Halloween season's round the corner and traffic is increasing on my Halloween site as well as on Squidoo. Hm... not all my Halloween lenses, I'm afraid :( I built 30 Halloween lenses and deleted some of them in the past for whatever reason. I was left with 26 scary stuff lenses.
When the changes occured on Squidoo, I cleaned up my account and deleted 3 of such lenses as I didn't want to make them comply with the new TOS given the huge traffic drop Squidoo experienced and still does experience nowadays despite the Halloween season.
Today, I took a look at my Halloween pages on this site and noticed that two of them were near to zero traffic. The first one was built last year and never really got a huge amount of traffic: once a lens's done, you have to wait for a few month if not a whole year to see traffic actually rising. So this lens' stats don't really bother me: I just decided to delete it. It'll do better on my related site.
However the one lens that surprised me was one for which I made improvements to comply with the new TOS, invested time to make it better and since the modification, its traffic declined day after day, month after month.
Now that the Halloween season is on, I expect to see an increase in traffic for this lens. Sadly there isn't any. The lens' stats are even lower than in August. So, sadly I had to make the decision on deleting this page.
Later today, both lenses are going to get a major overhaul and be published on my Halloween site that doesn't disappoint me like Squidoo does in terms of traffic and stats ! My site's traffic is increasing day after day, the Halloween season has really set in and traffic stats are proof that Google doesn't hurt all sites.
Since I haven't changed a lot of things to comply Google's new rules on my own sites, I'm also convinced that HQ at Squidoo hurt their own site much more than Google could have done.
The second lens that I'm going to move today is going to get a major refocus and is going to be split into three new pages. Not that these pages are going to carry more than 400 words each but with the new focus I'm pretty sure they're going to do pretty well hosted in a place that won't kill their usefulness - after all the original lens generated 2,000 visits for the month of september the year it was created, 1,500 last year and... 20 this year :(
As for the stats for modified lenses this year they're looking awful !
September 2012: 1,293
September 2013: 182
September 2012 : 2,300
September 2013 : 400
September 2012: 2,474
September 2013: 291
September 2012: 1,921
September 2013: 111
Even multiplied by 2 or 3 by the end of the month, none of these lenses are going to reach the previous year stats. And I'm ashamed to admit that my top Halloween lens that entered tier 1 isn't going to make 20% of last year's stats.
So, please, don't tell me that the dramatic Squidoo stats as a whole are the result of lensmasters leaving the site. These awful stats are the result of the bad way the management handled the whole Google mess that resulted in an even bigger Squidoo mess.
Not long ago I said that we'd have a more accurate picture of the situation around Christmas time. Today, I wonder if we won't make sure Squidoo's a story of the past before Halloween.
Posted by Squidoo lensmaster Prosperity66
My top Halloween lens had 12,000 visitors last September, but only 3,000 for the first half of this September. Quite a drop.
ReplyDeleteI'm getting back to updating now that the filter has calmed down. Google traffic is obviously absent for the most part, so I'm trying to promote my prime lenses on Facebook and on my blog.
I don't waste time updating, for Halloween and Christmas lenses that aren't going to get any kind of correct traffic, they'll just going to be deleted and moved. Wasted too much time on Squidoo and left my sites aside... No thanks, enough is enough.
DeleteBut I wish you to succeed with your traffic strategy. I've often enjoyed your lenses and seeing them disappearing somewhere in abyssmal traffic numbers makes me really sad.