Traffic Way Down Since Monday
For the first time, abysmal earnings are making me ask myself how soon I should start unpublishing articles that have zero views and start putting them somewhere else. I'm happy to leave the articles that generate most earnings for the passive income until the end. But it feels like it's time to start addressing the elephant in the room. It's sad but I'm being practical and realistic at this point.
I wonder is everyone using an electric lawn mower to cut their grass now or do they just not fix things? This troubleshooting guide gets less than 150 views a day peak now. I don't think I'll bother updating any articles this year to get a 2023 date because it seems to be a waste of time. There's nothing more I can add to guides anyway.
This seed sowing guide is running at about 70% less traffic than last year, with practically no growth. The same for all Dengarden guides. I'm not sure who speculated about it, maybe Paul, but perhaps the way Google works is they only allow articles to be in the limelight for so many years then they're effectively dumped, no matter how much they're improved or how good the quality.
Medium is dire for me at the moment. Probably because I can't be bothered to avail myself of the hamster wheel
My peak was $800 in a month, but now, phlumppp.And that's the very reason why I gamble my time here on Hubpages and not Medium.
Hmm, how did the market for human-created clothing go after mass-produced manufacturing arrived?
Certain types of writing will be okay, I would think, such as opinion pieces and creative works, but I'm struggling to see how a lot of general info-based writing will be able to hold its head above water in the future.
Search engines and websites seem like they might be threatened by AI too.
I hope I'm wrong, but I think writing articles could go like music, where all the money is sucked out of it. You can still make music and sell it but the value sank to almost nothing (in most cases) following digitalization.
I've actually been writing a few articles with help from AI recently. But I think people may start going straight to the AI at some point for their info.
We're at an inflection point, I believe. However, it's impossible to predict exactly how it's going to go. For example, nobody really predicted that texting would become a thing when mobile phones became popular. Technology can have unexpected consequences.
According to Search Engine Roundtable, the Google Products Update is causing a lot of volatility around the web.
Just not much for me at the moment, though.
My traffic's barely any different from what it was last Monday on this account.
I'm just after taking a look at my 2020 traffic and this year's is actually at the same level (there's a phase shift in the graph because I didn't adjust for the days of the week to be the same) I know I've probably got more articles since 2020, but they haven't been terrible prosperous in terms of views. I think the higher traffic for 2021 and 2022 probably spoiled us.
If we made your data statistics appear vertically, you would have what almost looks like a DNA strand.
I'd have to twist them a bit though to make them helical
Definitely!
The stagnation continues, but no volatility on the Semrush graph. Stagnation implies traffic fall in real terms, considering it should be rising at this time of year for me.
Feb/March '21 was during the 5 month "bliss period,".so it's a comparison of best and worst, in some ways. But still... It's sad how things have gone.
When things first began to go downhill 20 months or so ago, I thought the site might be able to bounce back relatively quickly. Instead, things just got worse.
Meanwhile traffic to this physics article has increased, maybe because it has a thumbnail in the featured snippet alongside a few other images. Google won't give me a SERP result because Ray already has a similar article.
The odd thing about this seed sowing guide is that I'm down 90% in traffic, yet I have two featured snippet photos. Maybe I need to change them. Meanwhile the guide that gets the text featured snippet doesn't have any photos to accompany it, so it's time to give a bad feedback review to Google for what it's worth.
The reasons for why a surge happens relates to the source of the traffic. There is no one, universal reason.
The cause can be spammy like Eugene says but there can also be legit reasons.
For example: getting featured by MSN on their page can give you hundreds or thousands of extra views for a time.
Google will also often boost traffic around algo updates to test out pages and sites.
The most common time to get a surge is just after an article is published but it can potentially happen at any point.
I sometimes try editing articles to try to get them to surge. The jury's out on how successful that tactic is.I've had it happen a couple times, Jerry. It's usually for the MSN reason that Paul cites or that new thing HP is doing with news stories that link back to your article. You can't control it, or make it repeat, it just happens. Enjoy it while it lasts. And the extra coins, too.
I doubt that it gets you blacklisted. Although "hundreds of times" does sound a little, urm, obsessive!
I normally edit a few times/year at most. At my most intense, it's still maybe only two or three times a month.
I have a handful of articles that have surged multiple times. Usually, they earn me not much more than the price of a coffee, though.
Of course, the other side of surges is that they can provide the potential for garnering more backlinks and improving SEO.
I just lost a photo snippet for a physics guide. Google won't rank it because of Site Diversity and a similar article on Owlcation, so traffic has dropped hugely as a result. What's annoying is that traffic was actually growing for this guide, now it's back to square one.
Weekly traffic since the start of the year. This shows the stagnation with no improvement.
This is for the same period in 2019 with 44 less articles. Traffic by the first week in April was already double what it is in 2023. So I guess due to a combination of downranking of sites and dumping of evergreen articles by Google.
Related Discussions
- 41
Earnings Drop on Monday, 9/21
Am I the only one seeing a fairly significant drop in earnings from Sunday, 9/20 to Monday, 9/21? My traffic stayed relatively the same during the same time.
- 61
Google Releasing a Core Update Tomorrow (Monday)
According to @searchliaison on TwitterThey don't usually tell us beforehand?
- 22
Anyone seeing a significant drop in traffic since Covid19 lockdowns?
I have seen a huge drop in both views and CPM for the past 2 to 3 months. I write mostly travel related articles so this was expected. However the drop is so steep that I am wondering if something else could be going on (i.e if it could be more than just people not planning or reading about...
- 703
How long did your plunge last?
I'm curious to see how long I can expect to be in the depths of Google's sandbox.I've noticed that people rise and fall in waves, depending on when you switched over to the subdomains, so I want to get a general idea as to how long most people are stuck in the sandbox.For me, the climb was slow at...
- 108
My figures have dropped since I told Matt...
It might be coincidence, and it's possible everybody else's figures have also dropped by 500%. It's also possible that from being paid out every month for a good few years, I am suddenly not paid out at all.Is this happening to everybody?I told Matt after he banned me that I had no desire for a...
- 21
Hub Traffic Comparisons...
For those who want to share. And possibly commiserate...HP comparing Monday-5/6 data versus Monday-5/13 data, HP is down 19.3%HP comparing Tuesday-5/7 data versus Tuesday-5/14 data, HP is down 15.0%PDS comparing Monday-5/6 data versus Monday-5/13 data, PDS is down 28.7% PDS comparing Tuesday-5/7...