I Removed RSS And News Feeds From Some Hubs...

1. 79

   Garrett Mickleyposted 13 years ago

   ...And those hubs about doubled in traffic.
   
   Could be coincidence, I'm not sure.  I did it on a few hubs that got 5 or less hits a day, and now they're getting 10.  I changed them on Friday and watched them all weekend.  One of the ones I changed that usually gets between 7 and 10 is now at 21 in the last 24 hours.
   
   Like I said, could be a coincidence with something else.  I don't have many hubs to compare it with.  I went through this morning and removed all of my RSS feeds and News feeds on the rest to see if they increase, too.
   
   Has anyone else tested this to see how they did?  I'm interested to hear the experiences of others.  It was somewhere on the forums around here last week that I saw the suggestion and I thought I would test it.

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2. 87

   Will Apseposted 13 years ago

   Everytime you go down the path of less SEO BS and more value for the visitor, the closer you get to the Nirvana of big traffic.
   
   And you feel warm inside, too.
   
   Can you feel it?

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      Garrett Mickleyposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      Yeah, I feel it, but I thought that was the Baileys in my coffee.
      
      =P

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         Will Apseposted 13 years agoin reply to this

         Virtue has many ways of entering the acolyte.

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3. 69

   lrohnerposted 13 years ago

   Honestly, I think it's coincidence. My traffic has gone way up (much closer to pre-smackdown levels) the past few days and I haven't made any changes recently.

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      Cagsilposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      I've recently made changes, but those changes were more than a few(6) days old and seen an up swing in traffic since changes were made. What is even better is the traffic is holding steady.

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      livewithrichardposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      I removed all news and rss feeds from my hubs including all the hubmob stuff and I have seen a 20% to 30% increase in traffic over the past 2 weeks.  Coincidently, I have also taken a beating on my hubkarma. It's gone from a high 80's to 50 and the only linking I did to other hubbers was through the hubmob rss feeds. But honestly, I could care less about hubkarma, all I care about is getting traffic back to my hubs. So I am on a huge backlinking campaign.

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         Sally's Troveposted 13 years agoin reply to this

         Just speculating that the Suggest Links tool (which the reward for using seemed to be a higher karma score), was put in place to enhance what appeared to be an exceptionally good internal site linking system.
         
         I was never a fan of that tool (wrote a cryptic Hub about it) because it encouraged internal linking for the sake of itself instead of for the sake of a reader's good experience.
         
         In all of my Hubs, the exception being the Suggest Links tool Hub, I never used that tool to link to other places inside HP. Instead, I took the time to find pages inside or outside HP that would give the reader value directly related to the topic of the Hub.   
         
         I'm with you...I could give a hoot about HubKarma.

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   Csjun89posted 13 years ago

   That is good to hear, I think I may remove some RSS feeds from some hubs too

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   sunforgedposted 13 years ago

   I have changed nothing and am seeing a 20-30% increase in traffic today - still coming from the wrong countries though

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      Garrett Mickleyposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      All of mine is coming from other countries, too.

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   Mike's Cornerposted 13 years ago

   I'm still unclear about the RSS feeds. Is Google penalizing for having RSS feeds of our own recent hubs at the end of a hub? I see this as added value to the user -- what is it about this added information that Google doesn't like?

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      Marisa Wrightposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      Two reasons why RSS feeds to your latest Hubs are not a good idea.
      
      1.  Outside visitors don't know who you are, and they don't care. They've arrived at your Hub looking for information on a subject, and they don't want to see links to other pages that are about something totally different. That's not adding value.
      
      2.  Google needs to know what your Hub is about.  If you have a lot of links to unrelated subjects, that could dilute your keywords and confuse Google.  Not a good idea.
      
      I use RSS feeds on some of my Hubs, but I set it up so it only shows Hubs on related topics.  I don't think there would be any benefit in removing those.

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   ryankettposted 13 years ago

   I have removed news feeds and RSS feeds from every single one of my 695 hubs and have yet to see any improvement on almost all of them. I was the pioneer of this experiment it seems, yet I cannot sit here and say that is working, far too early anyway.
   
   But, I did change some titles, now THAT has seen some positive results.

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   Spacey Graceyposted 13 years ago

   I removed RSS and news feeds and reduced number of capsules and my traffic is still lower than an alley cat's morals

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      Sally's Troveposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      Ditto.
      
      It wasn't that long ago that we were encouraged to add those RSS and News capsules. This is a bit of a roller coaster ride.

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   lakeerieartistsposted 13 years ago

   I have so few news feeds on any of my hubs that I can't contribute to this experiment.  I do have RSS feeds but I am not going to remove them because they are to my own hubs and sites except for a couple of hubmobs, and 60DC ones. 
   
   Hopefully will finish getting the commercial hubs in line tonight, threw out one piece of paper listing them last night.  I will be glad to be done.  Ended up deleting a few hubs that had little or no traffic ever, and just were not that great from my old days.

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      ryankettposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      Feel free to test out any deleted hubs on Excerptz, you just never know

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         lakeerieartistsposted 13 years agoin reply to this

         Good point, Ryan.  I don't think you would have wanted the ones that I had, because if they didn't get traffic here in the last couple of years, then they really weren't good enough for anywhere.  But I might do that with some other things that I have to transfer.  I just transferred a Squidoo lens that I had for two years to a new blog as an experiment, so putting some of them on Excerptz is not such a bad idea.
         
         Trying out a few experiments of my own these days.  Like you, I am trying to find what works best as to income and traffic.  I really like your site, and just recommended it to my two partners in the Writing Online venture.

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            ryankettposted 13 years agoin reply to this

            I have moved articles before to my own blogs and seen them rank. Sometimes it has a lot to do with how saturated your keywords are on Hubpages, I often find that Google will rank one Hubpage pretty high, and the others much further down their pages.
            
            It seems a waste to delete content forever, if it can be recycled. I suppose it depends on whether they were heavy sales hubs, because although Amazon links are permitted on Excerptz (with 100% impressions to you), the system rejects anything with more than 3 links.
            
            Alternatively, if you have other articles on a similar topic, you could just use Excerptz and the recycled article for a quick backlink. I would seriously have no problem whatsoever hosting an article which doesn't get traffic, within a month I will have my own server and not very much to host on it
            
            I am recycling my deleted Hubpages, probably on Excerptz but maybe elsewhere, in order to steal a quick backlink without having to write anything

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               lakeerieartistsposted 13 years agoin reply to this

               Sounds great.  Well, I will try to help fill it up for you.

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    sunforgedposted 13 years ago

    Hubpages report on HOW they tested was very incomplete. It possibly was well performed, but how they shared that data with us was not.
    
    For example, I have a hub that lost 10,000 views this month, it had  news, ebay and amazon capsules.
    
    I may have lost 10k views, but It still gets more views than 90% of hubbers get in their entire portfolio. Only 416 hubs received over 10k views this month.
    
    Any analysis I made would have some comparative analysis - word count/ranking keywords/competition/backlinks / commercial/navigational/informational  etc. of those 460. It could even be shared with the community w/ as Hub A, Hub B - etc to keep their success secret.
    
    im not sure how this:
    
    "Second, we found that Hubs which successfully maintained their traffic were much more likely to judiciously use the Amazon, eBay, news, RSS and link capsules, so we ask if you choose to add news and RSS capsules, you make sure that you have plenty of original content in your Hub to accompany it and that you write at least 50 words of text in your Hub for every product you feature in your Amazon and eBay capsules."
    
    was translated into "news and rss' are bad.
    
    Was there another statement that i missed? - because all that quote says to me is that a ton of  hubs used rss and news as the backbone of their content were skirting by as "hubs" and ranking based on the trust this site enjoyed. Now, they tanked. I want to know about what they had besides auto -generated feeds ...thats the telling factor to me.
    
    Did I miss something , somewhere? because, otherwise, a whole bunch of people did a whole bunch of work on hard to understand conjecture

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       lrohnerposted 13 years agoin reply to this

       I couldn't agree with you more, SF. People forget that the "rules" and changes that HP makes are designed to keep spammers at bay and hopefully weed out some cr*p -- not to teach already successful hubbers how to hub.
       
       The only change I've made so far was to comply with the 50-word per Amazon product rule. I also deleted one hub that I never should have published anyway. (If anyone wants the HP URL for Squinkies, have at it.)

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          lakeerieartistsposted 13 years agoin reply to this

          What, may I ask, is a Squinkie?

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             lrohnerposted 13 years agoin reply to this

             It's the stupidest "tween" collectible toy craze ever.

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          livewithrichardposted 13 years agoin reply to this

          I removed what I did not because of any experiment started by Ryan but because of my own observations of what so called quality content is.  RSS feeds that point to other hubs are leaks that need to be plugged. I have no problem with feeds that lead to your own hubs but linking to other hubs just for the sake of internal site linking is going overboard.
          
          News feeds give the appearance of scraped material plus they really add no value to the reader's experience since they are random at best. The only true benefit of these feeds is that they constantly change so the SE's see something different when they crawl your content.  Again, no need for them on a product hub.
          
          Sharing your page juice is important and the best pages all have outbound links to related content embedded in the content and in link modules. They may also be leaks but they add value to the reader's experience.

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             ryankettposted 13 years agoin reply to this

             Same reasons as me then.
             
             I do admit that I was slightly hopeful of improved traffic, but I finished the project being a lot more confident about readability of my pages and a belief that it would slightly improve my CTR.
             
             Page leaks, basically, I may even go back over my sales hubs and remove comments boxes; generally they have very little value, apart from a couple where unregistered users have added something like "fantastic, just what I needed" because those are comments which help with sales.

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                livewithrichardposted 13 years agoin reply to this

                I've gone back through my most commented hubs and removed comments from those that left anchored links as their user name. I think comments on product hubs can be useful if they are more like testimonials. I've edited most of my comment boxes so that the user must be signed in to leave a comment, it's probably not going to help with referrals but at least it plugs some outbound links to sites I didn't choose.

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                   ryankettposted 13 years agoin reply to this

                   I may do that too, go back and remove the "good hub" comments, and the ones with links which have slipped through the net.

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                   lakeerieartistsposted 13 years agoin reply to this

                   See, I have never allowed those unless they were hubbers, anyway. I have a policy of no links in comments.

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                      livewithrichardposted 13 years agoin reply to this

                      I really don't have a problem with links that point to other hubs but I first check the hub to see if it's worth linking to.  What I don't want to do anymore is allow page leaks to unrelated external sites. 
                      
                      I should have done this from the beginning but I really needed to go through some of these hubs anyway and I'm glad I did. I found tons of mistakes especially in the 30D challenge hubs.  Overall, its a good exercise in tweaking where tweaking is needed.

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       ryankettposted 13 years agoin reply to this

       I believe that I may be responsible for this rush to delete news and RSS feeds, although that was 100% what I didn't want, and I did state the quite clearly. Sometimes what you say you don't want is what you do get. Unintentional reverse psychology I suppose. If I had attempted reverse psychology I would have failed; sods law.
       
       My main intention in deleting news and RSS feeds was to reduce page leaks and focus readers towards my Amazon capsules and the various other ads and links on my hubs and in my text. And for the same reason I deleted some comments boxes on some sales pages.
       
       I am actually seeing a slightly increased CTR, and have had a couple of good Amazon days, since that change. But the effect on my traffic has been minimal on 90% of my hubs, and could never be directly attributed to be causing the increase on the other 10%.
       
       The only thing that has conclusively worked for me is the tweaking of titles on completely dead hubs. The only other thing that I can be confident will work for me in the long term is the hundreds of backlinks that I have spent the past week building and continue to build.
       
       I was open minded, as to whether I would see traffic increases, but I knew I would not see traffic decreases. So mine was purely strategic, I didn't want the irrelevant page leaks, and wanted to focus my reader on more valuable relevant links to higher paying content.

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       lakeerieartistsposted 13 years agoin reply to this

       I agree with you.  I do not believe that RSS feeds are contributing to this problem unless a hub is all feeds and no content.  I made no changes along those lines, and won't.

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    Randy Godwinposted 13 years ago

    I changed nothing because I was not alerted of any changes needed.  My traffic is near or slightly above pre-slap averages.  Some hubs have doubled in views these last couple of days.  So, who knows? 

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       brandonhart100posted 13 years agoin reply to this

       IMO keeping your RSS makes sense if you didn't already link to your other hubs a bunch of times in your hub already... or if you don't have a link list.
       
       A news feed that provides benefit to the reader also adds value in my opinion. 
       
       If you've linked to other hubs a bunch of times and then stuff the end of your hub with RSS and a link feed list, then this could be annoying to the reader and Google...  A good idea is to make it look and read how you'd want to see it if you came searching for the "Best red wii costume with buttons".

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12. 79

    Garrett Mickleyposted 13 years ago

    Putting them in was an experiment all on it's own.
    
    I didn't do a whole lot of work for nothing, I only have 25 hubs and very few had the feeds/news in the first place.
    
    A lot of my news feeds were empty or irrelevant, for that matter!
    
    As far as I'm concerned, it was good of me to clean them out. If not for traffic, for cleanliness and organization.
    
    I don't suggest anyone spend time removing tons of them.
    
    The time is better spent working on a backlinking campaign.

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    viking305posted 13 years ago

    I followed that idae of removing all rss and news feeds too.  It took a long time.  I believe it was useful though.  The traffic is up on hubs that were static. 
    
    And as a few other hubbers pointed out it was an apportunity to go back and review, edit and change earlier hubs.
    
    I now only link to a related subject that I have wriiten on my hubs.  I always try to write hubs in a series of same subject matter and find this is very valauable to me for traffic to these hubs and to the reader. 
    
    And yes my Karma score went down with a dive from average of 85 to 50 now.  Do I care NO!

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