Here on HubPages we always stress three major, yet simple guidelines that any writer should follow when publishing content here. These guidelines were put in place to ensure that all content is written to a certain standard and that it has a good chance of being successful. These 3 guidelines are as follows:
- All Hubs must be written in English: Even though we have authors from all around the world, we require that all content published on HubPages is written in English.
- No adult content allowed: There is absolutely no adult content allowed on HubPages. What exactly is adult content? Adult content is any type of content that would be considered pornography and is something that you wouldn’t feel comfortable looking at in front of your mother.
- Original and informative content: We strongly encourage 100% completely original and very informative content. I always say that if you’re going to spend the time to do something you might as well do it right.
Of these 3 guidelines, 2 of them are much easier to control than the other. It’s easy to only allow English – that’s about as straight forward as it gets. It’s also fairly easy to keep out adult-related material (aka ‘porn’). But, the guideline that’s by far the hardest to control is ensuring that the content published on HubPages is not only created as 100% original content, but stays 100% original content.
You see, it’s one thing for someone to copy someone else’s writing out on the web and then post it on HubPages as their own – there are ways to detect and regulate this type of thing because the copied content is on our side and we’re able to do something about it (delete it, flag it, moderate it, etc.).
However, it’s a completely different and much more complicated situation when someone on another site copies and publishes some writing that was originally published on HubPages. In this case the HubPages author is most likely unaware that their content has been copied elsewhere and even if they are aware of the situation, many aren’t sure how to go about getting it taken down.
First of all I wanted to let everyone know that we’re always working on tools that will help with this process of locating any content that has been copied from your Hubs and we take these issues very seriously. It’s our goal to always empower every one of our authors with the right types of tools so that we can continue to provide the best possible writing experience on the web.
Second of all, this is a problem that many of our more experienced authors have dealt with before – authors such as the super-awesome Whitney05. Since Whitney has some really great insight on how to deal with copying issues, I asked her to write up a Hub about these types of situations. This Hub, called My Content was Copied: What Do I Do About Duplicate Content, is a great resource for any author who has found out that their content has been copied and may be wondering how to deal with it.
If you have any additional questions, feel free to leave Whitney a comment in that Hub or even send her a message through HubPages.
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