Hubs with Comments - Are they doing better than others?
- Nelle Hoxieposted 12 years ago
0 
better share that tea and whiskey tonight!! 
yea, the more comments on the hub, the better they seem to do. I also see a trend in the type of content - info does much better than recipes though I have a couple that are steady with traffic. Today seems better than this past week...hoping next week will improve a bit more. And you?- Nelle Hoxieposted 12 years ago0
I am not seeing a noticeable difference, and I have hundreds of comments on some hubs. I have had an awful lot of spam comments recently as well - so I had been considering doing the opposite to you.
I am trying hard to look the other way until this change has settled down. I will officially start panicking if this goes on for a week.
Nelle, it never occurred to me to remove the comment boxes from my product hubs. I never expect comments to them either but surprisingly I do get comments from certain users here, the usual suspects who I suspect might like me or something
I did one hub product hub that triggered a user to share a memory they had with an antique version of the product I was discussing, and the story was really sweet. I guess what I am saying is that it is worth leaving the possibility of comments open, you never know what might happen. Might get someone share a personal story or whatever. I know you are by far more experienced with all this stuff then I am and so feel free to ignore this post.
- Nelle Hoxieposted 12 years ago0
Comments dont seem to be relative to my losses and gains. My heaviest trafficked hub was heavily commented on, barely backlinked (as it was a commercial flop) and has seen a 40% drop.
I could care less.
But it did seem to follow all "quality" factors, high time on page, very low ctr, high social sharing, outgoing authority links, triple checked for grammar/spelling and is often shared in forums and referenced in articles.
Its quality for its topic, for sure.
Its been dropped from #1 to #9 - with the manufacturer as 1, amazon listing as 2, ebay as 3 and a large industry aff/compare site at 4. Which is something I believe you saw also Nelle?
But although a commercial product now outranks me, the query was not strictly transactional - it was more along the lines of "when should I use widget a" not "where can I buy widget a"
Mark mentioned something yesterday that i have seen repeated at some webmasterforums.
Why would HP get hit hard and squidoo so much less - pretty similar user base BUT vastly different site structure, HP's internal linking is amazing, squidoos is non-existent. If that factor was "dialed back" (hopefully for testing purposes) which site would fall farther?
phases of algo switches have been discussed heavily too, Ive been getting emails about some hubs and pages rising already and can see that slightly in my own portfolio (but mine is mostly young) - there is a system of dropping filters, executing algo changes and resetting filters - this has been admitted to and can be found within the google blog (somewhere) - been trying to collate all this stuff as I find it interesting - sorry for the rantThe Squidoo chief editor made a forum post about the algorithm changes and lower traffic, so they have been hit to some extent. I don't have enough mature lenses to make any observations about traffic drops, so I have no idea how badly they were affected.
A Hubber with a bigger presence on Squidoo might have a better idea.
- Nelle Hoxieposted 12 years ago0
- Nelle Hoxieposted 12 years ago0
you asked for it
Im kind of regurgitating here, not much original thought and my industry specific jargon may be skewed so ill define my meaning just for this post:
Google is constantly making changes - tweaks, I will call those "filters"
Say spammers, introduce SEOBotastic2000 software and start churning out links and quickly getting their pharma sites all high ranked.
(opera and hp not getting along will be back)
Google identifies the unusual activity , say by link profiles, a code snippet , whatever.
and they institute a filter, "antiseobot2000" and fix that issue.
None of us will notice, its not an algorithm change just a little bandaid. the spammers are the only ones effected. the beat goes on for everyone else.
But the algorithm is different 200+ factors all weighted and balanced and that isnt changed as much or at least not at the level we are seeing now,mayday, florida etc.
When the algorithm is changed often the filters have to be set back and then reset perhaps to make up for core algo changes (total regurgitation here - but descends from webmaster world by way of google blog by way of google programmer who has been working on an update for a year now)
so when we see these big changes and things are jumping around, its because "filters" are still being added/tweaked, weights of the various factors perhaps tweaked.
So ASSUMING - we were seeing a hit here from a devalue of the interlinking that wouldnt be necessarily permanent or "bad" it would just be part of the process.
_____end of regurgitation_______
As "writers" we are quick to think of quality as readability to the human eye , but the googlebots are not humans they are extension of a massive mathematical formula that is evaluating everything the phds can come up with.
Your nobel prize winning essay could be shot to page 1000000000 if your site loaded to slow, your content was iframed, or every visitor who landed was so bored they "backed" away instantly - and 197+ other factors,most not directly related to the human readability of your page, most probably intended to simulate human interaction with your page and accessibility to the bots (or blind visitors)
(im being overly general - as phrase matching, reading level. lsi - things that can try and understand content relavance do exist)
Just trying to say - a google "quality/relevance" is not so basic as the writers here in the forums are assuming - much of HP success is from the site structure made by ex-MS IT specialists.
With that background out of the way if google tried to directly identify "content farms" and "duplicate content" (which isnt specifically stated but was discussed in the cutts/google blogs for awhile now) what factors would they try and identify?
Some that seem to be agreed on are:
Speed of content development (Demand pubs 4000 daily)
Percentage of Duplication (dupe to unique ratio)
Does the quantity of content have a sufficient level of authoritative backlinks to justify the quantity produced?
Currently (right now), if one searches alot (i do) one will see lots of very old content on top ..as in outdated BAD returns, ehow is showing up in multiple locations in the same return (prev limited to 2 per domain) scraper (duplicate sites) are more prevalent and webmasters are reporting that these sites are outranking their original content.
This would suggest that google is still very much in the process at the moment - and the filters are still being re-applied.
HP's interlinking really cant be penalized, its considered an asset to a site to be easily navigated and well organized along categorical relationships. Its not over optimization, but if we arent seeing that factor weighted, or weighted as high then each publisher is standing more on their own then we are used to.
----end conjecture ---
thats what I meant to say the first timeill come back and reread that later and see if it makes any sense, or even answers the question
but i really shouldnt be spending time on conjecture.
but i was working on the end of the hubsacademy article on the topic and have to much info rolling around and to many great new resources to read on search technology and philosophy to do it now. regurgitating will allow me to go off and work on paying work with a clear mind
*now where is that coffee maker*Nelle - I haven't noticed that comments make any difference. There is some correlation with age, although it is very weak.
One thing I noticed is that my current best performing Hubs tend to be well over 1000 words. I am wondering if the extra comments may be having an effect because they increase wordcount in the eyes of Google.I have noticed the same thing...and also thought the income potential was tied to word count until I did a short hub with $$$$$ potential...oh well so much for stats
The $$$$ is only a guide to how lucrative your keywords in the Hub may be - turning that into income is a different matter, especially if they are in a competitive market.
The wordcount thing is pure speculation on my part, and I am not a high traffic hubber - if it has an effect, it is probably one of many factorsAlthough my hubs with comments generally do get more traffib they are also seeing a sharp decline. I think the last time I had so few visits to my hubs was the first month that I started here. I was hoping that something was wrong with Hubpages "counter" but my Google Analysis report is also reflecting the sharp decline.
We;ll just have to sit out this storm and hope the arrows all point in the opposite direction tomorrow.I can't see a correlation between hubs, comments and traffic on mine, except for the obvious one like the hottest hub getting fresh comments like they do.
As it pans out my hottest hub is actually my best performing. Its been #1 in google for over a month and the hub itself is less than 3 months old.
It's now #2 and that is a big drop in terms of traffic
Woke up today and it seemed to have rallied but on closer inspection its traffic is coming from worldwide googles, not google.com.
When it is rolled out I expect to see decimation unless as Sunforged says, they get their filters all working again and that pushes us back up.As both Paul (in the HP Blog) and Sunforged (on HubsAcademy) have stated... this traffic glitch is but a temporary problem and will return to normal for those who write quality, original content.... My traffic has come back to 90% of what it had been and rising, with better SE ranking on some of my hubs.
- Nelle Hoxieposted 12 years ago0
Interesting timing. Just when Amazon is coming to realize they are not going to get away from state sales taxes that easy.
All of a sudden - they are dominating the search results - and for informational terms as well as "buying" keywords.
I hear a bell tolling - and I think it is for Amazon affiliates.This makes more sense than most theories Ihave been hearing. BUT surely this just means that another search engine will take the non-bigboy-commercial stuff ?? We choose to Google I think, we can choose to Bing or Yahoo or whatever I think ?
Maybe Baidu is coming to get them in their home territory
Oh, I see they have expanded their support:
http://www.google.com/support/webmaster … swer=99170
That's good news. It does mean a lot of work though to go back and find appropriate content that should be marked up this way.
Oh well: something to keep me busy in March
just me and the crickets
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