As an open publishing platform we have always tried to err on the side of giving Hubbers of all backgrounds and experiences the freedom to share their unique knowledge and opinions. Over the past 5 years, we have invested in educating and supporting our writers, offering technology and tools to help good writers become even better online authors. Recently, there have been questions about how the latest Google search algorithm update has affected us, what it means for our community of writers, and what you can do to help. We believe that some basic adjustments – several of which you can do on your end – to improve the quality of Hubs will go a long way to improve your experience as a writer on HubPages.
First, we want every Hub on HubPages to be original – we have updated our policy to not allow duplicate content at all. We allowed it in the past with many caveats, but to simplify our editorial policy, we will no longer accept articles that exist on other sites. If, for example, you have some blog posts that you’ve also published on HubPages, you will now have to decide whether to keep them exclusively on HubPages, or host them elsewhere online. We want to make it clear, we won’t unpublish a Hub if someone copied a Hub from you. It’s only an issue if it already exists online when you publish your Hub.
Second, we found that Hubs which successfully maintained their traffic were much more likely to judiciously use the Amazon, eBay, news, RSS and link capsules, so we ask if you choose to add news and RSS capsules, you make sure that you have plenty of original content in your Hub to accompany it and that you write at least 50 words of text in your Hub for every product you feature in your Amazon and eBay capsules.
There are three easy ways to better present your Amazon and Ebay products:
- Edit your capsules to reduce the number of products shown.
- Err in favor of specific product URLs or ASIN numbers instead of search terms and select only one item per capsule when you do list products by keyword search.
- Write unique descriptions for each product.
On our end, we will no longer allow RSS, news, Amazon and eBay capsules to be the first full-width capsule at the top of a Hub. We are also going to further examine our rules around affiliate links because our analysis shows that Hubs linking to affiliate sites were much more likely to have lost traffic. For this reason, you might consider removing affiliate links from your Hubs. We are also investigating ways to adjust our ad layout for a more pleasing aesthetic. We plan to release a new ad layout in the coming days that will be good for Hubbers and for the site.
As more people use Search as an integral part of their everyday lives, more people are realizing they have insightful answers and knowledge to contribute to those who seek it. An open platform like HubPages gives everyday experts a way to share these insights. We believe that open publishing is an important part of the Internet’s ecosystem and every individual with valuable knowledge should have access to the technology required to share it. Professional experts ranging from anesthesiologists, to college instructors, moms and poets have seized the opportunity that HubPages provides and made the Internet a better place by sharing their insight. HubPages is the most rewarding place to publish online – we appreciate your efforts to keep it that way.
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Hello Judd – you are correct. If content of yours is on HubPages, it must only be on HubPages. It cannot be both on HubPages and a personal site or blog.
@HP Jason
Thank you!
@Ian Clayton
I don’t re-write articles either. There’s usually more info that we can provide readers rather than duplicating the same info (my approach anyhow).
For what it’s worth here’s a suggestion: Write a related article. If you are finding success with this one article then write content to complement it.
Keep in mind that this one hub “linked for many sites” probably gets “link juice” from some of the links/backlinks.
I dont understand the amazon list of products that are on my hub pages now will need a description or is it the ones that you specifically choose to promote. I let amazon choose the products displayed on my site are those the ones you need to add content for? If so how do I have to add a text box. Thank you
Lisa
Lisa – you can only add descriptions to Amazon products that you specifically select, so it is impossible to add extra descriptions when you add products by keyword.
We recommend choosing each individual product that you feature and writing a description for it. You may also simply add more text to your text boxes, if your Hub does not meet the word-to-product ratio, however it might be easier to simply reduce the number of products you show.
I was testing the hubs to see how they work and I copied one of my articles from Enzimes onto HubPages. Is this not allowed when it’s my own article? It’s telling me it’s a duplicate. Do I have to edit it?
I removed everything from all my hubs that I thought should be removed now my hub score has gone down lower then it has been in a long time.
Don’t worry too much about HubScores, moonlake – they fluctuate over time. Keep Hubbing and you’ll find it improves on its own 😀
The 50 words for an ad suddenly becomes much easier if it doesn’t have to be unique to meet the rules. So is using the description in Amazon acceptable, it seems to me that if Amazon want a sale then they would be happy for you to use the description they provide, or is that not correct?
I actually try and keep the description fairly brief because too many words end up looking really messy with the current layout options, that is when you are using a 1/2 width for example.
When you say you need 50 words for the items in ebay and amazon capsules does that mean a general 50 for the whole capsule or for each product? Writing about each product is time consuming and to edit the amount of Hubs I used them in would take forever. Also, for ebay capsules the search works much better then direct products because then it becomes a job to actually find new products and then write about it. Would make the search option pointless.
Hubpages encourages evergreen content, and most of that content once set up doesn’t need to be edited or updated again. By forcing us to edit these hubs for new products makes it almost stupid to even place ebay (and sometimes amazon) ads in the first place.
It is unfortunate that you have made it your policy not to carry duplicated articles. I have many of my articles on many sites so that they can be read by people who may not be familiar with Hubpages. It just doesn’t make any sense to me why you would do this unless you just want new articles only available on your site for better traffic results. I think this is short sighted; however, you are free to do what you want on your own site. More than half of my articles are on other sites, so my hub will be a lot smaller. I wonder if it is worth it to have the blog on your site at all any longer?
I realize that somehow I was expecting that hubpages would have an automatic system to know hubbers who are attracting readers and base on that invite them to the hub ads program. I have been sharing my articles in facebook/twitter and through other venues w/o the tracker. It may seem silly but it is the straight forward way so it seems appropriate.
I know will have to proceed to delete those links from my twitter/facebook, add new ones with the tracker–and hope that my readers want to read them again.
Is there any other way to automatize this process as to having the steps while building the article instead of jumping to seek the tracker. That will be really helpful.
I will be waiting for that invitation!
Its great help. but when the hubpages start automatically posting your hub feed to twitter and fb.
When you publish a Hub, Hemu, there are links you can use to share it on Twitter and Facebook if you like. We will not automatically publish them on those sites. Hope that answers your question 😀
Hi, thanks for putting together this post – lots of useful new information to digest. I’m new to HP and as a newbie, I realise I have lots to learn about putting together a Hub. The new Google policy has had me wondering about the placement of our hubs on search engines now. And this new policy has got me thinking too but given that I don’t yet have any affliate links to put up (newbie here and hoping to apply for one as soon as I have sufficient hubs up), I realise that I might be jumping the gun with regard placement of aff links. All this is a roundabout way to saying that the policy regarding disallowing duplicate content appears eminently sensible…
Is there any other way to automatize this process as to having the steps while building the article instead of jumping to seek the tracker. That will be really helpful.
I will be waiting for that invitation!