Long Term Effect of the Loss of HubPages RSS Capsules.At the end of 2012 HubPages announced the removal of the RSS capsules from all of its writers pages.

At the time I was a little concerned that such a ove would see a decline in my blog traffic. At that time most of my blog traffic was coming from HubPages and amounted to several hundred views per month over the three blogs that I fed to my HubPages posts.

Now we are about six months after the removal of the RSS feeds and a clear conclusion can be made.

TRAFFIC HAS IMPROVED TO ALL OF MY BLOGS.

Traffic began to rise for my blogs within a few weeks of the end of the RSS capsules. June then saw a quite steep decline in views across the board but in these last few days views are rising rapidly rising again. Views across the three major blogs are now running at two thousand per month and rising.

Whereas previously most of my views came from HubPages, today I can find only one or two views from that source per month, analytics show that most views are organic search  views coming from Google and Yahoo! 90% Google, My Life with Blindness blog has in some instances, depending on keyword search actually made it to number one spot on Google's search page. A fact that I am very proud of.

Such placement was never heard of for me before the end of the RSS feed capsules.

So what seemed to be a terrible disaster at first conception has, for me meant a great improvement in my blog readership.

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We'll See a Fall in views on Sunday January 20 and February 3, 2013

I will now predict a fall in views for most Hubbers on Sunday January 20 and February 3, 2013.

Most of you who live in the U.S. will know and expect the same. These are the dates of the NFL Conference Championships and Superbowl Sunday.

For those of you who live outside the US, you will possibly not know the gravity of these two solemn occassions.

This coming Sunday January 20, sees the two Football Conferences seasons  come to an end.

The AFC Championship will be between San Francisco 49ers at  Atlanta Falcons and the NFC Conference Championship will be Baltimore Ravens at New England Patriots.

Each of the games could last up to four hours on television, each game only lasts 60 minutes itself but fifteen minuts of "game time" may be twenty or thirty minutes of real time, add in all the advertisements and commentary. The games are not played simultaneously, so Americans can see both games in full, basically taking up to eight hours of Sunday out of many peoples computer time.

For this reason the United States can be said to close down for the duration of the games.

The winners of this next Sundays two games will then go on to the Superbowl in New Orleans on February 3, 2013.

The Superbowl is the World Championship of American Football, and Superbowl Sunday is a very big deal which almost every American sees as a right to party.

So for those of you beyond the shores of the US mark these dates well. The fall of views on these two days is not due to Google changing an algorithm, HubPages are not skimming off viewers just to take your count down, the sky is not falling and no end of the world scenario is being played out.

Americans are just partying and enjoying a great game of football.

We'll be back at our computers on Monday as usual.

Get "Expert" Backlinks to Drive Traffic.

One way to drive traffic to your hubs is to create backlinks.

So What are Backlinks?

Backlinks are permanent links from other sites, hubs, blogs, or websites.

A quick form of backlink to your hub would be a link from Twitter or Facebook.  These are ok to a point. You may gain short term traffic while the link is up, but they are only visible to a limited number of people, unleess your friends and followers have a habit of forwarding and re-tweeting.

Those links then soon disappear and you have enjoyed a brief moment of increased viewing.

Better Backlinks:

The best back lins are in the form of permanent links from "Expert" websites. These links are beloved of the search engines, but How would you get an expert website to link to your hubs?

Simple: Create your own expert website, in the form of a blog or website.

Create a blog or website which is very specific to one small niche group of viewers.

Post on this regularly, link to your hubs, also very tightly grouped to the main niche of your blog or website.

As your blog or website matures, after three months at least, the Search Engines see it as maturing and with so many links it becomes "expert".

So here is an example.

You write a hub on trainspotting.

Your hub gets a few views from friends and goes away down the ranks.

So you build a hub on trainspotting.

Here you post lots of information on trains, where a particular engine or train will be.

It is watched by Google and the other Search engines and you get some good views, a few dozen per day.

As you build this blog or website, you post more hubs on trainspotting.

You link your blog to hubs and vice verdsa.

The Search Engines see all this two way traffic and you can now after a month or two add a listing on Technoratti, the blog catalogue.

Traffic continues to build and you will notice as you add each new hub and link back to it from your blog the traffic between the blog and hub maintains a higher level.

This will depend on the topic but as long as you at first maintain a tight niche topic, you will see your "expertise" level keep your SEO rank higher, traffic higher and hopefully revenue higher.

Then as your original niche becomes too narroew, you might need to add supporting ideas, so a train spotter needs his "anorak" what is the best trainspotting anorak? Add a clothing niche. You need somewhere to stay as a trainspotter, add hotel reviews. All the time linking in to your trainspotting niche, your expertise you are building a wider network of connections.

Your traffic will increase and search engines will take notice of you more.

In a real world example, I have a blindness blog alongside this one. I posted a story on that blog about Glaucoma, an easily preventable cause of blindness, within three hours, because of expertise status on the blog, being within the niche and good use of keywords within the niche, the blog post on glaucoma reached number three on Google.  That also caused a spike in traffic on my blindness related hubs on HubPages.

Google Searches or Links? Which bring You MORE Views?

We have all heard the cry "How do I get top ranking on Google searches?" Maybe you have even asked that very question yourself?

Well I know I used to ask that very question. I bought the books advising on Search Engine Optimization and How to promote your sites.

They were useful in that they talked about building links and creating an RSS Feed etc. But over the last year I have come to realise that Google search engine page location is not all it is made up to be.

I regulary look up my stats on my blog, they show some very interesting figures. Of all views only 3% come from Google searches.

1% come drom other search engines but a massive 96% come from posting links to places such as HubPages and Yahoo! Voices, The largest source at 70% of all traffic comes from HubPages and my RSS feeds there.

So that tells me that people who have read my content on HubPages are clicking through my RSS feed to come here.

OK So I don't get any revenue because I don't advertise on my blog. I don't mind that, this blog is to share information with you.

But in that there is opportunity for you. If you have a monetized blog, link it to your hubpage hubs on related subjects and you will gain traffic from people who already enjoy your style of writing.

Also link back to other hubs to drive traffic back there so you can benefit from your HubPages CPM revenue.

Remember. Google ranking is not the only way to gain traffic. But once you have your reader keep them reading your pages by linking to your own work when you can.

Be patient though. building a network takes time. You won't see a difference overnight, it has taken me one year so far, unless you hit a hot topic. The idea is to plan for the  long term. Then over time you will see a marked improvement in traffic.