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Thin Content on Squidoo Is NOT a New Problem; Something Else Is

Feb 28th, 2013
by Ellen.
55 comments

For years, veteran Squidoo lensmasters have been tearing their hair that some thin-content, “pile of links” lenses get promoted, showcased on the front page of Squidoo, and earn payouts, while more content-rich lenses like this sink in lensrank until they fall into WIP mode, get noindexed, and thus become invisible to search engines, cutting off their traffic.

So we should be happy that Squidoo HQ has raised the issue that we have raised for years, although I feel bad for the targeted lensmaster. But here’s the catch.

Check out the recent lensrank of the lens that HQ decided to make an example of as a “spammy lens.”

And here’s its traffic:

Prior to HQ’s Feb 27 post, what we see is the natural, organic search traffic the lens was getting. It drew daily traffic, for all that it was a pretty thin-content page. So apparently some people were finding it useful, or at least finding it.

Ironically, all the visits sent by HQ’s blog post precede a next-day lensrank tumble. I suspect that some kind of manually-applied lensrank penalty may be at work, so we can’t draw general conclusions from the tumble. But before that, we see that a thin-content, “list of product links” lens can naturally rank in the 15K-14K range, whereas thousands of lenses with more substantial content rank lower.

Here and elsewhere, we’ve seen that Squidoo’s lensrank algorithm rewards lenses like the one HQ has held up as an example of what not to do. Various theories have been espoused as to why:

  • The front page of Squidoo often showcases lenses with thin content just like this one, boosting the lensrank of those lenses
  • Like exchange groups on Facebook artificially promote spammy lenses via internal traffic rather than organic
  • Soliciting of likes is now encouraged on the official forums
  • Many Squidquests tell lensmasters to run around liking lenses, and in general, the points system encourages like exchanges, so people are liking things to get points not because of content
  • Other Squidquests award points for people nominating lenses in various categories for purple stars, and so people look for and nominate random lenses in various categories to get points. Purple stars provide lensrank boosts.
  • Lensmasters now receive “angel” wings automatically, and are encouraged to bless and rank up lenses with no guidance or training to tell them what’s bless-worthy
  • Fivr gigs, bots and services have sprung up selling traffic and likes to Squidoo lenses
  • ETA: When “Monsters” were added to Squidoo in fall 2010, it changed the thrust of the site from publishing content and earning readers to gaming and earning points. Is it any wonder that content has suffered, while gaming the system has increased? (Remember, before monsters were introduced, likes and blessings were anonymous).

I’m not sure which of these factors is signficant, and which are just offensive to our sensibilities but fail to have a real impact on lensrank. HQ is in a better position to judge.

The bottom line is that the top tiers are saturated with lenses similar to the one held up by HQ as “Never do this.” These lenses set an example of what earns money on Squidoo. Lensmasters see them, see what gets rewarded with a good lensrank, and imitate, imitate, imitate, trying to capitalize on the same success.

At which point, telling people “don’t do it!” is like wagging a finger at athletes not to take performance enhancing drugs when many news headlines, awards, and good salaries are going to stars taking performance enhancing drugs. Nothing will change until you make sure the problematic behavior is not getting rewarded.

Translation: Blame the lensrank algorithm, not just the lensmasters chasing it. And fix it.

There are bigger forces at work here, however. I can’t help but see Bonnie’s post in the larger context of what’s been happening on Squidoo lately as a whole.

Yep, I’m talking traffic fluctuations. As usual, I use Hubpages as a comparable site and yardstick against which to measure Squidoo’s traffic fortunes. Until November 2012, when Panda 22 took a noticeable bite out of Squidoo’s overall traffic and rankings, Google always seemed to leave Squidoo alone and use Hubpages as a punching bag. Now, abruptly, Squidoo’s traffic levels have fallen down to Hubpages’ levels (and even below):


— Source: Quantcast.com

Look at mid-February. This is not a typical traffic pattern for Squidoo; in past years its traffic has been fairly steady from January through March.

This means that something has happened in the past few months. Either Google has done a massive algorithm change — in which case we’d be hearing about it across the SEO blogosphere and on these Google timelines maintained by  Sistrix and SEOmoz — or some sort of recent changes on Squidoo have caused it to fall out of Google’s good graces, after years of navigating the stormy waters of Panda and Penguin without a wobble.

Are spammy lenses like the one Bonnie just fingerpointed a new phenomenon on Squidoo? No. They’re annoying, and they’ve not helped Squidoo’s reputation, but Google has never given Squidoo a hard time about them before, because Squidoo has a lot of meatier, in-depth content, too. So, if those aren’t anything new, what is new on Squidoo?

The biggest recent change has been Squidoo’s responsive layout redesign.

Starting in December, Squidoo redesigned the website, hoping to make it more mobile-friendly.

  • Many lenses actually became less mobile-friendly as a result, since hand-coded layouts were mangled by the change. Lensmasters have needed to go back and fix these layout problems manually, and many lenses— perhaps thousands— have not yet been fixed.
  • The responsive layout often pushes sidebar ads down to the bottom, then adds more ads to the body text area of the lens, between paragraphs and modules. This occurs not just on mobile devices, but even on very wide screen monitors and large browser windows which previously accommodated Squidoo’s sidebar and body column. I’ve also seen extra advertising appearing at the top of lenses on my tablet.

Too much “above the fold” and intrusive advertising causes websites to be downranked by Google’s “Top Heavy” algorithm. I’ve argued since 2011 that Squidoo’s inefficient use of “above the fold” space risked incurring this penalty, yet I was wrong: somehow, Squidoo always managed to squeak by. But now that we’ve got ads smack dab in the body text of the lens — where Hubpages has always had a block of ads, and until now has always fared worse from Google than Squidoo has — Squidoo’s traffic levels have fallen to Hubpages levels. Coincidence?

Also starting in December November, Squidoo became a Crowdignite affiliate (see Google’s warnings about Link Schemes). This did three things.

  • Crowdignite links now replace the “Related lenses” box in the sidebar of Squidoo lenses, unless we specify “related lenses” manually. So before, Squidoo lenses cross-linked to good on-site content that was relevant, boosting relevance on both sides of the link and keeping pagerank within Squidoo. Whereas now, most Squidoo lenses cross-link to CrowdIgnite content that may not be as relevant and which siphons pagerank away. This is a huge SEO change.
  • Crowdignite and Squidoo are basically creating an artificial traffic exchange.  It’s not a paid traffic exchange, which would likely incur some kind of penalty, but it’s not something that Google recommends.
  • Moreover, to hold up its side of this traffic exchange, Crowdignite takes and republishes Squidoo content elsewhere.

This is also huge. In the past, Squidoo did not distribute lens content to other websites. But now, according to Crowdignite’s TOS, “By registering a website on the Service, you expressly grant, and you represent and warrant that you have a right to grant, to Company a royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, worldwide license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, hyperlink, list information regarding, edit, translate, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, and make derivative works of all content displayed on any page of your website.”

This means the content we post on Squidoo is no longer found only on Squidoo. I don’t know where CrowdIgnite is redistributing our content, or how much of Squidoo’s total content is being duplicated on CrowdIgnite’s other affiliate sites. All we know is that CrowdIgnite is duplicating lens content off-Squidoo.

Duplicate content, folks. Again, I can’t be sure this has anything to do with Squidoo’s recent traffic woes, but the timing is suspicious.

However, I don’t know how to test whether this duplicate content, Crowdignite’s traffic exchange, additional ads, or layout problems are in fact causing Google to downrank us. Those are just educated guesses, based on my knowledge of what kinds of factors have gotten other sites clobbered by Google algorithms in the past.

So how does this tie back into Bonnie’s post about spammy sales lenses?

Squidoo has a traffic problem. Its traffic and revenue are falling. I was waiting to see what kind of steps HQ was going to take to address this problem.

While I worry that too many thin-content lenses like the one Bonnie fingerpointed could lead to Google penalties, they have been part of Squidoo for years and have not cost Squidoo.com any Google rankings; they simply took away Squidoo tier payouts from other, possibly more deserving lenses. Whereas now, it looks like something else is costing the site Google rankings. I hope HQ is investigating what that “something else” might be.

[UPDATE: HQ has now identified at least one possible culprit: a recent flood of “spun lenses.”]

Add Photos to Tweets to Get More Clicks!

Feb 13th, 2013
by Ellen.
2 comments

When I browse Twitter, I see PICTURES with some Tweets, which help draw the eye to them:

Why, yes, Twitter thinks I’m weird. (Here’s the Sea Slug Article and my phone book article.)

 

Hubpages, Squidoo and other websites usually have Tweet buttons, but one thing they DON’T usually do is incorporate a photo or graphic into the Tweet. If you’re Tweeting your own stuff, be sure to add a graphic! Here’s how:

  1. Save a graphic from the article (or some appropriate graphic) to your computer.
  2. Go to the article and click the Tweet button to compose a Tweet.
  3. Instead of sending the Tweet then and there, COPY the text of the Tweet, so that you grab the article’s URL.
  4. Go to twitter.com and paste the Tweet in the Compose box.
  5. Click the camera icon at the bottom of the Tweet box to upload the photo.
  6. NOW Tweet it!

Wait— WHERE will these graphics show up, anyway?

  • Sometimes they’re thumbnails in people’s Twitter stream.
  • They appear in the “Gallery” area on the left side of your Twitter Profile Page.
  • They are big and bold in the “Discover” part of Twitter— click the “Discover” link at the top for a demo!
  • Twitter is evolving. I suspect these pictures are going to grow more prominent with time, so get in the habit, right now.

Obviously, be careful of copyright. Remember that the image may be shared in retweets. Do you have the right to share/publish/distribute that graphic? Or, at the least, is it Fair Use?

P.S. I’ve just found two treasure troves of vintage, out-of-copyright images that require no credit: Vintage Printables, which includes this odd balloon illustration, and OhMeOhMy Vintage. There you go!

Leopoldo Galluzzo’s illustration for an 1836 hoax purporting to depict discoveries of life on the moon by famous astronomer John Herschel.

The Mobile Web on Squidoo and Hubpages

Feb 6th, 2013
by Ellen.
No comments yet

Yep, it’s another geeky stats post trying to figure out “what’s going on with our traffic?”  using two similar article-publishing sites to contrast and compare trends.

Squidoo launched its “responsive” layout on Friday, December 7, 2012, hoping to cash in on the skyrocketing use of mobile devices to browse the web. Many of us had emailed HQ about the need to adapt to mobile/tablets over the past few years, so we certainly understood the reasons for the change, if not the timing. But the proof is in the pudding. How did the Responsive Layout launch impact traffic?

I’m kicking myself for not doing a screengrab of Quantcast’s traffic tracking before the changeover, showing what percentage of Squidoo visitors came in through mobile, but I’ve at least got that info from my own Google Analytics (see below).

However, we can do a current comparison of Squidoo vs. Hubpages mobile traffic.

But first, a baseline. Quantcast shows that Squidoo’s overall (mobile and desktop) traffic remains above Hubpages — barely — although it has been dropping for a few months. Squidoo is probably more dependent on holiday shopping:

Squidoo traffic vs. Hubpages traffic, August 2012 through Feb 2013.

Quantcast only gives 1-month data for mobile, but I’ve seen that Hubpages has always drawn more mobile traffic than Squidoo, despite having slightly less traffic overall for most of the past two years. Even after Squidoo’s responsive layout update, this is still true…

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Keyword Research and Competition: Something Else to Consider

Nov 26th, 2012
by Ellen.
4 comments

A lot of us do a basic form of keyword research of one kind or another, using tools like Google’s to learn what search phrases are relevant to our topic and how often those phrases are searched.

By using the words real people use to search our topic, we have a better chance of getting search engines to send us those visitors. Obvious, right? Keyword research is all about finding a common language with our readers.

 

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Ouch! Squidoo Traffic Went Kablooie on Nov 17

Nov 25th, 2012
by Ellen.
6 comments

Recent Daily Traffic for my Squidoo Lenses

Around November 17, 2012, Squidoo and many sites across the web experienced major traffic changes. In Squidoo’s case, it was the worst drop I’ve seen in years.

Barry Schwartz of Seoroundtable got a brief nonanswer from Google about it. One thing is clear: it’s not a Panda update. Google said Panda would be updated in the next week.

I don’t think it’s an EMD update, because that specifically targets domain names — the website part of a URL, not the individual page’s filename. (squidoo.com = domain name, /my-cool-lens = the filename.)  I also don’t think it’s Penguin, because the main target of Penguin is sites using artificial link schemes and other heavy-duty black hat SEO practices which I think are beyond the capacity and budget of even the most spammy Squidoo lensmasters.

So what happened? Here’s a couple half-assed theories. Also, for my own enlightenment, I’ve compiled Squidoo sitewide traffic graphs for the past five years to see how our autumn traffic normally fluctuates. Bad news: there IS no “normal.”

P.S. Credit Where Due: Thanks to Victoriuh for pointing out some of the SEO industry analysis posts that I cite below.


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Google Panda 20 Loves Squidoo, Hates Hubpages?

Oct 4th, 2012
by Ellen.
6 comments

I’m having a little trouble separating out Squidoo’s Happy Traffic Season from impacts by the latest Google Panda update (rolled out on September 27 and the following 3 days), but I think this may be indicative of a Panda blessing on top of the usual seasonal traffic patterns:

Squidoo: “W00t, thanks for sending us more traffic for the holiday shopping season!”
Hubpages: “Why so mean, Google, WHY?”

(Note that it is normal for traffic to rise mid-week and tail off on Friday-Saturday-Sunday; it’s a web-wide pattern.)

Two possible reasons for Hubpages’ Sep. 28 traffic crash were discussed by Paul Edmondson, head of HP, in this announcement post: (1) they’d added a “buy on Amazon” button to the Amazon capsule to try and tweak its utterly ineffective conversions and (2) they just entirely revamped Hubpages’ profile page, adding a “Hubpages activity” section at the bottom that might be diluting the SEO value of the profile by linking to a lot of spammy social chitchat.   (1) is unlikely — I get plenty of Google traffic to pages like this with lots of nofollowed Amazon links — but (2) might be so.

Paul says HP has rolled back these two changes:

We believe it’s possible that one of these two changes started impacting traffic late last week, but aren’t sure which one, or if it’s the cause at all, but to be sure we are going to make some changes to test.

Translation: “We’re flailing, but we’ll test this and that until we find something that seems to help.” (Site outages on Friday and Sunday didn’t help either, but Squidoo has outages now and then and doesn’t show traffic dips). Hub traffic is starting to recover on my own account, but is still off by about 20%.

This was an interesting Panda update. Google was extremely cagey about it as SearchEngineLand’s write-up of Google Panda 20 explains.

On Friday, September 28, Matt Cutts announced a separate EMD Google algorithm update, which removes the advantage the Google algorithm used to give to low-quality websites using an exact match domain name that fit a popular search query. (www.teethwhitening.com took a rankings dive, for example).

Many people without exact-match domain names were noticing significant traffic changes over the weekend, during which time Matt Cutts resisted answering questions, but eventually SearchEngineLand called up Google and got a confirmation that yes, it was a Panda algorithm update.

An algorithm update.

During a regular Panda update, the Panda algorithm evaluates all websites (i.e. domains like Squidoo.com), and then uses the overall Panda rating of the website as one big factor in determining how high or low to list pages from that website in search results. This is like colleges getting evaluated annually, after which employers use the college’s rating as one big factor in deciding whether to hire particular job applicants from that college.

However, this was more than a regular Panda data refresh, in which it reevaluates all the colleges, er, websites. Instead, this was an algorithm refresh, which means Panda adjusted/tweaked the criteria it uses to evaluate websites. We don’t yet know what those criteria are— although at least some of them are listed in Google’s Inside Search blog post on Oct 4 (which unfortunately covers dozens of Google’s algorithm changes for the last two months, not just the Panda component).

At any rate, it appears that the new algorithm rewarded Squidoo and punched Hubpages. As usual, my chief reason for comparing these two websites’ Panda fortunes is that I keep hoping I’ll detect differences between the two websites — and how Panda treats them — that shed light on what Panda actually is looking for.

I still believe it was not a wise SEO move to noindex Pending Hubs. “Yo, Panda: from now on, Hubpages will not show search engines any fresh content until it’s stale, and we’re going to expect your searchbots to keep coming back to see when, randomly, we release new content from the noindex penalty box!” Maybe I’m crazy, but that just doesn’t seem like it would earn high marks from Panda. Again, stay tuned.

Why Traffic Stats Are Screwed Up: Google’s “Not Provided” Search Data

Sep 29th, 2012
by Ellen.
7 comments

I’ve got the Google Traffic blues.

Smart online writers depend on the search queries in our traffic stats to show us what our readers are looking for, want to know, or might want to read more about. This helps us improve our existing content, by tailoring it to our readers’ needs. Search traffic records also help us look for leads about new topics to write on which might get traffic.

Over time, observing search traffic can give you instincts about what kinds of things people tend to search for on the web, and what they don’t. This is very useful knowledge for an online writer to have.

There’s just one problem.

Google is hiding more and more of this information. As a result, traffic stats on sites like Squidoo are starting to look weird:

“Direct” traffic? Just what does that mean, anyway?

Originally, “Direct” traffic indicated visitors navigating to our websites via a bookmark, clicking on a link in a private email, typing the URL in directly, or some other source that provided absolutely no information that our traffic software could track.

To this we may now add Google search queries on iOS6. Google doesn’t usually hide search data this completely, but in some cases, it’s encrypting/concealing search data so much that when a user performs a Google search and arrives on your site, Google won’t even let your traffic software know, “Hey, that visitor came from us.” It’s as if Google were walking behind the visitor with a broom, sweeping away their footprints.

So that’s why our traffic stats now show so much so-called “Direct” traffic. It’s search traffic arriving under Google’s invisibility cloak.

But all the rest of Google’s search traffic is filed under “Google,” right? And then the search queries should show up under the “Keywords” chart?

Sadly, no. In many cases, Google is only telling Squidoo, “Hi, I just sent you a visitor,” without passing along the actual terms/keywords they searched for. So many Google search traffic visits are now filed under the “Referrers” chart, instead of the “Keywords” chart:

If you check Google Analytics, the keywords for these searches are all listed as “Not Provided.”

Unfortunately, since Google is blocking the data from its end, there is absolutely no way to ferret out what words those visitors searched for to find your page.

Not all Google search queries are hidden. In some cases, they still show up under “Keywords.” But more and more of them are not showing up. This has been going on for a while, but it’s getting worse.

In 2011, Google started encrypting (hiding) search data for users logged into Google or Google Plus. At the time, Matt Cutts of Google claimed that this “not provided” data would be a very low percentage of our traffic stats data, “in the single digits.” That was an underestimate, of course.

More recently, Firefox has started voluntarily encrypting searches from users using Google search at the top of its browser. More and more web applications are following suit.

Since more and more third-party browsers and apps are voluntarily using Google encryption when their users do a Google search, the percentage of search terms “not provided” by Google keeps growing. Some websites are reporting as much as 50% of their search traffic is concealed by the “not provided” filter.

Google claimed that blocking search data was done to protect visitor privacy, but it’s a pile of crock. Google advertisers get access to search query data which is “not provided” to the rest of us. Basically, you have to pay Google now to get complete data on what your customers are looking for. If you’re doing it as a commercial advertiser, you get to snoop on people’s web searching habits; if you’re doing it as a writer trying to learn what your readers want, tough.

Luckily, we’re not entirely dependent on Google to help us learn what our visitors want. Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines are still reporting their search data to Squidoo, so we’ll still see plenty of examples of what kinds of searches are bringing visitors to our pages under the “Keywords” column. But we’re missing a complete picture. We may not be seeing the most popular searches bringing visitors to our pages, or, at the least, only a fraction of those searches are turning up in our “Keywords” column, with the rest hidden.

New Hub vs. New Lens: an Experiment

Sep 24th, 2012
by Ellen.
5 comments

Query: How fast can new content on Hubpages and Squidoo start getting significant traffic and earning income? Which platform is best for publishing on trending, buzzworthy news and events?

When Hubpages introduced Idle Status, I wrote a hub about how Idle Status worked and possible ramifications. I drew comparisons with Squidoo’s WIP status.

A debate came up in that article’s comments about new hubs vs. new lenses. Squid∩ forum discussions helped me understand how the two sites deal with a newly-published article. This is important, because it determines whether a new article can get any search traffic or catch the wave of a traffic spike from a trending topic.

What happens to a newly-published article on Squidoo:

  1. A newly-published lens is visible to visitors who are sent to it via a link
  2. Search engines will index it if  they see a link to it and crawl it
  3. So it’s possible (and not difficult) to get search traffic coming in, before…
  4. Around midnight, Squidoo turns the lens red on the dashboard and marks it as WIP, but does NOT put a noindex tag on it.
  5. And about 6-8 hours later, Squidoo runs the lensranking algorithm, features the lens, removes the WIP status, plugs the lens into Squidoo’s directory, at which point search engines will find it if they haven’t already

What happens to a newly-published article on Hubpages:

  1. A newly-published hub is visible to visitors, but has a NOINDEX tag
  2. A search engine may find it if you share the link, but will NOT index it because of the NOINDEX TAG
  3. This will remain true until Hubpages removes Pending status AND search bots return to the page and recrawl it.
  4. Also, if you edit the hub after it’s been published, it will reset the Pending clock, and it could be another day before Hubpages moves it out of Pending status.
I believe that once a searchbot sees a new hub with a NOINDEX tag, that search engine may not return or recrawl the article for several days, but it could be a few weeks. (Recrawls happen more often on pages that searchbots expect to be updated frequently). This makes it dangerous to share a link to a new hub anywhere, even on Twitter, where searchbots may see the link.

My experiment: new lens vs. new hub

Thursday at midnight, I created a hub about the Friday morning shuttle flyover of California. The next day, when I realized it wasn’t getting search traffic, I created a lens about the same topic on Friday afternoon after I got home from watching it (written from scratch, so there’s no duplicate text.)

Publicity: On first publish for both hub and lens, I tweeted the URL using the event’s official hashtags and shared a link to it in a Squid∩ forum post. I retweeted the hub on Friday after I edited the hub and added my photos.

Results

Remember, the hub is one day older than the lens. Also, the hub was published the night before the event, whereas the lens was published after it. Nevertheless, three days after the event:

  • Hub traffic from GA as of Monday 8:30AM - 130 pageviews, 79 unique, from sources: 49 Squid∩, 40 hubpages, 21 Twitter, 10 from Twitter widgets on online newspapers set to display latest Tweets from #spottheshuttle hashtag, 10 direct (probably me reloading).
  • Lens traffic from GA as of Monday 8:30AM – 163 pageviews, 114 unique, from sources: 104 Google search, 29 Squid∩, 6 direct (I emailed it to relatives), 15 Twitter (including Scoop.it), 8 other search engines.
  • The hub finally came out of Pending Mode on Sunday, over 48 hours after first publish.
  • As of Monday 8:30 am, 56 hours after publish, the hub is still not in Google’s cache, although a Google search shows that Google indexed Tweets pointing to the hub AND a link to the new hub on my profile page:

Observations

Obviously, this is a very small sample size. We can’t extrapolate much from the actual numbers of visitors from different sources, but they can tell us what’s possible for a new hub or a new lens:

  • A new hub won’t get search traffic. However, a new hub gets internal traffic (visits from other hubbers), due to the fact that Hubpages has a “followers/activity stream” inviting other hubbers to come by.
  • If you promote a new lens immediately after first publish, it will be indexed by Google and has the potential for instant search traffic.
  • By using official hashtags related to the event, I not only received direct Twitter traffic during the height of the buzz, but also, traffic from automated Twitter widgets displayed on various websites — newspapers, Scoop.it — displaying the latest Tweets for a topic they were covering.

Conclusions

To recap:

This whole experiment is basically addressing, “Can you make money publishing on a trending/buzzworthy topic that gets an initial traffic spike which peters out later?”

PRIOR to Hubpages implementing Idle status, the answer was “Yes, but only on Hubpages, not Squidoo.” I had hit upon this as a great Hubpages strategy, sucking in thousands of visitors during the height of an event (e.g. the Mars rover landing) which petered off to 5-20 visits a day longterm.  Hubpages pays for ad impressions and ad clicks, so a traffic spike like that could result in a crunchy payout. Whereas on Squidoo, the answer was “not unless you can drive affiliate sales,” because a new lens isn’t eligible for advertising revenue until the first of the month AFTER it’s published.

Pending status changes this. On Squidoo, you might at least get some sales from a big, trending-topic traffic spike, especially because most of the traffic will be search traffic which came specifically out of an interest in that topic. Whereas on Hubpages, you’ll get social traffic and a lot of hubfollower traffic, who may be coming because they like your writing rather than because they are really interested in the topic.  Ad clicks and sales are less likely with this audience. (Also, in practice, I’ve only gotten one sale EVER from a Hubpages Amazon capsule, as opposed to dozens per week on Squidoo.)

Basically, now neither site is an effective platform for publishing fresh, new, buzzworthy content on a trending event. Either you get zero search traffic for the first week or so (Hubpages) or zero advertising revenue (Squidoo).

My hunch is that Hubpages will respond to member concerns about Pending Status = NOINDEX and fix this problem. However, as long as “Pending” status means no search traffic for days or weeks after first publish, I am disinclined to publish new hubs.

Which is good news for Christene, my Zujava referrer: it’s time for me to start learning what kind of content works best on Zujava.  :)

 

[UPDATE: It occurs to me that once “Pending” status is removed from a Hubpages hub – a day or two after first publish — you can probably force Googlebot to recrawl the hub by submitting its URL to Webmaster Tools.  But it may take another day for recrawl, and it won’t help with other search engines.]

 

Update2: I just tested: what about a new lens from a non-Giant Squidoo account? Same result…

  1. I published J.R.R. Tolkien’s Artwork  at 8:10 PM Tuesday night.
  2. On first publish,  sourcecode shows no sign of “noindex,” and lens is blue, not WIP, on dashboard (Screencap at 9:26PM)
  3. To get Googlebot’s attention, I Tweeted, cross-linked with related lenses, and link dropped on Squid∩ and Dreamwidth.
  4. Googlebot crawled at 9:08 PM (Screencap).
  5. As of 9:47 PST, lens was still blue, still NO noindex tag.
  6. At 10:40 PM, lens turned red on dashboard (screencap)
  7. BUT a search of the sourcecode at 10:40 revealed no sign of noindex (screencap).  I checked again at midnight; ditto. Compare with sourcecode (screencap) of this old, fallen-into-WIP lens whose sourcecode includes noindex/nofollow meta-tags.
  8. First search traffic from Bing at 1AM. (Which shows why we shouldn’t only consider Google).

Hubpages vs. Squidoo Traffic: Sept 2012

Sep 20th, 2012
by Ellen.
2 comments

Hubpages’ new Idle Status should’ve removed a lot of low-quality hubs from Hubpages around Aug 29-30, giving Googlebot a little time to crawl the website and reevaluate it with some low-quality content cleared out.

A Googler reported a Panda reset on Sept. 18. This is the standard Panda update where Google reevaluates all websites based on their overall spam to useful/unique content and assigns that domain a Panda rating, which then becomes a strong factor (a boost or a dampener) which it uses to rank individual webpages on that site.

Our guess was that Hubpages’ “Idle Status” would give Hubpages a better overall Panda rating, and help it draw more traffic. This is dependent on whether Hubpages guessed correctly— idling the sorts of pages that Panda tends to downrank— and whether Googlebot has re-crawled and removed Idle hubs from Google’s index. Googlebot re-crawls stale pages less frequently than ones that are updated often, so it’s possible that Panda is still judging Hubpages based on what it looked like before a lot of those pages were idled.

What does Quantcast show? Unfortunately, the last date on the chart today is Sept 19, so we’ll have to wait a week to see for sure:

What I still can’t figure out is why Squidoo took off like a shot this August, although it parallels the June sag. Take a look at Hubpages vs. Squidoo traffic on Quantcast:

 

I mentioned in my last Hubpages vs. Squidoo post one hypothesis: Squidoo appears to me to be oriented much more towards family and kids products, so its traffic may go in lockstep with the parents-and-kids demographic. In the comments of that post, Simon of Hubpages asked me to clarify why I believed Squidoo had a greater lock on that demographic than Hubpages. I answered her at length, explaining the ways I think Squidoo has visibly and officially catered to that segment, but I’d add one more datum: Quantcast rates Squidoo as slightly above average in the “parents with kids” demographic, Hubpages as slightly under. However, the difference between them isn’t all that much.

I’m not sure how Quantcast is able to measure demographics like that. Raw traffic I can believe — embedding a 1×1 image on each page and counting pageloads is a straightforward visitor counter — but I wonder how Quantcast is able to determine details of who is tripping the turnstyle.

Hubpages vs. Squidoo Traffic: August 2012

Aug 22nd, 2012
by Ellen.
8 comments

Riddle me ree, riddle me roo, why is Hubpages traffic different than Squidoo?

And what the heck happened around August 4/5?

Dates of Recent Google Updates:

Hubpages traffic vs. Squidoo’s on Quantcast, from Aug 22, 2012 (click image for larger-size)

Which just goes to remind us that big, publicly-announced Google updates are only one small factor, and that Google is CONSTANTLY tweaking its algorithm. (In fact, there were about 85 minor algo tweaks announced for June-July. Here’s a good discussion of some of them on Searchengineland.)

At first, my hunch was that this was due to one of the other algo tweaks. But I don’t think it’s that. With past algorithm tweaks, we’ve often seen Hubpages dip afterwards. But this isn’t a dip. Squidoo is climbing. What’s up?

Hubpages has a lot more writerly writers, whereas Squidoo has a HUGE chunk of Rocketmoms, work-at-home moms…. see a pattern? They create a ton of lenses based around kid-related and family-related products. I suspect we’re seeing a back-to-school climb, corresponding to the dip in traffic starting at the end of May .

What’s odd is that Hubpages writers also have mentioned a summer slump, but they’re not seeing a climb yet. I suspect there are more “informational” hubs and fewer sales hubs, or at least fewer sales hubs catering to the Soccer Mom demographic. Squidoo seems to have a lock on those. But that’s just a guess.

Why do I care? Partly, raw curiosity, but mainly, here we have a lab experiment: two sites with very similar models and similar ratios of spam to content. When their traffic diverges, that means there’s some small difference causing the change. If we can understand that difference, then we may begin to get a better grasp of factors that impact search traffic. (I would love for Wizzly and Zujava to grow enough to get directly-measured traffic for Quantcast; then we’d have  four sites with basically similar models to compare and contrast.)

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