Sunday, March 3, 2013

Effect of the Loss of the HubPages RSS Feed

It is just about a month now since HubPages removed the RSS feed capsules from the sites web pages.

There is some loss of traffic to my blogs from that source. I had expected that my blogs would suffer a loss of views with the removal of the feeds to particular hubs.

Before the removal some of my blogs were receiving 70% of views from HubPages via the feeds. Now HubPages shows up as a source site in about 5% of statistical reports. So I am getting less traffic directed from there, but the real surprise from my point of view is that views have only declined by about 10% from  on some blogs 30 views per day to just 27.

The majority of traffic is now coming from Google and other search engines and more of myviews  are from non-US sources. The trend to increasing views outside the US is very strong and remains positive even after one month.

Having considered the removal of RSS Feed capsules in the light of these figures, I am changing my feelings towards HubPages.

It seems that they wanted to remove the capsules not in order to clean up the site, it seems to me that their idea was to hold readers on the site.

While my viewing figures on HubPages are rapidly declining, my blog figures are climbing.

So from here on in. I will remain as a blogger looking to control my own destiny rather than feed HubPages with posts  to promote their site over my own.

So Thank you HubPages for removing the RSS capsules. You have made my life much easier.

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