Hubpages Wednesday: Or, Whatever Happened to That Thing

You may or may not have noticed a severe lack of Hub updating from my end of the Internet. I have a pretty dang good reason for this:  I got Google sandboxed early last month.

What the heckity heck is the "Google Sandbox"? Succinctly, it's when Google's algorithm decides it's not going to send your website traffic anymore. There's a number of reasons this may happen, but the short of it is that it happened to me, and I stopped making money. Any money.

July actually started very, very excitingly. By the end of the first week I had made almost six dollars! I know, right? Up until that point my traffic had been steadily increasing, and I put out a huge effort to write as many quality hubs as I could to keep the hits coming. Somewhere at the end of June my hits TRIPLED and I started raking in some money. By the end of the first week of July I was pretty sure I would hit my very first payout the end of that month.

Then I logged on one day to see that my hits had tanked to ten.

And they never got better.

I went from making sometimes up to two dollars a day to barely making four cents a day. All I could figure, as it never improved no matter what I did, was that I had been sandboxed, and it was time to move on. So I did. I stopped hubbing mid-July and focused on my noveling.

Today I logged into HP to see what was going on hits wise. It had been over a month since I last checked it, too disgusted to even bother. Shockingly, I made a whole daughter this month. Woohoo. But what actually WAS nice? My hits were back up in the hundreds! That is, they were about June's average, right before my trafficked tripled.

So what does this mean? I think when I have some downtime I'll go through and start updating some of the older hubs and start advertising them again. Apparently, Google is liking me enough to give me hits again, so why not? But I'm not gonna wear myself out writing new articles if I don't feel like it. I have a couple unpublished ones languishing that I might as well get out. If things improve again? I'll let you know.

Hubpages Wednesday: A lot of articles, all about Japan, Part 2

All my savings from Japan....in cash.

Can't believe I couldn't post these past couple of days. Cold keeps killing me. Well, more like the jetlag is still killing me now. Can't sleep more than five hours at a time usually, which leaves me totally exhausted and sleepy around sundown, and thus the cycle continues. Slowly making progress though!

In part 2 of today's fun, we're taking a look at the newest additions to the Living in Japan series over at Hubpages. Today we get to learn How to Take the Train / Subway in Japan and The Japanese Yen: Designs and Denominations. Personally I think the first one is more useful, but the second one has proven to be more popular by far. Go figure.

Anyway, I promised to talk more about my earnings thus far. If you're not worried about SEO strategies then you probably haven't heard about Google Panda or Penguin. Basically, they're new top-secret algorithms that are supposed to "help" get better results for your searches, but have proven to be anti-everywebsitebutownedbygoogle and have caused a LOT of people to lose hits and earnings on their websites, not just HP. Thankfully I haven't been hit too hard (yet, Penguin is still new as of last week) yet and still see gradually increasing earnings. Last week I almost made it to four dollars but since I was out most of the month I couldn't really give my articles the attention they need to thrive more. So I'm not worrying about it. I'm already at one dollar for the month and am shooting for five total this month. I'm casually taking part in the 30 Hubs in 30 Days challenge - I say casually because thus far I've written a hub every day but I'm not going to make it a focus of my month. But we'll see.

Well, off to do more market research and hub writing. These are my mornings thus far since being home =P