This Week's Network Site Migrations (9/7 – 9/11)

1. 83

   samanthacubbisonposted 3 years ago

   
   
   We are excited to announce that PetHelpful has been rendered by our front-end publishing platform and is currently live! ToughNickel, Spinditty, and PairedLife are soon to follow!
   
   To see past migration announcements, check out the Official Announcements category.
   
   A Note About ToCs
   
   We are aware that some authors have used anchor links in lists to create a type of “Table of Contents”/ToC feature to link to various areas in an article. We certainly understand the need for this tool and a feature like this is likely on the roadmap for all newly rendered sites, however, the HubTool was never built to support this functionality and it is not currently supported by our new platform. We suggest that all active authors who have used this feature remove the broken ones now until we can offer a ToC feature for HubPages content. You may prefer to keep the ToC text so that readers can get a preview of your content, but removing the links will be necessary. Thank you for your understanding and for helping out the editing team.

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   1. 88

      NateB11posted 3 years agoin reply to this

      I've got some articles on a few of these sites, looking forward to seeing the results!

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2. 92

   jansharesposted 3 years ago

   Great! Looking forward to PairedLife.

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3. 90

   Kenna McHughposted 3 years ago

   It’s meant to be!

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4. 92

   Titiaposted 3 years ago

   First article I opened on PetHelpful showed ads (I counted 25), second one too, but when I opened the first one again, the ads were all gone and on whatever article I open in the new sites  they show the grey bar and lots of white spaces in the text.

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5. 96

   Glenn Stokposted 3 years ago

   Samantha, I was discussing with Tessa about the extra work put on the editors every time Hubbers update their hubs, since they need to confirm it still meets required standards. Based on this thread, I have several hubs with ToC that I guess I will have to update to remove the links as you suggested. I'm going to go slow with that and update the ToC only when I have other changes I need to make too.
   
   I don't know why so many niche sites are being moved so quickly before most of the bugs are fixed. Formatting errors with superscripts not appearing correctly will make readers think they are typos. Large blank spaces where videos and ads were meant to be located makes it look unprofessional. Missing videos is a major concern. I don't know why video capsules are blocked in some cases. I would think that would be at the top of the list before moving more niche sites.

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   1. 97

      eugbugposted 3 years agoin reply to this

      Definitely subscripts and superscripts should be way up the list. Many math articles use them so the content looks ridiculous with exponents not rendered properly. Should I consider replacing squares with a Unicode character? I have hundreds of places to change these so I don't know whether I should go to the trouble if the issue will be fixed in the near future.

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      1. 97

         DrMark1961posted 3 years agoin reply to this

         All of the images I had asked you about (that have writing on them to identify the subject of the artilce) look terrible in this new platform. Should we consider spending the hundreds or thousand hours to fix them? Is HP going to come along and make changes that are just going to destroy all of that work? I too do not know whether it is worth the trouble.

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         1. 83

            samanthacubbisonposted 3 years agoin reply to this

            It’s important to note that most traffic comes from organic search. So I don't think it is worth changing everything. But when we go in for basic/premium edits, we will try to create top images that support this new format.

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   2. 97

      DrMark1961posted 3 years agoin reply to this

      Somebody must be holding a gun to their heads saying "Do this NOW" because instead of being done logically, which would be to fix the bugs before releasing more sites, the priority is to migrate all of them before fixing things.
      HP is going to lose out on this, definitely in the short term and maybe in the long term. (Nobody really knows that at this point.)

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   3. 83

      samanthacubbisonposted 3 years agoin reply to this

      For now, we recommend that authors remove the hyperlinks but keep the text. So it looks like a regular ToC. We hope to eventually offer the ability for H2s to render as a ToC.
      
      We are still working on the video issue.

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   4. 92

      Abby Slutskyposted 3 years agoin reply to this

      I hope your request helps. I think some of my articles look very unprofessional with a heading, a big blank space, and no video underneath. I have not noticed ads on mu content though. Thank you, Samantha.

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6. 95

   CYong74posted 3 years ago

   Samantha, I have quite a lot of hubs with links to specific modules in other hubs i.e. the URLs contain HTML anchors.
   
   It seems that the links still work, just that they no longer jump to the relevant section. Do you recommend all these to be removed? (It would be a lot, a lot of checking and work for me)

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7. 94

   Glimmer Twin Fanposted 3 years ago

   Just going to add this here even though I have written it on another thread...I really like the new look, but on the mobile version, the tables are messed up.  Mine are all 3 column in alpha order, and on mobile, the alpha order is gone and it doesn't make sense.
   
   Should I change the type of table I used or should I hold on until this is fixed?  I have a lot of tables, especially on PetHelpful.  Thank you.

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   1. 83

      samanthacubbisonposted 3 years agoin reply to this

      All tables will be rendered in a single column on mobile, if that's what you mean. But we are discussing a fix, so I would avoid changing anything.

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      1. 96

         Glenn Stokposted 3 years agoin reply to this

         I find it strange that Maven does not want to support multi-column tables on mobile. Data in a single column can be displayed with a regular text capsule, with or without bullets. So that makes table capsules obsolete because most of our traffic is from mobile devices.

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         1. 83

            samanthacubbisonposted 3 years agoin reply to this

            I'm not sure.
            
            We are also looking into linking author contact (email) to their profile ASAP, for those who asked.

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            1. 97

               eugbugposted 3 years agoin reply to this

               Is there a reason why social media links have been removed from our profiles? Does Maven consider that other content written by us would be in competition with their network of sites and they don't want readers to easily discover this content?

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               1. 83

                  samanthacubbisonposted 3 years agoin reply to this

                  I'm not sure. Asking about that now!
                  
                  We are currently looking at reinstating comments, working on getting author emails linked to their profile, see if we can address image cropping on author profiles, and discussing social media linking.

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            2. 0

               Marisa Writesposted 3 years agoin reply to this

               A link would be great BUT not email, please!!  Authors would be swamped with spam. You don't offer email contact on HubPages so why would you do it on Maven?  Or do you mean a "contact" form?
               
               It would be great if it could be a single URL so we could choose our Twitter handle, Facebook page or own website - but if that's not allowed, I'd suggest making it a Twitter handle, because that is what most digital newspapers allow.  Even if an author doesn't use Twitter, it's easy to create an account for the purposes of creating a profile.

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               1. 83

                  samanthacubbisonposted 3 years agoin reply to this

                  I assume that it's an optional contact form, but I haven't seen what it'll look like yet.

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         2. 94

            Glimmer Twin Fanposted 3 years agoin reply to this

            Glenn - I agree with you.  Also, tables with lots of info will be incredibly long in just a single column.  People may get sick of scrolling through.  Not sure how many folks do tables, but many of mine are name lists so they can go on and on and on.  On the other hand, maybe the scrolling will keep people on my articles longer which is a good thing (I think?).  Hope you are doing well Glenn.

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            1. 98

               theraggededgeposted 3 years agoin reply to this

               My best solution is to clip the table as an image and hide the original table capsule. Should the table display be fixed, it's an easy thing to get rid of the image and display the table again.

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      2. 97

         eugbugposted 3 years agoin reply to this

         What about subscripts/superscripts? Should we make temporary changes? The HTML of articles on the "old" pages uses standard <sup> and <sub> tags for superscripts and subscripts. However I'm curious why these tags are stripped out of HTML for the new sites.

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         1. 83

            samanthacubbisonposted 3 years agoin reply to this

            I would leave them for now.

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            1. 97

               eugbugposted 3 years agoin reply to this

               Ok, but the articles are useless without them.

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               1. 83

                  samanthacubbisonposted 3 years agoin reply to this

                  We are working on it!

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                  1. 97

                     eugbugposted 3 years agoin reply to this

                     I know. I've been on the other side of the fence so I understand what it's like

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      3. 94

         Glimmer Twin Fanposted 3 years agoin reply to this

         Thanks Samantha - Thought I would add 2 screenshots, one from the desktop version and one from the mobile version.  I'm thinking it's because I list things in alpha order from left to right.
         
         
         
         
         
         

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         1. 83

            samanthacubbisonposted 3 years agoin reply to this

            Yes, that is correct. It is converting information left to right through each row.
            
            It is up to you if you wish to change your tables, but there may be an alternative option on the way, so it may be in your best interest to let sleeping dogs lie (lol) for now.
            
            We apologize for the inconvenience!

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8. 0

   Marisa Writesposted 3 years ago

   I'm astonished that PetHelpful has been moved, when there are so many serious issues with formatting etc on the new sites. I always understood it to be one of the star performers.
   
   Gun to the head sounds about right - presumably Maven desperately wants to decommission the HubPages' servers to save money.

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   1. 89

      lobobrandonposted 3 years agoin reply to this

      Yes, so is Dengarden and Owlcation if SEMrush stats are anything to go by. Nothing is going to stop the move. Low traffic sites such as Caloriebee have not been moved yet.
      
      It is very unlikely that it has something to do with server costs, you could move HP with the database to another server without having to change things.

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      1. 83

         samanthacubbisonposted 3 years agoin reply to this

         We are focusing on getting the sites moved and then going back to enhance the sites and address all issues and observations.

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         1. 97

            DrMark1961posted 3 years agoin reply to this

            You guys do realize that page rank on Google is a fluid concept that is determined by user satisfaction? If the reader goes to an article, finds it unreadable, boucnes back and reads something by someone else Googles algorithm will lower the articles ranking (when it happens enough).
            I had assumed that you moved Tatring first so that you could fix some of the bugs, and now I see that you are moving all of them so that page rank will be destroyed by the time you get around to "enhance", or fixing the numerous bugs.

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            1. 83

               samanthacubbisonposted 3 years agoin reply to this

               Yes, we do realize. But when comparing author satisfaction to reader satisfaction, the results are very different. Traffic is still steady, and articles are definitely being deemed "readable." We are not getting any external complaints. Also, these issues do not affect every article on every Network Sites.
               
               Obviously, this matter is out of my hands, but I do know that everything was calculated in advance and we do have a plan.

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               1. 97

                  DrMark1961posted 3 years agoin reply to this

                  I do not mean to drone on about this as it is something we all have to live with at this point. I do want to point out that in business the vast majority of clients do not complain, they are just "The Customer Who Does Not Come Back". Those people are hard to replace.

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               2. 89

                  lobobrandonposted 3 years agoin reply to this

                  To add to what Dr. Mark has said in his reply to this post, you should also know that people have been contacting us directly and not HP when they had problems with an article in the past and it was always a design issue. Typically pop up ads and just a crazy number of ads making it difficult to read.
                  
                  I know that this is no longer possible because people cannot contact the author anymore, it is very unlikely that someone is going to be looking for the HP contact button, it is a lot easier to hit the back button on a browser and look elsewhere. I am pretty sure none of the HP articles are unique in the sense that similar info is not available elsewhere, this would be the only situation where people would actually look to complain.
                  
                  P.S. I am sure we all agree that this matter is out of your hands. But, if there is someone paying attention to you about this (not the bugs but the general process), these are the points we would like to send them as a representative of the writers.

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                  1. 98

                     chef-de-jourposted 3 years agoin reply to this

                     I read with interest and ongoing concern about this migration business. I take in all that Brandon, Dr Mark, Eugbug, Marisa and Bev have to offer - and input from others - understanding some but not all of the info I scan. One question I have regarding the crawlers of Google, crawling daily, weekly?...what happens when they reach a missing video? Do they just note the absence and crawl on or will Google consider it a mistake and mark the article down?

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                     1. 89

                        lobobrandonposted 3 years agoin reply to this

                        Google uses a mobile first indexing system these days and therefore it would be viewing the page on mobile. In the past Google just used the code, but today they also know what the page would look like once the HTML, etc. is fully loaded.
                        
                        From what I have gathered, there are no problems with videos in the USA? If that is the case the Google US crawler would have no issues with the site in terms of missing videos.
                        
                        If the videos are missing with broken code it will be seen that way. Most websites have broken code and Google is pretty good at deciphering things. But, if at all the videos were aiding in our ranking, their absence would take away any of these bonus points that we had.
                        
                        The bigger concern isn't Google crawls, but what Dr. Mark pointed out about bounce rate. More and more weight is being given to user reactions and how they behave on the search results. If many people hit the back button quickly for one reason or another over time it is going to affect the page and sites negatively. Once the problems are fixed this will be reversed, but only if the pages are still high enough to have sufficient people clicking and behaving favorably with the pages in question.
                        
                        As Samantha rightly said, the end readers' view of the site is more important. But, broken features should definitely be fixed ASAP. I have not seen any specifics from staff about the missing videos being looked into. I hope I just missed it and not the staff that have missed this.

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                        1. 97

                           eugbugposted 3 years agoin reply to this

                           Is the bounce rate we see in GA representative of the real bounce rate? For me it has ranged between 91% and 94% over the last 4 years.

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                           1. 89

                              lobobrandonposted 3 years agoin reply to this

                              Yes, it is the real bounce rate. A bounce is anything that does not lead to a page with YOUR google analytics code.
                              
                              That is why it is important to cover before and after bounce rates and not look at the absolute number.

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                  2. 94

                     Shesabutterflyposted 3 years agoin reply to this

                     As an avid online reader and an HP writer I agree with you and Dr. Mark. I have avoided HP pages for quite awhile now. With the Maven ads, pop ups, and certainly now with all the bugs, you couldn't pay to me to stay and read an article through this mess. Like you said we can find the information elsewhere.
                     
                     I understand other pages have tons of ads, but they are not placed so randomly inbetween article content. At least none of the pages I read. They almost always have ads placed after a complete thought (probably what would be similar to a capsule), or in the margins.
                     
                     Delishably is especially hard to follow at times because ads are being placed between a paragraph and bullet lists. On the occasion where the list is short and there is a photo after the bullet list you could end up missing the list altogther. The flow doesn't work, and the placement of ads could really help with reader satisfaction.

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9. 94

   alexadryposted 3 years ago

   I often send my clients to my pages here to read articles and watch my dog training videos and just noticed that several videos are not showing. Is this going to be fixed soon? Thanks

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   1. 89

      lobobrandonposted 3 years agoin reply to this

      On your account page there's the view on Hubpages option near a hub title. Try sending your clients that? Test to make sure they can see it when they are not logged in as you though, I haven't tested.
      
      I think it's been a month if not more since the first niche site was moved, so waiting for a fix is not the best option imo.

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10. 94

    alexadryposted 3 years ago

    Cool, I see that now from my account. It reverts to the old style. Thanks!
    I hope though that videos will start showing again soon as many people nowadays look for visuals rather than reading. The videos covered for those visual learners out there, so they were a plus!

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11. 53

    Julius Jimposted 3 years ago

    ToughNickel
    Nice move.

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12. 95

    viryaboposted 3 years ago

    All I can see now are my views dropping considerably after the migration!
    *Sigh*

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    1. 98

       theraggededgeposted 3 years agoin reply to this

       Mine too. My traffic is half what it was a year ago. But the majority of my articles haven't been moved yet (Exemplore). I'm not looking forward to it.

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    2. 88

       NateB11posted 3 years agoin reply to this

       I noticed the same thing on one of my articles the other day. I've been hoping it's temporary, it was my best performing article in terms of traffic.

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       1. 94

          Shesabutterflyposted 3 years agoin reply to this

          My best performing article since 2012 has the lowest views I have seen in several years today too Really hoping it's temporary, but they are going to need to do a lot of fixes and fast. This is the start of my articles high season so it's not looking too good right now.
          
          Funny enough, a different article on the same niche site saw a slight rise in views today. Will have to see if it continues or if people were simply searching for that information today for some reason. It should be coming up on its high season as well, but hasn't done well at all since the edit a few years back.
          
          I am seeing a bunch of blue arrows today on several others though, all from different sites (including one that has not made the transition yet).

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          1. 88

             NateB11posted 3 years agoin reply to this

             Strangely, my earnings are not that bad compared to last year but pretty bad compared to last month. Haven't compared actual traffic yet.

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13. 90

    Nell Roseposted 3 years ago

    Still no Adverts on these sites! My lowest ever views.

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14. 92

    Maffew Jamesposted 3 years ago

    
    
    This is what Analytics shows since the migration of Bellatory for the only 3 day period I have stats for (Tue to Thur), compared to an earlier 3 day period (Tue to Thur again). User Analytics IDs weren't implemented properly so there's about a 2 week gap pre-migration and post-migration where I have no data.
    
    
    
    This shows a number of concerning things. Traffic is overall lower, bounce rates are overall higher, session duration is lower, pages per sessions is lower and this is across the board for all countries. More troubling is that traffic from the UK shows a 99.33% bounce rate and a session duration of just 2 seconds, down 96.14% from an average of 48 seconds before the migration. Something is very wrong with the UK implementation and it goes well beyond some ads not appearing or a few issues with tables and images. Most readers are immediately leaving the site 2 seconds after they click on it.
    
    I know there's a long backlog of fixes to implement for various things, but whatever is causing this particular issue is the number one priority. Like others have said, Google sees all this user data through cookies, users with the Chrome browser, and other means and it's a significant ranking factor. Traffic is already down but it's going to get worse if we keep indicating to Google that users don't even want to read the page before leaving.

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    1. 89

       lobobrandonposted 3 years agoin reply to this

       Wow. I just checked mine week vs week and my bounce rate went from 89.3% to 98.03% while the average session duration is now just 6 seconds compared to 40 seconds for the earlier week. My average from Jan 1st to date 89.06% and 44 seconds respectively to keep things in perspective
       
       This is UK traffic.

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15. 93

    FatFreddysCatposted 3 years ago

    I must be easy to please, cuz all I can say is, "Hey, Spinditty looks way cool now." (shrugs)

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16. 96

    EricDockettposted 3 years ago

    My PetHelpful traffic is down by 1200 views compared to last Wednesday.
    
    On average, each article has lost 26 views per day.
    
    

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    1. 94

       Shesabutterflyposted 3 years agoin reply to this

       I'm experiencing the same on Pethelpful and Delishably. It's not looking good.

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