Deleting Hubs as a way to increase traffic

1. 77

   leakeemposted 12 years ago

   I have read somewhere here that google search engines take into account the page-views to compute ranking. Is it advisable to delete non-performing Hubs, those with 0 pageviews a day, as a way to increase traffic in an attempt to increase ranking?
   
   How do you deal with low-performing hubs?
   thanks in advance.

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   1. 63

      Chuck Bluesteinposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      That is not correct. That is like saying that if you spend a million dollars to get lots of links from good sites then Google will rank you high. JC Penny did that and Google banned them from search engines.
      
      You can pay Google to be listed higher than the #1 listing. But it says that it is paid listing and not the #1 search listing. Your theory would mean that the websites that have the most money for advertising will be ranked high by Google no matter how bad it is. It is clear that Google searches cannot be bought.
      
      To get more page views, spend $10,000 to advertise that page. If you added 5,000 more pages to your website or HubPages domain that get no  traffic, that would increase the value of the site or domain. WHY? What is king when it comes to searches. Content is king. Of course that means unique content.
      
      Consider this. HP has a minimum of words on a hub for it to be published. What is the maximum number of words?

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      1. 77

         leakeemposted 12 years agoin reply to this

         That made me think for a minute.  You gave me ideas. Thank you for replying.

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         David 470posted 12 years agoin reply to this

         Great Point!

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2. 89

   Will Apseposted 12 years ago

   Carrying a lot of poorly performing hubs puts you at risk of a Panda hit. I delete hubs that have poor view times and get very little traffic as a precaution.

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      leakeemposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      What do you do then with those hubs that you have deleted from hubpages?

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3. 66

   2uesdayposted 12 years ago

   Sometimes it is worth looking at an article you have deleted or unpublished here and asking yourself why it did not perform better.
   
   It may be with a bit of work it could become more viable or it might be worth moving it elsewhere and updating it to be of use. There is also the  factor that here if Hub ads are your main source then you need views, elsewhere it might be Adsense or something else that makes them become profitable.

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4. 0

   Arlene V. Pomaposted 12 years ago

   I am more ruthless than most Hub authors.  I have 230 Hubs right now, but a couple of months before, I had deleted about 33 Hubs because I truly hated them and did not want to work on them.  It was not about increasing traffic.  It was all about removing low performers that I felt weren't going anywhere.  When you unpublish Hubs, there's a chance that you will edit them and give them a new life that will draw traffic.  When you delete Hubs, you can either put them in a computer file, a memory stick, print them to store as hard copy or completely let them go.  Once you delete Hubs you don't want, you can see what you really have, and it is much easier to keep track of the remaining Hubs.  I have a year on HubPages, so I know what works for me when it comes to making those payouts.  I stick to the topics that are earners--not losers taking up space.

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5. 90

   Cardisaposted 12 years ago

   I have been deleting my poems and short stories. In total I had over 300 hubs but now down to 170+. Each time I delete the poor performers my traffic goes up again.  Poems and short stories are not articles and they don't make much money either so I have no problem deleting those. If an article is doing badly I try to improve that by changing the title, adding more content or improving the grammar, adding a table or something. Anything to improve the overall article.

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      2uesdayposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      That is an approach I have found useful too. I have less hubs than I once had because of taking down hubs when traffic fell for various reasons.

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      Marisa Wrightposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      That's very interesting, Cardisa.
      
      One thing that Panda penalizes is short posts - they're classed as "low quality" (which is one of the reasons HubPages sets a minimum word count). I've always wondered whether allowing an exception for poems was a good idea, because Google doesn't make any such distinction!  So a sub-domain which has lots of poems could be given a low Panda score based on those poems - and your Panda score drags down ALL your Hubs, not just the poetry ones. 
      
      So, I'm wondering whether removing poems may have improved your Panda score and therefore your traffic.  Did your poetry Hub just have one poem, or did you add extra words?

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         Cardisaposted 12 years agoin reply to this

         Hey Marisa, some of them had extra words especially those written during the creative writing contest but most of them had between 100 - 200 words. I had only one haiku which was the shortest. I do believe that poems and short stories don't belong with informative articles and my account kinda looked confusing. I have a second account with cancer and self development articles only and it is doing okay so far. I haven't removed all the poems as yet because some get good traffic but I will eventually do that within the next few weeks.

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            Marisa Wrightposted 12 years agoin reply to this

            Thanks, Cardisa.  I had a blog that got Panda'd last year and it had some 100-200 word posts on it.  I combined them together into longer posts and the blog recovered at the next update.  Of course, I can't be sure my actions were the cause of the recovery - but the fact that you're getting better traffic by deleting short Hubs is another indicator.

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6. 63

   Chuck Bluesteinposted 12 years ago

   I had an article about losing weight and it was not doing well but most of my traffic comes from tweets and I was not tweeting it much, since I liked other articles more. I have now created a much better article on losing weight that I am tweeting. But that old article is getting some traffic now. Also not getting much traffic is relative.

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7. 64

   SandyMcCollumposted 12 years ago

   Some hubs I have, have been there for a while and never did really perform, until they were almost 2 years old. Now they get steady traffic and it always surprises me. I guess it's a two-edged sword, you can be damned if you do and damned if you don't.

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   1. 63

      Chuck Bluesteinposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      The source of the traffic matters. With Google searches, they usually (not with new news) like the older posts. Also if someone has 20 hubs and they delete the less popular, then the more popular ones become more visible on their HP page and that will increase traffic but no one is going to make much with 20 hubs. This will not happen when you have 100+ hubs.
      
      Deleting hubs (unless they are badly written) is being penny wise and dollar foolish. It is like your boss at a job saying that if you quit college (you are studying to be an accountant-- high demand) he will pay you 20 cents an hour more. So you quit college and tell your friends that you are making 20 cents an hour more.
      
      Then you go on HP and tell everyone how smart that you are since you are making 20 cents an hour more by quitting college. Look at webmd.com They get a million visitors a day. They have thousands of articles. Do you think that all of them are getting a lot of traffic?
      
      No they have old obscure ones that do not get much traffic. But if they take it down then they would not be a good website. They would be known as the website with dissappearing pages.
      
      Also if you create a page and someone links to it with a new site, he will not be getting much traffic. But in a couple of years, you may be getting a huge amount of traffic that you would be getting if you did not delete it. In fact this could have happened with a few websites.
      
      So not only are you missing out on this traffic but these sites now have broken links that they have to remove. So you become the place to go to get broken links. Now if you are only looking to make less $50 monthly, the above does not affect you at all. It is for people who want to make more than $50 a month.
      
      In fact at first I used to link to other HP pages on my hubs. But I did not like all the broken links, so I do not link to them anymore. But I do link to the National Public Library of Medicine. They do not destroy webpages. Don't be a link breaker.

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8. 0

   Arlene V. Pomaposted 12 years ago

   I've just celebrated my first anniversary on HubPages, and the answers to me getting payout are already listed on my account page.  I don't wait around for Hubs to get to their "full potential" by waiting on them for 1-3 years if I can't even stand to read them, update them or edit them.  To earn those online pennies, it all depends on what you are writing and if your writing makes someone's life easier or better.  I started off writing fiction and book reviews, but after six months, I quit writing those.  My older posts that draw are about home improvement, gardening, behavior at work, dating, travel, etc.  I also do WTI if I can.  That's once a week, and the titles to those articles are ready to go.  To draw readers, I work on my articles' titles.  No longer do I think up cutesy titles like I did when I was a reporter.  Not acceptable!

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9. 61

   Randy Godwinposted 12 years ago

   And then everything changes again.
   
   
   
                                            

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10. 0

    Arlene V. Pomaposted 12 years ago

    Randy, now ain't that the truth???  The best I can do when I tire of the multiple changes is to take a break.  You can't predict what's going to happen next.  You are either wading through crap or going with the flow.  Most of the time, I find myself wading away . . .

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11. 77

    leakeemposted 12 years ago

    Thank you for the replies. I've learned a lot from what you have said but I still am not sure for myself if deleting hubs is a good idea. I guess I just have to experiment. I guess there are too many variables to be sure of it.

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12. 92

    melbelposted 12 years ago

    Just wanted to hop in and mention a blog post I read about something called AuthorRank, a Google algo (Agent Rank patent.)
    
    Essentially it's goes something along the lines that your reputation as a content creator influences the ranking of search results (query independent.) So basically, the better content you write, the better Google will rank you overall.
    
    ---
    
    Personally, I'd rather tweak poorly performing hubs than scrap them... unless it's completely unsalvageable. I've had hubs/blog_posts do nothing and then reach a nice peak after quite a bit of time (two years+ in some cases.)

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13. 89

    cam8510posted 12 years ago

    I agree with those who are saying to work on the poor performing hubs.  Actually, that is what I am doing this morning.  When I go back and add photos and videos, or think up a better title, the activity starts again.

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    1. 77

       leakeemposted 12 years agoin reply to this

       I've noticed too that when you edit your hubs, traffic increases but it eventually drops again.

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          cam8510posted 12 years agoin reply to this

          I have edited and reposted the same hubs several times with the same positive results, but yes, they do go back down eventually.

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14. 66

    Sue B.posted 5 years ago

    This is an interesting thread. I do not understand how lower performing Hubs affect others -especially since our hubs are now published to varying websites.
    I have been on Hubpages for years and I have not unpublished a hub unless I wanted to change it or if I felt it was undated- or no longer reflected how I think.
    I have looked at low performing hubs before and revamped them -- or even combined them-- and have seen improvement.
    What everyone has shared is certainly food for thought but I will say that some of my hubs did not perform well until after 1-2 years at least.

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15. 75

    Wesman Todd Shawposted 5 years ago

    Blogger or Blogspot is your friend. I've got hundreds and hundreds of former hubs, some I shouldn't have ever deleted, over on various blogger blogs, where they sometimes make me a buck.

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16. 91

    Rochelle Frankposted 5 years ago

    You might notice that this discussion was posted six years ago. Quite a bit has changed since then.

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       Wesman Todd Shawposted 5 years agoin reply to this

       I think that is exactly why this discussion is still relevant. So much has changed. More has changed than I could recall, I'm sure. I'm reasonably certain, that to some degree or another, the big G daddy still ranks us as individuals though.

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