HP and Hubbers' Traffic only Sustained by Added Articles

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  1. janderson99 profile image54
    janderson99posted 11 years ago

    As the graph below shows HP traffic is relatively flat and is only sustained by the daily influx of new articles. This mirrors my experience where my traffic over the last few months has only been sustained by writing an average 2 articles a day. My recent decline appears to be linked to not writing as many over the last month.

    I wonder how much overall traffic is dependent on the 'founder effect' the initial surge of views for the first week or so. This means that on average the traffic for older hubs is declining. Is this experience shared by established writers with a reasonable number of hubs, with older hubs? Some people have advocated dumping older hubs or trying to revitalise them. What does this mean in terms of writing for HP.

    Has the notion of the Evergreen Hub withered?
    http://s4.hubimg.com/u/6686719_f248.jpg

    1. relache profile image72
      relacheposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      1) Not in my experience.
      2) Not for me it hasn't.

    2. tmbridgeland profile image80
      tmbridgelandposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      I have had just the opposite experience. I am gradually gaining more hits on older Hubs. Some of this is because as I learn more, I improve older Hubs, but a lot seems to be organic growth. When I was first on HubPages I put up a lot of weak Hubs that got a brief surge then fell to nothing. Now, I can pretty much predict how many visitors I'll get in a day on any given Hub, and it is increasing.

  2. sabrebIade profile image80
    sabrebIadeposted 11 years ago

    When you say writing an average 2 articles a day...do you mean writing 2 Hubs a day?

    1. janderson99 profile image54
      janderson99posted 11 years agoin reply to this

      average yes

  3. Sue Adams profile image96
    Sue Adamsposted 11 years ago

    Some of my older hubs still gain more traffic than ever before, yet my overall views have gone down by about 20% in the last couple of months. So I don't think age has anything to do with it. I think HubPages as a site has, for some reason, taken a plunge.

    1. janderson99 profile image54
      janderson99posted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Some of my old hubs do very well but on average the older ones perform worse in time.

  4. mistyhorizon2003 profile image88
    mistyhorizon2003posted 11 years ago

    I have to say that HP always said it took 3 years for a hub to reach its peak earning potential, but what happens then? I had two hubs that were about 2 and a half years old and 3 years old respectively. One was getting about 1700 views a day for many months, whilst the other was getting around 1500 views per day during the same period. Then about four months or so ago the traffic just fell through the floor on them, and now the one that used to get 1700 views a day only gets about 300, and the one that used to get 1500 views per day gets about 180. This situation got worse with every run of Panda, and yet both Hubs are on 'Evergreen' subjects and the information does not date.

    Personally I suspect the original pattern would show new hubs gradually gaining in traffic as tmbridgeland describes because this was/is normal, but I have to wonder if there is also a point where Google decides that the article has now been around too long and it is time for 'fresh' content to be read instead.

    1. janderson99 profile image54
      janderson99posted 11 years agoin reply to this

      The sucess stories paint a gloomy picture

      see http://hubpages.com/success/

      click 'keep reading' and see the graphs  - most show a punga after writing stops. I know the data is out of date, but there is a pattern there.

      Success may not be the word now??

      I guess its a trade off
      => organic links build PR
      => genuine competitors steal your thunder
      => plagerism
      => Google's Freshness Index
      => The article may have just been ahead of several others that have got better links and the nod from Google
      => It partially depends on HP's reputation and standing

      1. mistyhorizon2003 profile image88
        mistyhorizon2003posted 11 years agoin reply to this

        I looked at those a few weeks back as it goes. They look pretty depressing as they illustrated how even the 'success stories' are seeing a dramatic drop in traffic. Not good, but as you pointed out earlier, the site overall is no doubt not showing a loss of traffic because of the new hubs being published constantly. Sadly this should actually be causing a gain in traffic as opposed to simply allowing the site to sustain roughly the same level of traffic overall. I also notice that those graphs are very much out of date now, and since a few Panda runs plus Penguin have taken place since 2011 (when most of the graphs finish) the odds are that most of the hubbers in question have probably experienced even further drops in traffic since. At the end of 2011 I was regularly on over 10,000 views a day and was earning pretty well for a part time income. Now I am down to just over 3500 a day (less at weekends), so based on this I was doing far better than most of the success stories at the point the graphs largely go up to. I would love to know what there figures are now based on how my own have dropped!

    2. cardelean profile image86
      cardeleanposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Just wondering Misty (since I haven' hit the three year mark yet) for the hubs that you are saying are 3 yrs+, have you 'updated' the content of the hubs?  This is not meant as a criticism at all, truly a question of curiosity since I have nothing to compare it to in my own experience.  I'm just wondering if (as it has been suggested), updating content in the much older hubs is helping Google to see the content as 'fresh' or not.  And I wonder if you unpublished one of those formerly great performing hubs for a while and then republished it, if it would have a new surge.  I don't know, just thinking out loud...

      1. mistyhorizon2003 profile image88
        mistyhorizon2003posted 11 years agoin reply to this

        No I haven't really updated them apart from correcting the odd typo, mainly because the content cannot really be updated as both articles related to medical health one way or another, and the facts in the articles have not changed. I did write a couple of sequels to them and linked the hubs together in the hope of getting a 'knock on' effect of people going from one to the other, but it didn't really make much difference. Of course to add the links I did edit the main hub's text slightly to suggest that the reader could benefit from reading my other hub on 'xyz', so I suppose Google might see that extra text as fresh content. All that said I am far from convinced this comes down to 'fresh content' being required to make a difference. The drops were just too huge and too fast.

        I don't see any benefit in unpublishing the hub for a while either, as it would end up deindexed by Google within a week or so, and then when it was republished it would have to go through the whole process of regaining (hopefully) a high up place in the search engine results. Potentially it could also take another 3 years to reach its full earning potential, AND because it would look like a new article to Google, the odds are any plagiarized copies of it that were already on the net when you unpublished it would outrank it and be the ones to earn from it.

        1. cardelean profile image86
          cardeleanposted 11 years agoin reply to this

          Great information.  Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

          1. mistyhorizon2003 profile image88
            mistyhorizon2003posted 11 years agoin reply to this

            You are very welcome smile

  5. profile image0
    kelleywardposted 11 years ago

    I haven't been here long, 5 months, but from what I've seen my older hubs are doing much better than the new ones I've written. I see a gradual increase each week so far.

    1. mistyhorizon2003 profile image88
      mistyhorizon2003posted 11 years agoin reply to this

      This is not surprising as your hubs are still 'young' and finding their way up the search engine results. Hopefully this process will continue for you, but like I described before, this can die off again at some point in the future when the hubs reach their 'peak potential', or at least that appears to be what others have experienced.

  6. Anamika S profile image67
    Anamika Sposted 11 years ago

    My page views have gone down drastically. I tried to bring them up by writing on Celebrities and Movies which is an evergreen topic. But even that has not been of any help. Now my next step is to clean up unproductive hubs, I sincerely hope that helps (It did in the past).

    1. mistyhorizon2003 profile image88
      mistyhorizon2003posted 11 years agoin reply to this

      I wouldn't count movies or celebrities as 'evergreen'. Movies are being released all the time, so a review for instance is quickly out of date. Celebrities come and go in terms of being 'in the news'. Evergreen topics are things like 'How to' articles, recipes, medical health articles etc, as these either don't date, or do so incredibly slowly.

      1. Anamika S profile image67
        Anamika Sposted 11 years agoin reply to this

        I agree! But most of the Indian Actors and Actresses have a 'long shelf life' one way or the other. I am not writing about just movie reviews but about celebrities, their life, the movies they have acted, their heroines, their upcoming projects etc as an all in one. Entertainment Industry related articles are always hot topics especially in India (though not much of revenue earners). I work in the industry so I do not need to put much effort in writing either. I have already written 18 hubs so far and can write 100's more if I want to.

  7. Lauryallan profile image71
    Lauryallanposted 11 years ago

    @janderson99 I have been thinking very similar things myself the last few weeks. I have been wondering how Evergreeen content can really work long term when everything is constantly up in the air whenever a Google update comes along. I realize there's very little HP can do about this, but it's still a major risk factor of putting your time on here, trying to wait a number of years for your content to reach it's peak and then not reaching it's potential because Google released x or y algo.
    I haven't gotten close to being on here for 3 years and most of my content will have a far shorter time frame anyway. However, I have seen my traffic decline over the past month. It seems to fluctuate around the 3k mark. Most of my traffic is from search engines so I don't really get a surge of new visitors when I publish the hub. I normally have to wait for a few days or a few months for the traffic to come in. Sometimes it doesn't come in at all on a particular hub. However, I am left scratching my head wondering my my traffic has halfed recently. Originally I thought it might be Penguin but now I am thinking it could be because of the changing seasons.

  8. CMHypno profile image82
    CMHypnoposted 11 years ago

    I'm having a different experience.  My account is one that plunged last August and hasn't really recovered yet despite extensive revamping, but what traffic I'm getting is from older hubs and it is really difficult to rank new ones and get any traffic to them

  9. Paul Edmondson profile imageSTAFF
    Paul Edmondsonposted 11 years ago

    We were looking at some data last week and hubs do tend to peak earlier than they did a few years ago.  They seem to peak between two and three years old now.  That can change pretty quickly.

    One thing I've noticed is Google seems to have twisted the freshness dial up quite a bit from where it was - this favors new content.  My gut is it will get dialed back a bit.

  10. nakmeister profile image66
    nakmeisterposted 11 years ago

    I've only been around on here for 18 months (with 6-8 month gap in the middle). When I came back after my time away from the site, I discovered that a lot of the hubs that were getting 0 or 1 daily hits were now getting 5-10. There's also a batch of fairly evergreen hubs which don't get any traffic at all - am trying to spruce them up at the moment. One thing I have noticed recently though is that a lot of the new hubs I'm writing are also getting on page 1 of Google search results - within 24 hours in many cases. This surprised me as I thought you generally needed to let them age to do well, but perhaps this is the freshness dial turned up.

 
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