There have been several theories about what content Google is penalising and rewarding in the search results but at the moment it does seem a bit random (from my end). Let's compare notes and hopefully we can see some common threads in there. What content of yours is holding on to its ranking and traffic? What has been decimated?
Some ideas that have been thrown in so far:
Google demoted internal links
Google is favouring older content (hence the 1997 forum posts clogging up the results)
Single product hubs are faring better than multiple product hubs
Older product hubs are faring better than newer product hubs
Informational articles are faring better than product related articles
Informational hubs are doing better than hubpages "How to" hubs
Google has had an army of manual reviewers scoring webpages on a quality scale and looking at things like grammar, qualifications of the publisher and the citing of sources from authorative sites.
I thought I'd add my experience here because I'm a less prolific Hubber and I don't approach writing a Hub from an SEO point of view (not within my realm of expertise).
Here's what happened to my google dot com traffic: down 80% and holding there.
The oldest Hubs, mainly about food, are getting the most g.c hits now, but at a rate that is but a shadow of the past.
I have used shetoldme for some of the oldest Hubs, maybe for only half of my portfolio. All of the Hubs getting the most hits at this time do have stm links.
Until 2/23 both g.c traffic and AdSense earnings were on the rise, significantly, and I had made a 2011 plan to publish 100 Hubs. If things stay the way they are as a result of this algo change, and google implements the change around the globe, I will have pretty close to no google traffic. If this situation continues, then my motivation, and thus my plan, is going to be tough to keep.
I'm among those who write here because I enjoy it; any revenue I earn is a nice plus, but I don't write a Hub with earnings in mind. Hope this report adds something to the “let’s work it out” effort.
My sales hubs are getting hardly any views or clicks. My hub on Hot Pink High Heels used to have decent traffic and received earnings from both AdSense and Amazon. It was on the first page of Google. Now it's on the 3rd. It's still getting a fair amount of traffic, but from international versions of Google.
My hubs that are not product-related have had a jump in page views, and when I click on the keywords that brought people to my page, many of my hubs are on the first page of Google. I have a silly hub about food stamps, as well as serious hubs about being estranged from my mother and having my boyfriend take a vacation without me. All of these hubs have increased in popularity since the algorithm changes.
One of the first hubs I ever wrote is still on the first page of Google, so maybe time does make a difference.
A lot of people are saying their amazon hubs aren't doing well - does anyone think google might be registering the number of affiliate links on a page and devaluing pages with what they deem to be too many?
There are certainly a lot of spammy sites out there that are built just with affiliate links using amazon api and so on, so it would make a kind of sense to do that. If anyone has a website of their own with lots of affiliate links per page it would be interesting to hear how that has fared.
The fact that HP is now requiring a minimum of 50 words of text for each Amazon/eBay product listed would seem to suggest so.
Are they? I hadn't seen anything about that. I may look into this and remove some of the less useful / poorly performing amazon capsules from my pages. Or at least reduce the number of products they show.
This is the forum thread announcement for the changes in hub layout http://hubpages.com/forum/topic/69780
I haven't noticed any major difference to the traffic my hubs are getting at the moment. The top ones are still doing well (although one of them is seasonal at the moment and so it could be improving but perhaps not as well as it would have done otherwise?).
I remember when Squidoo got hit by Google some time ago; it all eventually settled down again so hopefully that will happen for the good content here as well.
[line]20%[/line] (i know it wont work)
Google has drastically dropped the trustrank of many 2.0 sites and the pages must now hold up on their own merits which is still primarily based on backlink profiles.
Pages with a backlink profile primarily made up of effected properties will naturally fall a bit due to the loss of the value of those 2.0 links ... this may not be permanent
The update is so large it will take weeks to see its final results
Crap content including eHow that has risen to the top is exactly what will eventually be slaughtered from the serps
duplicate content is currently damaging the original producers (copied) and the scrapers (copiers) - many sites that ranked well became the target of scrapers and were damaged in this update by their previous popularity
[line]20%[/line] (i know it wont work)
From my own perspective and testbed websites the biggest factor in the Google ranking change is down to duplicate content, my testbed sites with duplicate content and spun content dropped like stones.
My sites comprised 100% of unique content rose.
My overall opinion is that a large part of this algorithm change has targetted duplicate content, this has affected domain trust as well as page trust. So if a site with duplicate content has a single page with duplicate content, that page will take a big hit, but the overall domain trust will drop as well. To put it bluntly, the duplicate content on Hubpages has affected us all.
I would also be interested in knowing if Google has increased the impact low quality spelling and grammar has on rankings.
..this thread has the potential to be a worthwhile empirical resource tool
That's what I was hoping for....some real stats, as well as some anecdotal observations, rather than the backlinks are bad debate and sarky remarks.
I didn't say back links are bad. I said that dishonest SEO was what caused this.
That's indisputable, but also unimportant because there will always be dishonest people and there will always be otherwise honest folk who feel that they have to do it to compete with the original cheaters.
But still: the blame belongs to them and I am certainly not going to praise them - and also am not going to let them post inaccurate statements (such as bad links cannot be cause for punishment) without saying something.
Like I said, this thread was meant to be about stats and personal observations on our content whether on our own websites or hubpages, not ideology, morals or blame. If you have some stats or observations based on your own content or reliable sources to share, great, if not go and create your own thread.
I published a throw-away hub.
By "throwaway" I mean no SEO and no intent to monetize.
It has 15 views - 14 from hubpages - and no backlinks. Did zero keyword research.
It's on page 3 at Google already.
Good grief. "Seems a bit random" is an understatement, Susana.
(After I refreshed the Google results, it inched up another spot while typing this. I did click on it once to be certain the Hub is mine. I bet Google is watching and will now send a bomb to blow me up. See you in the sub-basement.)
That's interesting J - It may help us draw some useful conclusions at a later date when we see how the hub fares over a longer time frame. (as long a google doesn't bomb it )
From what I've read, seen, and experienced to some degree, the hubs that are holding up the best are the informational ones without web 2.0 links. I'm also seeing hubs with external links from RSS going down.
And yes, sorry about my "seems a bit random" comment, that is an understatement for sure considering the search results I've been seeing and the many strange anomalies therein.
I think your observation about informational hubs without links may be valid and worthy of further study.
The aforementioned Hub has crawled onto page 2 since I wrote the first post.
This is like watching the blob.
This particular Hub is informational, has no web 2.0 links, no links to other Hubs and only 3 tags.
Please keep us informed of your analysis.
Adding to theories
Google has drastically dropped the trustrank of many 2.0 sites and the pages must now hold up on their own merits which is still primarily based on backlink profiles.
Pages with a backlink profile primarily made up of effected properties will naturally fall a bit due to the loss of the value of those 2.0 links ... this may not be permanent
The update is so large it will take weeks to see its final results
Crap content including eHow that has risen to the top is exactly what will eventually be slaughtered from the serps
duplicate content is currently damaging the original producers (copied) and the scrapers (copiers) - many sites that ranked well became the target of scrapers and were damaged in this update by their previous popularity
----------
personally - traffic drops are not extreme but revenue loss is, I seem to have lost a massive amount of "buying" traffic I will need another week to be able to really glean which terms were effected - I stand to lose about 2k monthly if my portfolio keeps its current demographic of traffic.
Luckily feb was still better than January and between all the various revenue sources it will be months before I even get all my earnings from dec/jan .. so will have time to adapt in any way I may need
My portfolio shows that product hubs are faring a lot worse than informational, particularly the newer ones. Some older ones are still doing ok, some have tanked. It's been suggested those titles in the least competitive niches are holding up better?
Amazon earnings are definitely down due to lack of views. Though I've had higher ecpm for adsense making up for the loss of traffic - not making sense - shaking head.
I have definitely noticed ranking high for less terms for one hub - that's info hubs.
One thing I didn't mention in my first post is the possible effect of onpage optimization. I'll have to look to see whether less optimized hubs are holding up better?
And if it is, that's easy enough to fix: tell the authors of the hubs that are causing the problem to clean up their self generated links or be forced to change the URL and lose all existing juice.
Draconian, yes, but if that is a major factor, that' is what is needed.
Not only draconian, but idiotic also. And will not bring the desired outcome. Quite the opposite, will hurt even more.
Well, first, I am not yet convinced that the inbound linking IS an issue, so you do understand that I wrapped that in a big IF, right?
But IF it is - if HP has been devalued AS A WHOLE because x% of members have been fabricating inbound links from certain places judged to be improper by Google (as in the manual J.C.Penny case recently) then obviously it would help to remove those links or force a URL change.
I really don't see how your assertion that is "idiotic" makes any sense. It would be idiotic to do that without strong evidence that it needs doing, certainly. But if you knew (or could prove by experiment) that Google is heavily weighting this signal, what else could you do?
I think your personal investment in artificial linking is clouding your vision, Misha.
LOL You obviously don't understand the very basics of how links work, that's why your suggestion is idiotic.
Links can either do nothing or add value to the page they are pointing to. They cannot subtract value. Links from bad neighborhoods do nothing. All other links add some value.
Typical hubber linking profile consists exclusively of web2 properties like snipsly, shetoldme, xoomba, etc. If SF is right, and G devalued those links (means the value they add now is less than before), serious drop across the board on HP seems very logical. However, removing those links will remove all the value that was left after devaluing, decreasing the value of target hubs even more. As easy as that.
That's the way I look at things too Misha, my links aren't being removed, but they may be added to
Hi Ryan, glad you are back to your senses, and sorry for being a bit harsh on you a couple of days ago
I am curious, did black hat seo have anything to do with our demise or is it just a lot of poor hubs?
It seems to be neither. It's that we aren't major retailers.
So did this affect zazzle and those other small biz sites? Interesting that Google went for crass money grab instead of fairness if what you say is true.
Neither is ehow and yet they seem to be doing OK.
I'm just trying to help you out here Izzy, you seem really down about your Hubpages traffic. It may come back but worrying about it constantly isn't going to speed that up.
Most of us have taken a huge hit, my earnings have halved, even Mark Knowles told me that he might have to join be behind a bar (exaggeration of course, although not on my part), frogdroppings earnings have bottomed, all of us have lost money.
But hanging around on Hubpages bemoaning your traffic and worrying about getting into the new ad program isn't going to change that, I have been keeping an eye on what everybody is doing to counter their Hubpages hit.
A few people have applied for BrightHub where you get revenue sharing and $10 upfront, Nelle and Bill are working on new sites, Sunforged is superman and is probably doing a thousand things at once using 28 monitors in a world domination room, I am writing three eBooks and slowly building up wordpress sites. Some others are even trying to publish their way through the storm on Hubpages.
If you think that content is doing well on eHow, as you just said, then why not give it a whirl? Just trying to underline the positives and pick you up off of the floor, there isn't a single major Hubber who isn't freating, I have given myself 4 months to recoup my losses before looking for an office job, I have had 2 hubbers tell me that they have been in tears, one wondering how they are going to support their kids, but ultimately anybody with significant traffic is in the same boat.
It has been a week now since the crash, we can all do just as much waiting away from Hubpages as we can do waiting on Hubpages.
So, if you don't want to write on eHow, and you don't want to write on Hubpages, and you aren't bothered about being in the new Ad program, then what do you want to do? I don't really want to be messing around with eBooks which may never sell, and if Google hadn't had to change its algo then I wouldn't be. As it happens I haven't ruled out giving eHow a whirl myself...
Neither. It is just a lot of writers who have no idea how internet works.
Misha, surely you are not counting HP management in that category?
That's false.
This WAS caused by black and grey hat SEO 100%.
And you are part of it.
I have begun to realise that Google doesn't just object to "black hate SEO" but rather seems to object to "SEO" in general, at least any off-site SEO, they seem to encourage on-site SEO on their own help pages.
Well, that might have truth in it.
But it's a matter of degree. Certainly it's appropriate and expected to toss in a link to a related article from another site, even if you wrote it. But building link wheels for no other reason than to increase SERP quite rightfully ticks them off and it SHOULD tick off every one of us - because the fake linking of these so called "SEO gurus" is what created the mess that Google is trying (not all that well, perhaps) to clean up.
But instead of chastising these folks, most of the people here see them as heros - they are "beating the system". Yeah - and making problems for al of us while they count their money.
Simple fact.
If the fake linkbuilding like you extol didn't exist, there would be no need for Google to do any of this because they could judge quality by PageRank as they used to.
Of course I understand that's asking too much - there are far too many dishonest people in the world and because this has gone on unchecked for so long, we now have otherwise honest people arguing that they must cheat to meet their competitors.
But the fact remains that this was and is caused and perpetuated by dishonest SEO.
Oh my... You are again proven wrong all around (see my post at the end of the previous page that you ignored), and still babble incoherent garbage... You are boring. I am leaving you alone again, on your high tower. Ciao
You, my friend, have never even begun to prove me wrong on this.
On the other hand, you have been wrong - case in point, your continued insistence that nobody every gets punished for spammy links. Completely wrong, but you cling to that still.
Watch out, Misha: things can change over night. As I said before, invest your money wisely because Google is looking hard to take people like you right out of the game.
I can see too sides to the coin there, as Google aren't exactly a not-for-profit. They are the very definition of capitalism, and it is only natural for them to encounter threats from people attempting to leech off of their success.
I see the black hatters as a threat to the Google model which Google has simply failed to counter effectively at any stage since the start of their life cycle. They are effectively a huge building full of PHDs being outdone by the everyday man on the street who can find out how to cheat them via, well, via Google.
I see that as a Google fail more than anything. Black hat SEO techniques haven't even really needed to evolve, the stuff that they were using in 2002 is still largely applicable now. This is a desperate effort by Google to defeat black hatters and it looks to be just another fail. In my humble opinion.
How come I was not affected?
Either your assumptions are false or your idol punished angels instead of sinners. Either way you are proven wrong LOL
Probably because as this post suggests, you are just small potatoes: http://makemoneyonlinegrizzly.com/make- … y-example/
Or you simply may be too clever - right now.
But we know people HAVE been punished and Matt Cutts confirms it.
Who should I believe? You, or Cutts and J.C. Penny and others, big and small?
Oh, of course: we should believe YOU.
No. You are wrong and always have been.
"They cannot subtract value."
IF incoming links from bad hoods could have a negative effect it would be oh so easy to sabotage your competitors. Which is why they never will subtract value.
so "google bowling" is only a mythical unicorn then?
Nope. Doesn't exist. Misha says so.
Matt Cutts disagrees, but who is he to say?
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/ … le-bowling
lol, I was just reading that article 20 mins ago.
But, I am confused, Matt (of course) says that Google Bowling should be ineffective and that G is all over that (comments paint a different picture).. obviously "google bowling" attempts exist but they claim it shouldnt work
Are we reading the same article?
Personally, I see Matt Cutts as the Minister of Propaganda for Google - he is very smart, and is all double speak and innuendo but he will never tell you anything.
Webmaster communities often show conclusive empirical evidence ( as close as it gets with seo / algo reverse engineering) that much of what Google claims (via Cutts) is just PR.
I think you are missing my point.
Cuttts is confirming that yes, there CAN be a penalty but that if your competitors do it to you, he thinks they will catch that.
Of course he gives full details of how - NOT.
The point is that Misha and others constantly say you can't be harmed by linkbuilding and say that I'm a fool for saying otherwise.
Yeah, OK, I'm the fool. But you CAN be penalized. Have they caught Misha? Obviously not..
Anything that can be gamed and affect Google ranking is going to be something Google will want to penalize gamers for. But... a really good algorithm wouldn't allow any of this black hat stuff in the first place. They wouldn't have to hand out penalties. The rules would enforce themselves.
I think I understand far better than you, Misha.
First of all, my comment was directed to a scenario that assumes that HP AS A SITE has ben devalued because of activities by some hubbers. I hasten to add that I neither know nor believe that to be true; this is entirely hypothetical.
But IF it were true, the solution would be as I said: remove the devalued links or force a url change to cause Google to raise its opinion of the site as a whole.
As to your assertion that links cannot subtract value, that was demonstrated to be false in the recent J.C. Penney case. Yes, that was manual, but nothing says it cannot be algorithmic in the future.
Google doesn't like people like you who create massive fake linking campaigns. They have ben hampered because of the old saw that a competitor could damage you if they devalued because of bad linking, but obviously that didn't deter them in the case of J.C. Penney and they may be working on algorithms to do that automatically.
Your days may be numbered. While I don't know what you might publish elsewhere, certainly your hubs here are not spammy or low quality - if you are ultimately punished for enthusiastic linkbuilding, that certainly would have more than a tinge of irony, wouldn't it?
However, that wasn't my point here. Here I was addressing the overall health of the site. If excessively linked articles had to go to protect the site(big, big IF, please remember), then that's what would need to happen.
It's the same issue with everything else: if duplicate content is what is putting sand in Google's shorts, then it all needs to go. Painful for some, but if that were the deal, toss it out. If it's too much internal tag linking, tell people to cut it down themselves and then take out the machete if they don't comply.
But it's all IF right now. The solutions are easy - IF you know the problem.
ROFLMAO. Me punished? I made 50 plus bucks yesterday off HP, biggest day since mid January.
Ciao again, buddy
Where did I say this existed now, Misha?
I understand that you dislike me. I dislike people who do massive false backlinking, so we are quite even on that score.
However, in the past, Google has been unable to do anything about people who do this sort of fake linkbuilding. The reasons are obvious - it's somewhat hard to distinguish the fakes from organic links and if you can distinguish, the old saw about punishing a competitor comes up.
But Google HAS demonstrated that they are willing to do this. They did it to J.C. Penney and no matter how much you may guffaw, the fact is that they WANT to find a way to do it to every big linkbuilder out there, including you.
Can they? I don't know. I do know that Google has a lot of very smart people and a whole lot of money and a very big incentive to do that.
So, laugh while you can and invest your money wisely. As HP has seen, the world can change overnight.
I agree false and massive backlinking/internal linking indeed sucks, regardless of the current changes. I've seen many hubs internally linking to something totally non-related, and they do a lot, like 10-20 or even more in one single hub (was wondering why and still don't have a clue)
I was also thinking that anything can change overnight, whether or not currently backlinks subtract value (I naturally did think it could have negative impact, to me it makes sense). It is important to know it can change, at any time, and it is wise to keep stuff the natural way possible, then the chances of getting penalized in the future should be minimized.
Actually, they CAN subtract value. It's called "over optimization"
You are certainly free to believe whatever myths you choose, be it Jesus, or good government, or backlinks hurting your value.
I'm sure it's a myth when my clients get over-optimized, I fix it, and then their rankings bounce right back.
Repeated coincidences?
With your know-it-all attitude you must be making billions of dollars in SEO, huh?
Not billions, I am too lazy for that, but more than enough for a comfortable living in the most expensive part of DC area. All from organic traffic itself, not from clients. So, I know a thing or two about it.
And how many competitors of your clients you removed from the SERPs by backlinking them?
Yeah I used to live in DC but I got sick of city living so I came back down here to Florida and moved to Jupiter Island. But I'm only 23 w/ little college education so I guess I'm not doing too bad. You're in your 50's so I can't really compare my level of success to yours.
"And how many competitors of your clients you removed from the SERPs by backlinking them?"
None, I don't do that. First of all, I'm not a jerk. Second of all, a high school economics class will tell you that competition is healthy. I like them there, I need some one to compare to and say "Hey look, we did better than OurCompetitorX, Y, and Z this month just like every other month."
If it was only for me, I would have lived somewhere on a tropical island since long ago. But wife's work, kids' school - all that stuff you still have ahead LOL - they don't let this happen just yet.
And I was pulling your leg about competitors, of course
OK, coming back to the topic - I agree that over-optimization is possible, however I disagree it can substract the value from the page. I think we need to define what we understand by page value before we go any further.
Any page has some value in the eyes of search engines, irregardless of backlinks. Then backlinks add to that value. So, what I mean when I say "backlinks cannot subtract from a page value" is that they cannot decrease that core value that was there before backlinks.
Over-optimization could decrease the backlinks add-on value, here I am in a full agreement with you. This does not mean it will decrease the "core" value, it just means that add-on value is less.
Your turn.
I wasnt referring to a penalty to hubpages or any other ugc site.
Simply that the previous strength of a site structure that heavily revolved on internal page linking isnt weighted as heavily.
Which means the page has to stand alone and in order to rank needs to fulfill the same level of external backlinks as its webmaster competitors for the term. A more even playing field.
So even keeping it within the organic methods, this means many with older hubs with a diverse and extensive backlink profile would be doing better than newer hubs with little to no backlinks.
If site structure has been devalued then webmasters .. really "pagemasters" at web 2.0/ UGC sites, who had very little external backlinks would fall in the rankings.
again devalued not penalized, they are quite different, pages from a site dont stay on top of the serps with just drops of a few positions if a site/domain is penalized - as a site we still have a lot of very big term sitting in the top 10. If we were manually penalized that is not likely to happen
As I said, I'm not sure that there is evidence of a sitewide penalty and if there is one, it seems to be very minor.
I am actually banking on my last 150 hubpages eventually recovering my losses, as I start the process of backlinking them and they begin the process of gaining organic backlinks too. In the past my huge traffic surges have been the result of Hubpage maturity.
Ultimately all it really means is that my traffic growth from now on forward is compensating for prior traffic losses rather than building upon my success. My old Hubpages are still performing strongly, albeit a little less strongly, my newer Hubpages could still show future growth even if that growth would have been much stronger in the past
What I am trying to say, is that we are not necessarily stuck with these traffic levels even if the algorithm doesn't change at all, we can still see growth within our existing portfolios making up some of the lost ground - particularly with the number of hubs that I published in November, December and January.
It's been reported that hubpages had an 87% drop in traffic. If a significant percentage of inbound links on any hub came from internal links (which of course are now getting less traffic and have less juice) and other content farms similarly affected (squidoo, mahalo, ezine) what links remain that are trusted?
It's not that there's been a penalty - it's that these links no longer help you to gain trust with Google. My guess is that the next time there is a public update of Google PageRank all these sites will take a hit.
If you're writing on Hubpages because you like to write, or you have information you'd like to get out in the world, or you like the community, you won't be affected by the Google Farmer.
But, If you are writing because you think you'll earn easy affiliate commissions or advertising revenue, I'd start rethinking your strategy.
It wasn't reported that Hubpages lost 87% of its traffic, you read the article wrong. That was nothing other than an index, it didn't represent traffic loss, in fact it was related to SERPS positions. If Hubpages had lost 87% of its traffic it would probably have been pulled out of the plug socket.
The ability to get information out to the world is going to be greatly reduced with a drastic reduction in traffic. You are mistaken if you think that commercial as opposed to non-commercial uses of Hubpages can be distinguished in this way. If HP loses authority, we all lose.
Sunforged, I think you've hit the nail on the head. We all used to tell newbies that just being on HubPages gave articles a boost, compared to publishing it on your own little blog. Losing that "trust" would make all the difference.
Backlinks still count though.
I've been trying to figure out why some hubs stayed 'up there' and others didn't.
My best hub is going to fall soon because there are some pretty strong contenders creeping up on it (it's at #2 - was at #1 for a popular keyword - damn this to happen when I'd finally found a niche I could write in and make money!)
According to Market Samurai, it has 4 PR5 backlinks that came from some TV producer in the US who linked it on his Facebook.
THAT is what is holding that hub up, not the writing, not Hubpages, just simple backlinks.
Yep, corresponds to my observations. And not only in this case.
That's true Izzy, that's what Sunforged is saying.
In the past, Hubs could do fairly well without backlinks just because of HubPages "trust factor". Backlinks would get them ranked faster, but good Hubs get there anyway, if you're patient - look at the earnings of Hubbers like Relache.
Sunforged is saying the "trust factor" is now gone, so our Hubs are being judged like any other web page, which means backlinks are vitally important now.
Yey - great thread idea Susana, so here's my 2 pennies worth:
My biggest loser was a hub that was getting around 1k views a day and was a multi-product hub. It has been replaced at the #1 spot with the Amazon product I most sold through that hub. Then #2 is a YouTube video which is a joke about the product, #3 is Google's compare prices entry, #4 is an Amazon a store with its own domain name (this makes me want to cry), then three online stores specific to that product area.
I seem to have lost about a third of traffic off all the other hubs that generated 10+ views a day, but then I didn't really have a variety of different hubs.
My Adsense has tanked.
So onto theories:
* I thought that affiliate links on a site were hurting it because a lot of the blogs I have seen newly appearing on the top page don't have affiliate links in the text although they do have affiliate banners in their advertising column - but with the appearance of an astore on the front page of some searches I can't be so sure.
* My highest performing hubs, which are now the hardest hit were backlinked on other 2.0 sites.
* I have two opposing ideas about the AdSense
1. The search results could be better, so once the user has read the webpage they are satisfied and are not clicking on an ad in the hope to find more information
2. The search results are not better and the user immediatley recongnizes the page does not meet their needs and hits the back button and/or the ads displayed are poorly matched to their needs.
* Ever since Thurs night I have been Googling away doing research for a project of mine and it has been much harder to find the information that I need compared to the previous week.
* Not sure I buy into the grammar, quality theory. Just for laughs I have been reading out some of the top results to my husband as the incredibly poor English is giving us a good giggle.
I shall watch this thread with interest as not only will these changes mean I need to adjust my HubPages approach,they will aslo affect my own website (hopefully positive).
I don't get tons of traffic, but I just noticed a hub of mine which showed up just after 3 Amazon results for my most searched term on the hub...wonder if it makes sense to adjust titles to include a reference to "compare" or "comparisons" on a multi-product hub, in order to distinguish it from one-product amazon results.
I have an eight month old second account with just over 70 product hubs in it. Overall traffic for this is slightly down, but it hasn't tanked. Fingers crossed.
For my main account I've also got slightly lower overall traffic levels than normal, but again, nothing major. I do however have one informational hub which has always been my most-viewed hub, and now it's getting more views than ever.
On a totally unrelated note, I received my first Amazon cheque yesterday - am going to have some fun today trying to get it paid into my account at our local branch of Lloyds TSB
Good luck with that - my local Lloyds were so grumpy about it I never went back and now pay in at Barclays.
Thanks Aya . Ended up paying it into my account at the Halifax who are now owned by Lloyds TSB so it's the same people dealing with the paperwork. And what paperwork - a form filled out in triplicate, and a 28 day wait until the cheque clears into your account. Plus several very dazed and confused (but very sweet) cashiers, who had to look up the procedure in their handbook.
OK, sorry Susanna - I'll stop hijacking this thread now
My hubs are all over the place. I rarely backlink. Anything that has links is pretty much due to naturally occurring ones.
Amazon has tanked, big time. I think it's a 50/50 mix between lack of traffic and Amazon now appearing for the same keywords.
My how to stuff has held up, of which I have a good few. However, despite (for the main) no real shift in the serps, traffic is way down. I have a couple that have hit the #1 spot, or at least experienced a big leap up the serps.
I have one hub (you know which one Susana) that is stand alone. Before it was doing good. It's now at #4, which is a significant enough leap. It's views have increased by a little over 30%. Though I'm not entirely sure, as I can't link it directly to Adsense, I believe that it's almost solely responsible for keeping Adsense from completely tanking.
Some of my new stuff is gaining traffic, better that I would have normally expected, though not enough to make a huge difference overall.
Having got a truly well blended hub portfolio - info hubs, how to's, Amazon and so on, all have been equally affected to the positive and the negative.
I have one large, related niche that has seen the traffic drop by 50%, and yet some of the hubs have improved in the serps, the others remain where they were.
I'm past trying to work out just what the heck Google was/is trying to achieve. All I can see is that a lot of good people, who write online with the best of intentions, are hurting. I have come across some who, based on 'things' remaining the same, are going to hit the wall. Googles shake up is putting people out of work.
My theory? I have only one - that it's politics. Back scratching is going on and nothing good will come of it, not just for us, but for the internet and Google itself.
My traffic ratios from one hub to the next have remained about the same, so I can't point to one hub, or one type of hub, that was hardest hit. Pretty much everything of mine took a massive hit. I was down 70% at one point, but it has recovered and stabilized at about a 40% overall loss. My best performing hubs have dropped from #1 to about #4, so earnings are through the floor. I think I made 35 whole cents yesterday.
On an interesting side note, my traffic at Info Barrel is up almost 25% in the last week or so. My hubs and IB articles were pretty heavily linked from web 2.0 sites, so I don't really see a correlation there, either.
Many don't get that this 'new ranking' is Google's answer to gain much more money from those sites greasing Google's palms. They tried the 'pact with the devil' but Americans want a free and open Internet so the FCC stepped in. But Google, being smart, has gotten around all that to still accomplish what they want. So we will see, but I have no doubt that their 'Do no harm' slogan is a joke at best.
That is absolute nonsense.
Google wants one thing: happy searchers.
Yes, they want that for "evil": happy searchers means happy advertisers. But it all starts with what Joe Internet expects to see when he goes looking for something.
We all know that search results need to be better. Google has constantly experimented with new algorithms and tools (like the Wonder Wheel) to try to give us results we will like.
Judging page quality is tough. Yes, you can look for bad spelling, run on sentences and the like, but after that even humans have a hard time agreeing, so Google and every other search engine have to rely on other signals (such as those that have been discussed here).
One thing is absolute: not even Microsoft is dumb enough to give extra weight to sites that "grease their palms" (they were accused of that once, but I don't think it was ever proven conclusively). Google doesn't care if your page runs Adsense or Chitika or no ads at all - they care only if Joe Internet was happy to find it.
Google may or may not have misjudged HP. All of us "out here" are like the blind men with the elephant - we can't see the picture Google sees (and even Google sometimes has trouble discerning an elephant from a blown up elephant balloon).
If they HAVE misjudged, traffic may straighten out naturally as they tweak the new algorithm. If not, HP needs to figure out which of the many possible signals are the ones causing the damage. Fixing whatever is wrong is the easy part, but fixing the wrong thing (for example, changing internal linking) is foolish because it will just cost money and accomplish nothing.
It is possible that a number of things are summed together and have just pushed HP over the edge. If so, then small adjustments here and there might fix things up. Or it might be one big thing that causes Google to dislike what it sees. If so, it's that (whatever it is) which needs attention.
This stuff isn't easy. Google is NOT going to say "If you have x% of articles with bad spelling and x% with more than Y internal links and z% with bad external links and .." because that kind of detail will just let the spammers know exactly how far they can push. However, SEO testers will eventually figure it out anyway (or come close) and on we go.
"Do no harm" may be an unrealistic slogan, but useful search results is what Google wants to provide, period.
And YouTube is not a user generated content farm.
Are you suggesting that Joe Internet doesn't like finding YouTube results?
I'll repeat it again: Google cares about happy searchers. Period.
That said, obviously right now some searchers are unhappy
I am suggesting that they have applied different criteria to their own site youtube than they have to other "user generated content farms."
Happy searchers - and I include myself in this - do not want 5 Amazon results in the top ten returns. I don't want to see any shopping results in my internet searches. When I want to go buy it - I will go buy it.
I agree - I don't see any need for multiple Amazon results. It would be fine to have a "More results from Amazon" link - even a "15,000 results from Amazon"
I doubt that Google has applied any different criteria. that would be very, very stupid of them and they are NOT stupid.
Maybe not, but they're certainly cut-throat. Business, profits and all that. The very perspective that perpetrates black hat.
That's just what Google wants us to believe. That's a nice little tale.
Looking at this whole mess as a person who uses Google for info - I don't like that they have demoted pages with internal links. I often read a page, but want to read more on the topic, and follow a writer's internal link to see what else they have to say, especially if it's a good, informative site.
And as far as the citing of sources - I use books for 90% of my research (I trust them more). And I've read a ton of misinformation on the web. So, if I am not siting internet sources, I'll be demoted? That's stupid.
Have to say that it is the older hubs that are holding up, and everything that I have written this year so far is struggling to get traffic
Doesn't seem to be about product/informational though. My travel hubs are not doing well, but as they are mainly about Australia and NZ, this could be more to do with people not being able to afford long-haul travel at the moment, or the recent sad natural disasters in both of these countries
I highly doubt it is the case. Couple of my newer hubs about strange fish are getting 10-20 views per day, though not much, it is considered fairly good in my case, higher than before; yet the older similar ones about plants as well as couple of newest are getting little attention from google; my product hubs fare no worse or better than the rest of the hubs, my beyblade hubs may have lost 25% traffic overall, because they are not getting traffic under the most popular keywords like before.
One personal conclusion: No matter what happened, my personal experience gives me this conclusion: All of the most popular and general keywords are not finding me on the top, only combination keywords may hit my hubs. That is the biggest difference and the surest thing I've observed so far. Almost all my toy hubs used to be on first page (fewer on 2nd) under the most common keywords, now they are either on 2nd page (the best case), 3rd, or vanished. To me, that surely indicates overall penalization. Getting increased traffic for some individual hubs my be of many other factors including but not limited to proper backlinking strategies.
All that you say is fine Pc - only right now the good stuff ain't sitting square. I've found more crap in the last few days (looking for stuff, I'm still Joe Internet) than ever before.
Maybe that's a by-product of the change and it will disappear, who knows?
I could follow the 'point', had the stuff that's worse than the usual crap not started showing up when I perform a search.
Google is ticking me off on both counts - as a user and a content writer.
More reasons to start diversifying and finally start doing what it actually takes to rank well in BigG, Pretty Froggy
'lo Misha
I'm on with that the now. It was my plan, next step for this year. It's become my 'right now' step, it's moved up in my personal serps.
Barriers are not an excuse to finding a solution. When I get my millions, I'll send you a bottle of something cool and crisp
Hopefully, things will level off. But they may be driving users away.
My very best "sales" hub currently gets when from 100 to 37 hits a day. 0 of them are Google.
Others are hanging in there. My Amazon output is ugly now, though.
My adsense has completely vapourised. I'm seeing more traffic on my fluffy, informational hubs that earn next to nothing, but my travel and how to hubs are faring very badly. I hope this is only a temporary blip. Logic tells me that the cream must always rise to the top in the long run.
I have traffic loss of 50 - 60% on Amazon related product reviews. Especially on US Google searches. I don't care other traffic much because they don't buy from US. If the rate continues, I will be losing $500 - $700 / month on Amazon purchases.
For now, let's not panic in any case. We all know that lots of qualified writers generate top rated content on hubpages and it is surely not a content farm. It is the main reason I stick to hubpages and never tried writing for other article sharing websites.
If apparent garbage eHow, snipsly etc. continues to be ranked, I believe Google will lose lots of prestige.
Let's wait a month and see the results. I believe Hubpages owners are already in contact with Google about the unfair issue.
If garbage ranks well, they'll lose more than prestige. They'll lose an empire.
Honestly, if the junks stay afloat and do not get removed in the future, then hubpages can be seen as a content farm, regardless of its ultimate concept and goals, like it or not. You can't claim your child did not kill someone after he did simply because he is your baby
Whatever, I think the number one issue is that people were searching for something, they'd click on a HubPages link on the front page and go "Ugh, this is awful" and click away.
Really?
I am quite sure I came to HubPages because I had clicked on one or more SERP results and admired what I saw. I wish I remembered which hubber or hubbers I found, because I'd like to thank them, but it definitely wasn't an "Uggh".
I found HubPages after searching for some info on a herb. I found what I needed on one of Bard of Ely's hubs, and followed the links to other hubs. I was soon hooked.
The first I hub I saw came up in a search linked at yahoo answers, it was awful in content and style, it was on an ebay related topic. I figured I could do that better, researched HubPages , read great things about Hubpages and decided to join up and write my own ebay series
That doesn't hold up. Far too many people here write far better than to deserve a reaction based upon that being the reason.
Many don't write for money, they publish highly relevant, well researched and well written articles simply because they enjoy writing and sharing.
Of all the hubbers on this site, there are quite possibly just as many that write for pleasure as they do for income. And neither is mutally exclusive with income either - that's an individual thing.
But HubPages has far more class about it than allowing users to publish page after page of useless, low-level content.
I guess if that was measured and it met a certain threshold percentage it could make a difference, but the problem is that the algo change is damaging good content as well as bad. e.g. my average time on page is between 4-6 minutes and I've lost about 2,000 uniques a day.
Not only that, the search results are a lot worse than I've ever seen them.
The point isn't that all of HubPages is bad content or that YOURS specifically is bad content. Obviously I have a (relatively) positive opinion of my own work, at the very least.
I feel like Google was pretty straightforward in saying, though, that sites that users did not feel produced useful content was knocked down. And I feel like that must be the general impression people get when they a random HP return came back.
I'll only talk about what I know: search on HubPages for articles about how to make gold in World of Warcraft. For every article written by someone who has actually played the game and has legitimate, useful strategies for earning gold there are 10 or more articles from someone who knows it is a good keyword and has written a useless strategy guide. Or worse yet, they're just Chinese farmers trying to get people to buy illegal services from their websites.
The problem is that the ones who knew how to promote the right set of keywords are the ones a lot of people see when they search HP, not the intelligent, useful content. These people aren't usually the ones posting in these forums, though. People will usually get an earful if they make a post here and have incoherent content in their articles. If you think I'm referring to "you", don't be. The type of person writing the worst content usually won't post on the forums because one slip up and they'll get an earful about inferior content.
So, yeah, I stand by my statement that a lot of people are going to come across articles and go "ugh." Obviously I like HubPages a lot and I've seen good articles from here turn up on Google, but I understand why Google's employees and volunteers might mark us down as a less than useful search result.
Have you read my latest Hubpage? You seem a little down on the site, it might perk you up a little.
I read it - think next you should cook up a HubPages national anthem that we can all stand a sing when we log on in the morning
I tried doing something with "Oh, Canada" but HubPages needs another syllable..
But 'God save our HubPages, long live our HubPages' scans quite nicely
hm...
god save our gracious hubs,
long live our hopeless hubs,
god save our hubs,
send us our visitors,
happy and generous,
long to click all our ads,
god save our hubs.
I'd do the other five verses, but no one can ever remember them anyway.
There is a hubpages national anthem. I have it linked in my own hub about national anthems. ;->
Oh, I know it wasn't personal Len and I know there is a lot of shite on here that should be removed. It's just frustrating for me to see good content getting swept away with the bad, as that is the antithesis to the point of the algo change.
As far as I can see at the moment (though it could change a lot over the next few months) google have fu**ed up for searchers as well as those who produce high quality content.
I'm pretty sure that the Hub of mine that just surged from around 500 visits from Google per day to just over 2000 in the last 24 hours isn't due to people going "Ugh.."
Strong content stays strong. I think lots of folks here are just being a tad too impatient. I don't think watching to see the results of the Google changes for a month is unrealistic. Quite the opposite actually.
I totally agree. I believe it's WAY too early to start trying to make heads or tails of the new algo. There's just not enough data yet, quite frankly. We can speculate until the cows come home, panic and scream about this so-called "apocalypse", stop publishing, unpublish, etc... But, the latter two do nothing but harm HP as a whole.
These fluctuations are part of making money online. I look at my income from HP much as I do the stock market. I can't worry about the day to day dips and dives. Nor do I jump for joy with the out of the ordinary highs. I have to consider the long term without panicking and pulling out all my money (hubs). So far, the return has been quite nice. I'm in it for the long haul and the investment has been more than worthwhile the time.
In the meantime, keep publishing quality content AND working on diversifying. No one should have all their eggs in any one basket.
I think SF is closest. Because so many people (myself included) have seen significant drops in HP traffic, it is reasonable to assume that the hubpages domain "trust" was devalued.
Product related hubs for me are down the hardest. My HP income has definitely been hit hard - both adsense and amazon.
I'm with Misha - I just can't see how links could have a negative effect, otherwise the next big game will be to throw loads of crap links at your competition.
Although my hubs with natural backlinks tanked too - they were mostly linked in relevant discussion forums so maybe the forums are worthless to because anyone can plant a link.
I don't create a lot of links and especially not from web 2.0 so it's unlikely that's the cause of my own traffic drop, but I'm sure that could be affecting other hubbers rankings. I've used a lot of RSS promotion, so that could be a minus. The one hub I have made more of an effort to backlink consistently is one that is holding up.....so far anyway.
A loss of Google trust is definitely likely, but that wouldn't explain why some hubs, such as some of froggie's, are going up in serps. It's hard to get a handle on any of this.
It seems like a totally mixed bag so far. Some peoples product hubs are doing ok, others have taken a big hit. Some info hubs are staying put, others are tanking. I still need to look at onpage optimization, haven't had a chance yet.
One of the strangest things I have seen is how the click percent is so low now. My click through with adsense has been very low the last week.
This includes on my own sites. Not sure why that would happen. It's like your getting visits from people not interested in your stuff.
Adsense always works in mysterious ways. My best working hypothesis so far is that with the shift in rankings the demographics of your visitors change. This does not explain CPC fluctuations, though.
I'm not seeing that at my site. Traffic is normal, CTR is normal, but RPM is down by a third.
Sorry to hear it Bill but you make an interesting point. Going by many of the search results I've seen over the last week you could well be right about them attracting the wrong visitors.
In another thread I was explaining what pages are above me now for "falling out of love" and two of the pages are not what a searcher would be looking for Visitors to those pages are not going to be hanging around long.
My ecPm has dropped 66% - i am not an adsense focused writer outside of using the hub format for optimal positioning - this optimal positioning is the same positioning that adsense themselves will send you an email about and suggest if you ARE NOT using it.
I focus on products and 3rd party services and always did well in conversion ratios because my traffic was "interested in that stuff" - the scenario you describe would be exactly what would give you a boost in adsense! unfulfilled traffic is what clicks adsense - fulfilled traffic reads or buys.
Im def seeing a demo shift far more than a traffic shift but I havent figured out why.
I may just shift to adwords for a few months to make up for that shift
Hi guys,
I have a theory. Is it possible that google is trying eliminate the practice of affiliate marketing or are trying to make it more difficult?
They have a new service called google shopping http://www.google.com/prdhp?hl=en&tab=ff in beta phase. They may be trying to encourage price comparison and product reviews etc being done via this site rather than by affiliates as it is currently done. This would result in them earning a serious amount of $$$ and would create a better environment for online shoppers
This is just an idea a friend mentioned to me and I am trying to work out if its rubbish or not.Any insights would be very welcome.
Dumb question but I need to double check I have understood this - will Google get a kick back for products sold through the links? Or only ad revenue from the pink boxes top and bottom?
But Google already has their own affiliate biz:
http://www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork/
So making affiliate marketing hard would be shooting themselves also.
That sure would bring up anti-trust issues with DOJ. Harm affiliates and promote their own product service.
And I'm not really understanding how duplicate content works anyway. Since Thursdays change I have spent hours and hours researching a topic and very often the put of the top 10 results are 5 blogs that have cut and pasted the press release, even when I know there is other related content out there. Very frustrating as a Google user.
You know what they say, the more things change the more they remand the same.
I don't feel like I'm too down on it. I think HubPages makes it easy to create eye-pleasing layouts for even the most novice designer, has a generous revenue share program, and lets a lot of good writers succeed. But I think it is only realistic that any type of completely open platform is going to produce a lot of junk. The problem, obviously, was that a lot of junk was turning up in search results instead of AAA material.
My only interest is seeing the best of HubPages stay on top. I can't get mad at other people for seeing something that didn't help answer their search query wanting to avoid future articles, though.
Well, if that is the cause (and remember: we don't know that it is), it's easy to deal with. As I said before, you just ask for a citizen posse to flag stuff and put it on an unpublish list when the flagging hits a certain threshold.
You then send an email to the affected hubber telling them that their hub may be unpublished in X number of days unless they request an appeal. This eliminates vendettas and gives people a chance to fix up any content that needs it. Real spammers won't bother to appeal, thus saving time and effort by staff.
Hubs by brand new hubbers should get unplublished immeditely, not later.
If you get no response, it stays on the unpublish list and goes away at the appointed time. If it is appealed and the staff sees that there is nothing wrong, they remove it from the list and possibly add it to another list that prevents it from going there again.
But - BUT - first you need to know that this really is the problem. It would be foolish to do this and gain nothing.
"As I said before, you just ask for a citizen posse to flag stuff and put it on an unpublish list when the flagging hits a certain threshold."
I think this is not as easy as it looks. In particular, you need to get a citizen posse that represents Joe Internet. And to make matters even more complex, Joe Internet changes from keyword group to keyword group.
Many sites review articles before publication and those have not necessarily fared well with the new Google algo. either.
As Len said, I may think my hubs are brilliant, but there are probably a whole bunch of people who think they are crap. Ultimately, it is about numbers - what do the majority of people who search for my content think? That is difficult to get at and that is what Google spends a lot of time and resources trying to do.
The posse is only to take the work off staff.
It IS as easy as it looks. People keep misinterpreting this and jumping to the conclusion that the posse would be damning hubs forever. That's not the intent - it is only to filter out the definite spammers so that staff isn't wasting time making decisions on them.
What I view as a definite spammer, will be different from what you view as a definite spammer, will be different from what HubPages views as a definite spammer, will be different from what Google views as a definite spammer.
In the end, Google's view matters most. All the rest will make little difference to the situation at hand.
I agree and said so.
Sheesh.
If - IF, IF, IF - the problem turns out to be that HP has too much spammer crap, we CAN get rid of it quickly with a posse and spammers will NOT bother to ask to be reinstated (and won't be if they do ask).
If this is NOT the issue, this idea still could help allieve some staff work, so I stil think it might be a good idea,
LOL, I understand your frustration.
I agree with what Len and others have said that the problem is likely associated, in some large part, to spammer crap.
But the problem is *how* to identify what Google considers to be spammer crap. Getting a posse together will not help until we first identify what 'crap' is, as viewed by Google.
I think that is what many people are working hard to do.
We do NOT know that it is associated with crap. It may be and I wou;d LOVE to see HP clean up that stuff but we do not KNOW that.
And I said before: there is no reason to do this until we do know.
If it is not for *perceived* spam content or spam links, what else would a site be dinged for by Google?
There are posts here in this thread that discuss that at length. No reason for me to repeat all that here.
I now see where our misunderstanding comes from. You just have a more narrow definition of spam/crap.
Crap is in the eye of the beholder. A page that provides no added value to a user is considered crap in that user's eyes. Everything that is being talked about is related to what Google perceives as high value, low value, or crap.
That is the only point that I am making here. No need to pour on the sarcastic juice just for little ole me.
Aside from hanging around on the forum I am doing some work. Having picked my way through the rubbish search results that should yahoo answers and some about.com entries, I avoided anything dated 2009 or earlier, found something I wanted, visited the page, which redirected me to another page, and that link was broken............aaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!
This is so frustrating.
OK - I've got to do the school run. You've got an hour, I want this whole algo mess sorted out by the time I come back- you kids had better come up with a good solution while I'm gone Otherwise it'll be back on the whiskey and coke for me tonight.
All I know is that I was earning good money in nov, dec, and jan. Earnings were steadily on the rise until Feb. In Feb. my sales dropped more then 75%
Not very Happy at all!
I am nearly the exact same actually. Mine dropped at the start of Feb. Long before people started mentioning the algo change. When did this change take place exactly??
Well my best hub dropped from #1 to #2 on google, and has been beaten by a 3 year old site with 11,000 external backlinks.
So, Google was cleaning up the system, were they?
Not sure if this is relevant but I followed a link on a Hubs news capsule and read this
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/ … e-effects/
maybe things will improve soon if they are already making adjustments.
According to that article they made adjustments Monday night/Tuesday morning and it helped some people, but I've seen no improvements so guess it wasn't designed for us.
Very interesting article.
Seems like they noticed it was a clear error and they fixed it.
Also good to know reporters in high places.
Anything I put on HP now will have a very unique title and not have been written by anyone else. I suggest that everyone else do the same.
I have noticed a trend in these two bullets made by the poster:
Google is favouring older content (hence the 1997 forum posts clogging up the results)
I've noticed that one of the huge hits I've had is against other Hubbers. In my opinion Google has upped it's duplicate content to include similar titles on the same website. In the past I'd see a dropdown menu of other content on HP that has a similar title. Now I Have several hubs (that were on the first page of google) that aren't even in site. Essentially we are all beating each other because are content is so similar and newer hubs are "duplicates" in googles eyes.
Older product hubs are faring better than newer product hubs.
Updated content that I've written this year is fairing poorly against content that Hubbers wrote many years ago on similar subjects.
I disagree. If we start to follow this approach then there will be hardly any content here on hubpages(or anywhere else). Take example of 'samsung galaxy tab' keywords, how many possible unique combinations of title you can make that will favor search engine crawling for this keyword ? You have no control over unique title and content on the web. These two things(title & content) will be rehashed or reblogged(not pointing to spun) by everyone. Google is playing authority card to weed out reviews or personal opinion on things to provide better results.
It's not really about disagreeing or agreeing. It's just what I've seen. If you want to do well on HP, then you are going to need a unique title despite how different your content or how much better written it is than the other person. It's not fair and it's not right, it's just the way it seems to be now.
If you want to write a title that has similar content, then it may be necessary to make your own niche site and write it there.
Before this update many product hubs performed well even with long tail keywords and surpassed content from original product authors. It's not even about quality of content during that time because crowdsourced sites did well before this update from google. In case of 'paid journalist' type content farms there are editors who restrict single page for unique title/topic. We can't do this here because this is crowdsourced platform and every page has a chance of competing with similar other titles/topics on web (and within the same platform).
Now that content farms are slapped this strategy does make sense but we're not sure for how long things will remain like this.
Just got an advertising email from Chitika, "Recently, search engine algorithm changes caused many publishers' revenue to drop significantly - as much as 10% in some cases."
I wish my earnings only dropped 10%, thats almost a win compared to what my account is actually showing.
Ok, so I've had my head in my analytics this afternoon and I must say I am puzzled. According to my searches on google.com I am still number 1 for my main keyphrase, yet when I compare the google traffic for this week vs last week for that phrase it shows a 50% drop. Do you think they are split testing? ie: some data centres showing my page first and others using other search results. I can't think of any other reason for it - can anyone explain?
Here's a link to a screen shot (you would need xray specs to see it properly in here)
http://img845.imageshack.us/i/analytics2.png/
Change your IP address before searching and check if you still rank for the keyphrase.
I don't know how to do that Can you check the phrase for me? It's "how soon can you tell if you are pregnant"
Use Scroogle.org then.
And your hub is at the top on Google and Scroogle.
And Bing.
I heard scroogle was not up to date with the google algo changes, but I'll try it.
Edit - Showing #1 on scroggle.....
I see your hub at number 5 on Google... just under the Mayo Clinic's site.
Edit: Oops, number one for the exact phrase. Sorry.
Screenshot please that way it's possible to see what other pages are ranking higher.
Edited above: number one for the exact phrase. Had a brain fart and forgot the quotes...
Right back atcha... It's just one of those days, I guess.
Oh I don't usually do the quotes. Can you guys do the search without quotes please?
P.S. great to see you! How are your hubs faring?
I did searched without quotes and result is the same.
I saw your hub at number 5 as a broad phrase, Susana.
Good to see you, too!
Thanks wordy So you're seeing number 5 and others are seeing number 1......Hmmm it still says #1 for me using this incognito browser....apparently I am in Wisconsin
There's something going on here. I like my split test idea
Could be... Here's a screenshot for clarification... sorry it's so small.
#1 Google.com
#1 Google.co.in
I'm not sure about split testing theory. This drop is really confusing to me.
By the way you can use Xerobank for proxy browsing.
I have you at number 4 for that phrase when using SEO Quake that shows me what Google.com would show.
I am now seriously concerned that if this has not yet rolled out across the whole of the US and I have already lost around 70% of my income I am totally buggered really.
You are #4 at 6:10 EST, it's just as good as #1 in my mind
Thanks for looking, I appreciate it #4 is not really as good as #1 because it means going from earning around $50 a month on that hub to a lot less
Are you sure? I thought people click on #1 as many times as listings after that, as long as they are on top of the first page
Yes, I'm sure. Did you see the link to the click distribution on the serps? It's here: http://hubpages.com/forum/topic/69120?p … ost1509969
1st result is Mayo Clinic.
In 2006, AOL mistakenly released a giant pile of data about internet use (was a huge scandal - people were fired) A #1 result in the serps gets nearly ten times the clicks as a number 4.
http://www.free-seo-news.com/newsletter226.htm
If #1 is a well known highly admired business like the Mayo Clinic, it's probably even more.
Hey! Squidoo has bounced back
http://www.quantcast.com/squidoo.com
but Hubpages and Articlesbase languish
http://www.quantcast.com/hubpages.com
http://www.quantcast.com/articlesbase.com
It's a Worry!
What does HubPages have to say on the new Google changes? Is there an official post?
For the starters - my content got hit slightly (15%), but I was fearing, it will go down more, so no panicking here. I am trying to put things up here and I just simply don't understand some things, maybe you could help me. Let's say, for the first time Google got in the second place after Facebook being the most visited website of 2010. That means that Google is losing advertisers' money and trust, because part of them are now going to Facebook to place their ads. This means, we are losing our money which comes from advertisers. The ad placement idea in Facebook is pretty attractive, since people usually spend less time on Google (search+find+exit) and more time on Facebook (chat+games+friends+news). Besides you can customize your ads selecting gender, age, location, time of show up and other things. Could this recent algorithm change somehow be related to Facebook slapping Google big time and Google trying desperate measures? Besides, have you noticed how drastically the Click through ratio has diminished? These are just my reasonings...
I have not seen diminished traffic or diminished CTR, but I AM seeing lower RPM. That concerns me, but there are many possible reasons for that, so no panic (yet).
I am worried about Facebook. They don't offer us any incentive to publish there (and it is hardly a good format for that anyway).
It is possible to use FB to draw traffic to your site, but I am astonished by how often people will return to Facebook to comment on the links provided. Very insular, and that's not good. When I need my daughter to read something I had to send in email, I have to go to FB to tell her to read her email - otherwise she never looks at it!
Is Google concerned? I would think so.
Is everybody's click through rate down? Mine has halved and it wasn't high to start with.
On a brighter note...the traffic on my best hub has crept back up to where it was before last Thursday, though it's still down in the SERPS.
I'm still down about 20% overall, but when the change first kicked in, I dropped over 30% (it seemed like more) so should we be cautiously optimistic?
My click through rate is slightly down, my viewings are still down by about 300 per day (15% or thereabouts), but my earnings are up by about a third, which is still not a large amount of actual money, but definitely improved, just not sure if this is coincidental or not.
You go girl!! Increased earnings eh? Who cares about the traffic then!!
My earnings are down but hey...tomorrow is another day and am feeling more hopeful already.
LOL, I have probably jinxed it now by announcing it here!!
Does that happen to you too? It does me. I'm wary looking at my stats now in case they go wonky again. They usually do if I announce anything.
Edit: mind you they didn't stop dropping when I reported on the forum they were on the way down!
Well touch wood, I haven't found it happens here on Hubpages yet.... but never say never!!
I have a cool chart somewhere that shows what percentage of visitors clickthrough for each top ten position in the search returns.
ill go look for it ( its obviously general but I believe the data is gleaned from multiple terms and niches)
Yeah I have that somewhere too...
Aah here it is....
Here's the link to it because it's hard to see the figures: http://www.bryanphelps.com/wp-content/u … n-serp.jpg
I'm really turned off with the first 5 search results on google. This heatmap is switched to 180 degrees for my personal search queries. LOL.
And I don't think you are alone. Some of my hubs have recovered a good chunk of traffic without moving back up the rankings. My big earner that used to get around 800-900 views per day, is now languishing in 9th place, but is now back to getting 600 views today.
So either what I see on the results page for that term is not that same as across the US, or people are dissatisfied with the search results and are continuing to scroll down the page.
The plot thickens.
Mark I agree with you, but why do Google keep on insisting that all their metrics say this change has worked?
Good contents with little or no linking still ranks high. my how to know man love hub is still on google no. 4 search result and some others...and earnings have continued to rise too...u can search for that key phrase and see...
write good hubs, whether promo or not, it will rank high...
Pretty sure they are going to have to fix it and we will not be suffering so badly in the end. The search results I am getting as a searcher are horrible - hub on the way.
Seriously - I just did a search and got 4 results from the same company followed by 4 from another company - then a wikipedia entry. Then 2 more results from the company that was i spots 1-4.
So the entire front page was dominated by 2 lousy companies and wikipedia.
They have not rolled this change out to the rest of the world yet because it is broken.
In any case - when they do and if they do not change it - you have already lost the income you are going to lose. Or - most of it. I can lose all my Indian, Singaporean etc traffic and I bet my eCPM will rise.
Yep the search results are worse than poor - really struggling to find what I am looking for on page 1 or 2 in most cases. I hope you are right about google fixing it - like skyfire says the heat map must have reversed for most searches....unless most people are happy with tat.
I'm looking forward to reading that hub already
I disagree.
Your examples of poor results are actually examples of poor searching. If I want to know about how different beans taste, I'd Google "coffee bean taste" and if I want to know about growing, "coffee bean growing" gives me good results. "Coffee beans" gives me exactly what I'd expect - people selling coffee.
Are they the BEST results? That I do not know, so, yes, Google may have screwed to pooch, but that would require a different analysis.
Odd you do not apply that logic to buying coffee beans.
When I want to know where to buy coffee beans I type in "where to buy coffee beans" or "best place to buy coffee beans."
And you said you were not religious.
Of course - you could also head on over the the MSN lab - see if they think there is any commercial intention behind the term "coffee bean."
Being a lazy sort, I always try the fewest words first. So, yes, I type "Keurig" when I want to buy K-cups and I'd just type "coffee" if I wanted to buy coffee.
If I don't get what I want, I add words. That's nothing new.
Google isn't broken. It may be bent.
Not arguing about the laziness factor - but you seem to think commercial results for all search terms is the right direction. Why is that?
I specifically picked a search term that had no bias either way and that MSN said was of low commercial intention.
They have to pick something for an ambiguous search - mixing in this that and everything is worse, in my opinion.
I certainly agree about multiple results from the same site - that's dumb and they need to fix that.
I don't agree that showing sellers is horrible for an an ambiguous search term.
Someone at your hub said "Will we now need to take a three week course on how to use google search?"
No. But you do need to refine your searches sometimes and that has always been true.
That may be the case - but this is heavily weighted in favor of "authority" and commercial only sites right now.
Why would you want that? Most times people looking for something don't know what they are looking for. If I enter an ambiguous term - I want mixed results - not heavily commercial only. And not Big Boys Page Rank 6 and Above Club only either. Most small Internet retailers must be tearing their hair out right now.
Seems to me you are just defending the faith.
He-he. I came to the same conclusion
Google worshiper, the worst sin of idolatry
Better a worshipper than a manipulator.. but of course you think that gaming Google is perfectly fine - even though it is the actions of all the people who do this that caused the difficulties to start with.
If people only did honest links (as some of us behave) SERP's would always reflect real opinion as to value. But that's not the game you want to play, right? You like a stacked deck.
Good point, Mark. I was just about to post and mention that the folks who are reporting that their traffic/earnings are fine ought to check their traffic sources.
I've seen a 60% drop in traffic for HP, although my personal sites are fine. But over 80% of my HP traffic comes from Google.com. The hubbers whose traffic relies more heavily on internal visitors, Google.ca, Google.au, etc. wouldn't feel a hit now. But they probably will feel it later.
It has been almost a week, and my traffic is worse today than it was shortly after the farmer update. It is down 50% (almost exactly). Worse, my adsense is down 70-80% since the change and amazon has dried up to a desolate wasteland.
I don't do much external linking which leads me to believe that SF was spot on with the theory that internal linking was devalued.
The irony is that IF that theory is right, the end result will either be 1) an accepted end-state of dropped traffic or 2) lots of increased external backlinking to get the hubs back up to where they were. I don't necessarily think that that is the desired endstate by G.
***Stand by for a PCUNIX slap***
Here's something interesting Mutiny. I backlinked nearly all my hubs a little bit, then from about August last year through to January, I made a little routine up and backlinked each hub round quite a few sites just after publishing.
Then in the middle of January I stopped and concentrated on just writing hubs with no backlinking.
I've just checked and NONE of the 39 hubs I have published in the past month (going back to almost the start of February) are getting any google.com traffic at all.
My backlinked hubs, however, are doing much better. Some have dropped but they are still getting some traffic.
I have managed to give myself a migraine trying to sort this all out. I have barely glanced at HP and Google changes due to the death of my daughter's classmate. Last night I logged on to see that my traffic itself hasn't changed much, but was given a warning by Google adsense that there were unauthorized adds being placed on my webpage. (I only write for HubPages.) So that send me down a spiral trying to figure out the merge between Google and Feedburner. I still haven't figured out if this is the unauthorized site they were talking about and what it means.
translate.googleusercontent.com
I do know that I have my work cut out for me. I was just seeing an increase in traffic and profit before these changes and am not sure how bad they will effect me. My informative hubs seem to be holding their own. I have seen an increase in my humor hubs. I have written such a large variety of hubs, that I haven't seen too many changes. Of course most of my traffic comes from HubPages.
For now, I am still trying to straighten out what happened to my adsense, the linking between pages, and what is going to be considered substandard when the smoke clears.
Sorry I couldn't help much.
googleusercontent.com is the domain Google uses when you look at Google's cached version of your page when searching Google.com. I'm pretty sure translate.googleusercontent.com is the subdomain they serve up translations into other languages from.
It is safe to add webcache.googleusercontent.com & translate.googleusercontent.com to your AdSense under "Allowed Sites" section since it is part of Google. Otherwise any clicks coming from there won't be credited to your account.
Proof it is owned by Google: http://www.robtex.com/dns/translate.goo … ml#records shows the primary DNS server is ns1.google.com
I'm still seeing my click through percent way, way down. Mostly on my main site I normally get most of my clicks.
Guess I gotta work on my other sites more and make more sites.
Maybe it's time for an exodus to duckduckgo
Much better search results for sure and they don't collect any data from you.
The problem is not what search engines we use but what the masses use. Same goes for browsers, IE is the worst browser of all to use yet most use it because that is all they know.
Problem exists only if we think of this change as against our income streams. Google screwed one set of marketers only to favor another whereas there is hardly any change in user satisfaction. In fact quality of search after this update is much worst than previous search results. We can change search engines and to some extent even ask readers to switch to other search engines. But gaming will go on in loop no matter which search engine we (as user or marketer) choose.
Yeah, unfortunately it seems that the favoured ones are MFA's, scraped splogs and big business And as for user satisfaction, I would have thought that's gone down, not up
Internet marketers will work out how the algo has hit and then we will try and provide google what it wants. I wouldn't call that gaming (though some will game to get crap ranked high, if they even need to bother, lol), no it's more about knowing what daddy G is looking for and trying to please him.
I hope not, as far as I can see they don't rank any of my stuff at all.
Just from what I have seen so far in my own searches, commercial sites seem to be far outranking any other sites at the moment.
This wasn't the case before the change, and it may go switch back.
But to the casual observer, it looks like commercial sites are getting more weight now.
As far as my own Hubs, some popular ones have tanked, but some of my Hubs that were pretty much ignored before have risen to the top.
Anyone who listened to the 'SEO experts'needs to forget what they think they learnt and start writing content that is worthwhile.
PC Unix is right. Google wants happy searchers or its whole business model is undermined. Facebook stands ready to suck in the advertising money. Twitter could take a big piece when it monetizes. Even sites like Groupon are siphoning off revenue from Google.
Well, while PCUnix says a lot of sense on a lot of issues, the truth is if you go on the web forums at the moment you find people with entirely white hat original sites that have been crushed over this algorithm change. People who have devoted the last ten years to building really good sites.
'no it's more about knowing what daddy G is looking for and trying to please him.'
This is not about your father, Susana S
Is anyone else's traffic tanking again? Has the roll out to the other sites started?
It seems to be consistently bad. I published a hub yesterday, and none of my hits on it so far has been from Google.com. I did get one hit from Google.uk, though.
On a 4000 word high quality hub I published last week, I have only had 7 hits from Google.com so far. That is a tiny fraction of my traffic on that hub.
I used to get really good organic traffic from Google.
No changes observed on Non-US Google channels. Product hubs are going down for me if that's what you're asking. Informational topics (non-us) are doing just fine atleast for now. I think there is going to be consistent drop for product hubs unless google fix things.
I've read tonnes over the last few days about this and one idea I've come across that seems to be reasonable is that websites with more prominent adsense ads and affiliate links are the ones hit hardest. That would make sense in relation to hubpages because adsense is in your face when you hit a hub.
I was going to say it makes sense for the amazon focussed hubs too, but while the amazon capsules obviously do contain affiliate links, they are no follow.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-farm … -vs-losers
Google results really, really suck right now!
a friend complained about the rise in gas prices in the US, so I responded (tried) by sharing global stats ..
"worldwide gas price comparison"
most of the returns are from 2008! .. no stinking relevance at all!
There is no way its going to stay this way, its just too bad.
They kind of have admitted that they know their algo is dumb right now
http://hubpages.com/forum/post/1509946
So true - it's really getting me irritated!
I did the search....
1st result from 2005
2nd from 2008
3rd 2009 (even though it says "as of this week" in title, lol)
4th wikipedia
5th - at last a result from this year! Still not very useful
6th showing data from 2009
7th from 2007
8th - no info on page, ha ha
9th from 2008
10th - looks promising but page won't load
Beyond pants is all I can say.
Do you think that forum post is really an admission?
I think its more telling than any of the high PR statements they would make elsewhere.
They seem to be admitting the algo needs to do some learning. Also, the list of sites complaining is rather interesting (at least to me) as they are not the type of sites that will come up in big traffic comparisons or PR releases .. so they seem like better indicators to me.
So we have all just noticed that Google is not perfect.
I wonder what brought this on...
Gosh - I knew you were not very clued in but I would have thought even you could have managed to work out that this was bought on by a large drop in traffic from google caused by skewed search results.
I realize you are probably very happy that some of us are taking a knock on our income, but still. Just write a few more "5 best amazon wotsits" hubs - you will be fine. Remember - the cream always rises to the top.
I wish that my 5 best Amazon wotsits hubs would rise to the top! As it happens, I am more understanding of their demise, it is my non-product hubs with 1400 words of real substance which I want to move back to the top. Amazon can go, be gone with you, if my AdSense comes back
Wait until this rolls out to the non-US sites.
I already know how much money I am losing - you won't know until that happens.
Yeah - real substance? Quotes from Winston Churchill?
Not sure why I was worthy of that dig Mark, or why the further demise in my earnings is funny, but you have plenty of "five best" hubs too
Contrary to your perception I do have some good quality hubs: http://hubpages.com/hub/Cheap-Spanish-P … y-In-Spain
But that aside, how do you know how much you are losing? You must stand to lose something from the non-US traffic too.
Sorry - I thought you were implying that no product review hubs had any substance and were "more understanding of their demise."
Which is why I made a dig back. Because - as you say - I have plenty of five best amazon wotsit hubs. Where do you think Will got the idea from?
Cheer up Ryan - it will get worse before it gets better.
Oh ok, nope I wasn't knocking those, I have plenty of those myself Just saying that if one had to give, Amazon or AdSense, it would be Amazon. As things stand it is both.
I happen to believe that the quality of a sales hub is measured in your sale statistics, if you can sell something you have met the needs of the reader, if you can't then they have pressed 'back' and your conversion rate is very high, so that is the only measure of quality that you need.
Oh - mine converted just fine thanks - when they had traffic.
But - adsense is a world wide earner - amazon and ebay are US specific.
So - if they roll this same change out to the rest of the world - you can expect another big drop in adsense.
Yep, don't you worry, I know
Things will get much worse, hence the reason I am frantically trying to finish a few eBooks before I have to downgrade from Asda to Lidl or sell the pug
Evidently Google measures quality differently.
I usually enjoy a 14% to 20% conversion rate each and every month from Amazon -- well above average. And from the amount of products that I sell, many of my buyers purchase multiple products.
My Amazon sales have decreased significantly since the smackdown (I'm down roughly 50% to 60% in traffic), but the conversion rates are holding steady at 14% to 16%.
Mine is only 6%
But, in fairness, I was only taking 49% of my traffic from the US, so non-buying clickers would have been prominent.
I also knock down that average by religiously clicking on my own Amazon capsules to take URLs, I have always done that for some reason, rather than searching for it again.
What that probably means (49%) is that the bulk of my hit has yet to come (damn) despite me losing at least 40% of my revenue
*face palm*
Just keep yer grubby hands off my keywords. Google already smacked their traffic into oblivion. I don't need any more competition.
Lashing out really doesn't deal with the issues that are a problem. In any situation.
I suggest taking your own advice. This is not about your mother.
I went to the thread, read a lot of the comments there and like you said, these are top quality websites that have had huge drops. Most are pretty irked that scraper sites and spammy sites are on page one when their stuff has moved to page 22 or beyond.
I really feel for them after their years of hard word.
Something's gotta give....
My sentiments exactly. I'm kinda saddened at one or two hubbers that come across as condescending, almost as though there's a 'ha ha ha' mentality.
Well all I can say is this: some of us have worked our butts off to make a living online. And I mean really worked hard. And just because google decided to rid the 'net of crap does not mean the rest of us should be penalised. And I include HubPages, the admin team, the coders, everyone.
Putting people into financial difficulty through no fault of their own is nothing to be proud, or to celebrate. A condescending, stopping short of sneering attitude is mean-spirited, plain and simple.
For those of you out there that think our musings and concerns are nothing short of our own fault ... happy now?
Working hard and working smart are two altogether different animals Andria, with altogether different results, and you know this as good as I do.
lol Misha. Smart then. But for my part I had to work hard because I didn't know anything about what I was doing. Different now, working smart is more apt.
To start with I just worked hard, blundering around I guess. In fact I still work hard now, I just use my time differently so @ you.
I have noticed the OLD dated search results also.
Making older articles top in searches does not mean it is relevant to today.
You could try this search:'rise in gas prices in the US'.
Plenty of info.
Why do you think searching for 'worldwide gas price comparison' will bring up info on 'rise in gas prices in the US'?
I wouldnt, I searched for what I wanted... a comparison of gas prices worldwide, (you can tell this because i used the search term "comparison of gas prices worldwide" - see how that works?
For some reason your response annoys me.
You must work for google ..same screwed logic and lack of reading comprehension
in a shallow attempt to be nicer -
person A bemoans US gas prices , person B responds with worldwide gas comparison chart .. "at least you dont live in Oslo"
http://money.cnn.com/pf/features/lists/ … gasprices/
the search results are terrible. I've ended up going to page 2 or 3 to find a decent article.
I hope big G gets it figured out.
The last 3 searches that I have done have resulted in me finding the nearest "content farm" for the best answer, generally at #8 or #9, life was so much easier when I didn't have to scroll to the bottom of the page
Seriously though, I had a specific query relating to Createspace, the first 5 articles were from Amazon themselves - none of the answered my question. Then I found an eHow article in #6, not too bad but not comprehensive enough. At #8 was a Hubpages article, thank goodness for Hubpages, the only damn people who could answer my query. And that is true, genuinely the only people on the first page with a good enough answer to my very simple question.
by NotPC 11 years ago
I have been experimenting with Google to find new techniques to drive more search traffic and I found one that is quite silly but has doubled my traffic within about a week of updating my hub.Here it is: THE RATING CAPSULEIt's really quite silly, but I added a rating capsule to the bottom of my...
by Brian 14 years ago
Well, it seems to me that my traffic is never going to increase.I am lucky to get one hit a week now, and the only traffic I am getting is from google.I know that being away for a while doesn't help much, but none of my other sites are doing any better. With all the stuff that is going on with my...
by Shadaan Alam 11 years ago
Hello all my fellow hubbers, hope you all are fine and enjoying your work!!This is my first forum topic and i hope i am able to explain myself well here- as to what i intend to ask you all.My question is: I read somewhere on the internet that if you want to drive maximum traffic to your main...
by Mark Ewbie 13 years ago
I need reassuring.Up until a few months back I understand, maybe wrongly, HP pages got additional boost from Google. That implies (to me) that Google wanted content farms to churn out pages so that every possible search term was covered by pages that had associated Adsense advertising.Now...
by Jess Brazeau 10 years ago
So I was bored and decided I would Google some of the topics of a few of my most recent hubs... Two of them popped up on the FIRST PAGE!! WHHHHHAAAAATTT?!??! lol. Sorry, I'm not sure if this is the appropriate place for this, but I almost swallowed my own tongue I was so excited and I need to tell...
by KnowledgeAnywhere 13 years ago
I have been on hubpages for two months. I have read multiple articles on SEO and backlinking. Ninety percent of my hubs do not have backlinking. But I choose for a while to say no backlinking. It was "different" I thought and "original". ...
Copyright © 2024 The Arena Media Brands, LLC and respective content providers on this website. HubPages® is a registered trademark of The Arena Platform, Inc. Other product and company names shown may be trademarks of their respective owners. The Arena Media Brands, LLC and respective content providers to this website may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website.
Copyright © 2024 Maven Media Brands, LLC and respective owners.
As a user in the EEA, your approval is needed on a few things. To provide a better website experience, hubpages.com uses cookies (and other similar technologies) and may collect, process, and share personal data. Please choose which areas of our service you consent to our doing so.
For more information on managing or withdrawing consents and how we handle data, visit our Privacy Policy at: https://corp.maven.io/privacy-policy
Show DetailsNecessary | |
---|---|
HubPages Device ID | This is used to identify particular browsers or devices when the access the service, and is used for security reasons. |
Login | This is necessary to sign in to the HubPages Service. |
Google Recaptcha | This is used to prevent bots and spam. (Privacy Policy) |
Akismet | This is used to detect comment spam. (Privacy Policy) |
HubPages Google Analytics | This is used to provide data on traffic to our website, all personally identifyable data is anonymized. (Privacy Policy) |
HubPages Traffic Pixel | This is used to collect data on traffic to articles and other pages on our site. Unless you are signed in to a HubPages account, all personally identifiable information is anonymized. |
Amazon Web Services | This is a cloud services platform that we used to host our service. (Privacy Policy) |
Cloudflare | This is a cloud CDN service that we use to efficiently deliver files required for our service to operate such as javascript, cascading style sheets, images, and videos. (Privacy Policy) |
Google Hosted Libraries | Javascript software libraries such as jQuery are loaded at endpoints on the googleapis.com or gstatic.com domains, for performance and efficiency reasons. (Privacy Policy) |
Features | |
---|---|
Google Custom Search | This is feature allows you to search the site. (Privacy Policy) |
Google Maps | Some articles have Google Maps embedded in them. (Privacy Policy) |
Google Charts | This is used to display charts and graphs on articles and the author center. (Privacy Policy) |
Google AdSense Host API | This service allows you to sign up for or associate a Google AdSense account with HubPages, so that you can earn money from ads on your articles. No data is shared unless you engage with this feature. (Privacy Policy) |
Google YouTube | Some articles have YouTube videos embedded in them. (Privacy Policy) |
Vimeo | Some articles have Vimeo videos embedded in them. (Privacy Policy) |
Paypal | This is used for a registered author who enrolls in the HubPages Earnings program and requests to be paid via PayPal. No data is shared with Paypal unless you engage with this feature. (Privacy Policy) |
Facebook Login | You can use this to streamline signing up for, or signing in to your Hubpages account. No data is shared with Facebook unless you engage with this feature. (Privacy Policy) |
Maven | This supports the Maven widget and search functionality. (Privacy Policy) |
Marketing | |
---|---|
Google AdSense | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Google DoubleClick | Google provides ad serving technology and runs an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Index Exchange | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Sovrn | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Facebook Ads | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Amazon Unified Ad Marketplace | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
AppNexus | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Openx | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Rubicon Project | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
TripleLift | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Say Media | We partner with Say Media to deliver ad campaigns on our sites. (Privacy Policy) |
Remarketing Pixels | We may use remarketing pixels from advertising networks such as Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and Facebook in order to advertise the HubPages Service to people that have visited our sites. |
Conversion Tracking Pixels | We may use conversion tracking pixels from advertising networks such as Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and Facebook in order to identify when an advertisement has successfully resulted in the desired action, such as signing up for the HubPages Service or publishing an article on the HubPages Service. |
Statistics | |
---|---|
Author Google Analytics | This is used to provide traffic data and reports to the authors of articles on the HubPages Service. (Privacy Policy) |
Comscore | ComScore is a media measurement and analytics company providing marketing data and analytics to enterprises, media and advertising agencies, and publishers. Non-consent will result in ComScore only processing obfuscated personal data. (Privacy Policy) |
Amazon Tracking Pixel | Some articles display amazon products as part of the Amazon Affiliate program, this pixel provides traffic statistics for those products (Privacy Policy) |
Clicksco | This is a data management platform studying reader behavior (Privacy Policy) |