there's so much obviously low-quality material in there, as others have pointed out.
It's a weird situation brought about by the vagaries of Google Search. The disconnect between what Google say and do has never been greater.1 out of 2 of my Feltmagnet hubs got moved to Discover, in the stats it shows that the moved hub is gaining traffic (5 views in one week, dinner's on me!). I guess it's more about content not being stagnant, which is a welcome change.
Encouraging, in the short-term anyway.
It seems all articles on Soapboxie also been moved back to Discover. Still not announced. I just noticed it.
We did move Soapboxie and YouMeMindBody yesterday. I was waiting to see if the articles migrated correctly before announcing it.
This entire discussion poses a question in my mind: does Lisa work for HP or TAG? Whose decision is this????
She started at HP around the time of the Maven merger I think. If you check out her about section, it shows she now or in addition to HP also works for TAG on some of their own and previously published sites (SI).
That's another great question, Shauna: "Whose decision is this?" But I don't think we'll ever know.
I suspect Lisa is just as frustrated as we are. She probably just needs to follow orders. But it's clear someone higher up has no idea why Maven bought HubPages in 2018.
They seem to not recognize that HubPages made the company profitable by creating niche sites to satisfy Google's Panda algorithm, and they limited the ads to placement between capsules so readers can follow the logic of the content. So we had readers who stayed engaged. That's gone now.All of the changes that have been implemented by TAG are counterintuitive. And no one wants to listen to us. HP do you hear us????? Sever the ties with the dictatorship and take back your ship!
Lisa, Thank you for the update. Can you offer any other news?
Please don’t get rid of Delishably! I receive emails all the time about the site as well as Pethelpful, DenGarden, and a couple of others. There are readers who care about those sites.
My 120+ articles on Soapboxie just went pftt (imitation fart noise) on to Discover. No notification although I seem to recall a promise being made that we would be advised of articles being moved.
Quality articles are now co-habiting with conspiracy theory rubbish, lists of words for fruit/kitchen utensils/birds etc. in other languages, and barely literate screeds about education and science.
Go to your happy place Rupert.According to this, Google doesn't rank websites; they rank the pages within.
https://victorious.com/blog/how-does-go … 's%20rank.Shauna, that article discusses individual pages. But it also says that Google's Helpful Content Algorithm can impact an entire site’s rankings rather than just a particular page’s rank. It's easy to miss since that's a long article. It's stated under the section: "How Does Google Rank Websites?"
Thanks for the clarification, Glenn. I think I've gotten googly-eyed (pun intended) on researching this topic!
Glenn, I've Googled both you and Kenna in an attempt to find your websites. Nothing came up. I know you and I are connected on LinkedIn. Is the link to your site in your profile? I'd love to check it out and I know it's a no-no to provide the link here.
You might have spelled my name wrong. No problem, everyone does. LOL. I just checked and all my sites come up in Google. But yes, it my home icon on my profile. Kenna's website in the home icon on her profile too. Thanks for your interest.
You're probably right. I think I added a "c" to your last name. My bad.
I found your site (after spelling your last name correctly), but I don't see a "subscribe" button. Will you consider adding one?
Good idea, I'll consider that. I write the HTML myself so I need to use a database feature. I think my webhost has that option. I'll have to check. Thanks for the suggestion.
You're welcome. Having a Subscribe button is as important as being able to comment, doncha think?
Hint, hint: maybe consider that as well....Thank you for your suggestions! While adding a subscribe button and comments section could provide more engagement opportunities, they also involve more challenges that I need to consider.
Managing subscriptions requires ensuring their security and privacy. It creates the opportunity to be hacked. So I would need to make it foolproof. My web host does have a feature I can use, but it's easy for hackers to use it to find a back-door. I'd rather avoid that.
I actually wrote an article once about how big corporations get hacked so easily because they don't understand these things.
Handling comments is another issue. It would require moderating comments to avoid spam, and that can get quite time-consuming.
I recognize the benefits of comments from readers, but I also realize the challenges involved. I used to delete comments on my hubs that had spam or poor grammer. I noticed doing that helped increase my Google traffic back in those days before TAG.
Besides all that, hey, I do appreciate your suggestions and will still consider them in the future. These things do take time to implement.I understand, Glenn. When I'm ready to build my website, I'll be doing so through the Squarespace platform. They have security measures in place that make me feel comfortable in using their web builder.
I don’t use a web builder. I do my own programming. Interestingly, I monitor all hacking attempts and continuously see attempts to find back door access that well-known web tools have. But what they don’t realize is that I wrote my own code, so their attempts are in vain.
Hey Shauna, you got me thinking and I added social media share buttons to most of my articles today. I know you suggested adding a subscribe button and comment feature. But those take me more than a day to get done. lol. Thanks for motivating me.
Many people do that. I'm used to it. It's an understandable mistake.
Shauna, you can google my full name, Kenna McHugh, and it'll come up.
Rupert, how did you find out about this? That's so many articles and you have been such a dedicated writer here.
Janis. I clicked on the Soapboxie link at the right-hand side of this forum and found the entire page/domain/subwoofer/rutabaga or whatever they call it had been emptied. It still says "Welcome to Soapboxie," but there are no articles and no explanation as to why it's a void.
Not a peep from HubPages alerting me to this, which speaks volumes about the value placed on their contributors, the people who provide the raw material from which they make money.I just checked the home page for HubPages and Soapboxie is no longer on it. However, the entire page has been updated with current articles.
Curiouser and curiouser. In the midst of the chaos, I've just had an article moved from Discover to ToughNickel. They must feel I need compensating for the 120 plus articles of mine on Soapboxie that went the other way.
That's odd and interesting.
I don't know why they would do that. ToughNickel is one of the worst-performing niches. It may not offer the compensation that you seek.
Did you get any notification that it had happened? Like others, I've had stuff moved from Soapboxie to Discover without any notice.
Yes Paul. I got the usual "only the very best blah, blah, blah are put on network sites" e-mail yesterday, Sunday, July 14.
Is it possible the left hand doesn't know what the right had is doing?Surely you jest, Rupert (she says sarcastically)!
Jason. Nobody knows whether this will be the end of the niche sites. Probably, HP doesn't know the answer to that question. If they did they might tell us. Nah.
Yes Shauna. I jest.My impression was that everything's going to Discover, it's only the timing that's in question.
And once it's done, it's done, or as the announcement said: "The move to Discover HubPages is intended to be a permanent one."
It seems clear to me that it's the end of niche sites.That was how I understood the announcement from Lisa-Winter. Whether it can work for everyone remains to be seen. If we lose money from it, then the HubPages writing platform loses money from it.
All the more reason HP needs to sever their ties with conglomerates that only ( misconceptually) see HP as money in their pocket. HP did fine until they looked outside their own vision. HubPages worked.. Now it's nothing more than a dried up noodle.
HP: Please respect your founding premise (and founders) enough to restore what worked! Okay. I get it. You thought the grass was greener on the other side. But guess what? Many - if not most of - your loyal EEAT writers have now jumped ship.
Restore the platform we knew and loved. Yes - give us hoops to jump through to be featured and recognized by Google, but please restore a more user-friendly platform. Ads scattered throughout and no comments section goes against what Google is looking for now.
And now, another article of mine booted from Discover onto Owlcation. Bizarre.
I suspect that it won't matter in the grand scheme of things and Owlcation will ultimately be emptied like happened to Soapboxie.
My expectation before this announcement was made was that HP would aggressively move large amounts of stuff to Discover but leave the articles with the most views in the niches. They were doing this already but in a fairly restrained way. I thought they'd just ratchet it up.
However, it seems everything is now destined for Discover. The aberrations may just be technical glitches.It’s possible it was a technical glitch. In Lisa’s message in this forum she said, “I haven't decided which sites will move or what the timeline will be yet, but I'll keep everyone posted as best I can.”
Based on that I don’t think all the niches will be moved. Only the ones that have low traffic or a low authority score, or something like that. Perhaps eventually everything will be moved, but I don’t think that’s the plan currently.A hybrid system would mean either curating or not curating submitted articles depending on the subject matter. I doubt they’ll want to run two systems at the same time indefinitely but I guess we’ll find out.
FYI: I just had a similar experience to Rupert, where an article has been moved from Discover to a niche. Who knows what the explanation is?
It’s definitely madness. I think they let the situation get too urgent and that’s how we got here. My earnings for this month really are the worst ever, so in a weird way I’m happy at least something is being done. It could be a last ditch effort, who knows. I’d like to think this is the beginning of tunneling out of the hole. All of this change could very well have no effect.
The earnings are low, though I had an uptick yesterday. Also, an editor moved one of my Discover articles to PetHelpful, which is promising.
Yeah, I think if they can find an article a new home not on Discover they might test it out at that other spot. I’m hoping numbers across the board improve.
Also, it appears I received a slight uptick in earnings yesterday as well.
I'm glad some of you have had an uptick in money. Mine has gone downhill.
There's also a new Google algo core update on the way, supposedly coming in the next few weeks. That could shake things up. They've resulted in traffic drops in the last few years.
It was a very minor uptick. July overall is outrageously bad.
Maybe 8 years ago or more, Paul Edmondson said something as far as I recall, about talking to Google about site performance issues. I wonder is there or was there a channel open at some stage? Can companies get any feedback other than the normal vague replies from Google about how to improve things?
Here is a SERP case study that flies in the face of lumping everything together on Discover to improve rankings. Basically they say Google has a new E added to EEAT (as of March 2023) and that is Experience. They found at HubSpot, after being hit by the M23 algo update, that they needed to write about fewer topics, and in the first person, adding their experience with the topic.
The article includes their "personal experience recipe" as well as their new philosophy, which created positive results for them for the following year. Briefly that includes writing in the first person and sharing an anecdote on the topic. Having shared this, the new Google algo update, mentioned by Paul, may upend all of that going forward.
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/hubs … rp-secrets
I sincerely hope HP staff will stop moving over sites wholesale, until after they get some real data, and Google's rollout and its impact are understood.I am seeing some changes being incorporated in hubpages for quality enhancements. Earlier my articles were easily featured but now they (last two) are published but not featured.
Anyway, I welcome these measures and would try to improve my work. My request is can one of my unfeatured article can be edited/snipped by one of the editors so that I get some guidance for future.
I know I am expecting too much from the editorial team but that would not only help me but the many newcomers also.I'm wondering if it is even worth it to submit an article to a niche site to be upgraded to that site. I recently submitted a HubPages article of mine to ToughNickel, but I'm bewildered about what the outcome of that is going to be. It seems that the niche sites are ultimately going to disappear, and the entire HubPages writing site will only have the Discover site where our articles can be featured with ads.
From what I've seen, the more popular niche sites such as Delishably, Dengarden, PetHelpful are still live. If I were you, I'd go ahead and submit to a niche site that seems befitting. If it's not accepted on the site you chose, it should at the very least be sent to Discover if you've updated/improved it. That is unless HP determines the original HP article needs to remain there.
Today when I was in my HubPages feed, I checked to see if the SoapBoxie niche site was still in existence. I clicked on where it read "SoapBoxie" and instead of taking me to the SoapBoxie niche site, it took me to the HubPages Discover site. It looks as though SoapBoxie is long gone. However, I will continue to submit my articles to the other niche sites for as long as they continue to exist.
Soapboxie and FeltMagnet are both gone. They were the first to be emptied of content, which was moved to Discover.
I hope they don't remove the Exemplore niche site, because I do like getting articles upgraded to that site.
