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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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.