You may have noticed recently that some Hubs on HubPages are showing up without summaries. As a part of our overall effort to improve the reader experience on HubPages, we are encouraging everyone to create their own, custom summaries.
The summary you enter (under the summary tab of the control box at the right side of the HubTool) will be used as a hidden “meta description” tag- something many search engines and web services use as summary/preview text for your Hub.
A well written summary could be the deciding factor between a potential reader clicking through to your Hub or moving on, so interesting, well-written, original summaries are worth the little bit of time they take to write.
I recommend you make a habit of writing up a quick summary for each Hub before you publish. It adds some extra polish to the Hub and encourages other people to have a closer look at your work!
HubPages Blog 
Oh man – I’d love to know more about this. I’ve yet to see where on a hub’s page this is even done. Guess I’ll try to decipher this and figure it out.
Excellent advice!
So does this mean that all our published hubs do not have summaries any more due to duplicate content?
I started using this when reading the capstone and flagship info. Ties into the SEO a lot and it can be nice to customize things a little.
I love this idea. I don’t think I’ve recognized a summary on any hubs. Can someone give me a link to an example?
great addition guys! keep up on this line!
@Sinea Go to your article, click on edit, scroll down a little, and you should see the summary tab next to the Tags, Settings and Groups tabs.
Got it! Now…can we go back and do summaries for existing Hubs? I am assuming we can?
Sinea – Yes, absolutely. 🙂 – Jason
Just have a look at the “summary” tab of that box to the right of the HubTool, Wesman Todd Shaw 😀
And ponx – I think it is only Hubs that have been published within the past two weeks or so that no longer have automatically generated summaries.
Sinea- the summary is the little bit of text you might see by a Hub on the homepage (when you’re signed out), or on Hubs as they’re listed in the Hubs section of the site (amongst other places)
And yes- you can always go back and edit / add existing summaries!
Totally awesome friendly staff as a new customer is greatly appreciated. Cheers!!! 🙂
Awesome people which I greatly appreciate and hope to meet someday. Cheers!!! 🙂
I do this already with all of my hubs and it’s been a benefit…. One suggestion I would have is that you give a hint or help to us to let us know how many words we can use in these descriptions. For example I know some suggest no more than 155 characters… Does HP already do this?
HP is on top of things–thanks much.
The optimum meta tag description length is said to be 150-160 characters in length. Does the tool prevent people from going over 160 characters? And would it be a good idea to have a character count for those who want to try and hit 150?
I great addition for true Hubers!
Guess you’re right. I’m going to have to settle down to doing my summaries after all )-: