Next week, we will be rolling out to updates to Featured Hubs and the Quality Assessment Process:
- We will be giving Featured Hubs a longer grace period based on Hubber Score
- We will be raising the quality bar applied to newly-published Hubs
About the Longer Grace Period
As it stands, Featured Hubs have between 30 to 60 days to prove that they have a heartbeat. We define a Hub with a heartbeat as one that has demonstrated sufficient interest from readers and is getting some search traffic (e.g. a small handful of search hits per week, around a dozen per month, or a little over 50-90 per year, depending on Hubber Score).
Starting next week, Featured Hubs will be given a grace period between 30 days to one year based on Hubber Score. To make Hubber Score a more accurate representation of the overall quality of one’s Hubs, we have adjusted the manner in which it is calculated to factor in human ratings collected through the Quality Assessment Process.
Because new Hubbers tend to have more volatile Hubber Scores, their grace period will be artificially inflated until these scores normalize, so rest assured that promising new Hubbers will not be penalized for having fresh Hubber Scores.
Should a Hub lapse out of Featured status after the grace period has passed (no matter how long it may be), all one has to do is edit and improve upon the Hub (ideally looking at present search competition and tweaking the title and text of the Hub to make it more search-friendly) to have it once again become Featured.
About the Higher Quality Bar
Because we will be giving most Hubs longer grace periods, we are also raising the minimum quality ratings required for a Hub to earn Featured status. This means that fewer Hubs will make the cut, but this does not mean that your Hubs need to suffer. If you make sure that your Hubs meet the substance, organization, and grammar and mechanics criteria of an 8+ Hub on our rating scale (shown below), and are clearly above the criteria of a 6 Hub, you should be fine.
Note: A collective score of eight on all levels is NOT the minimum requirement for a Hub to be Featured; the minimum quality score a Hub needs to become Featured is actually much lower, but given our margin of error with human ratings, we want to make it clear that if you meet the criteria of an eight, you can be very confident that your Hub will be Featured.
Should you publish a Hub to find that it is immediately not Featured (a clear indication that it did not get sufficiently high quality ratings), you are confident that your Hub’s substance, organization, and grammar/mechanics meet the descriptions we provide for Hubs of an 8+ rating, please file a buggy quality assessment report and we will look into the problem.
We hope this adjustment to our Featured Hubs system helps to give your Hubs a better shot at success and also improve your traffic (by improving HubPages’ overall reputation through even higher standards). For more information about the update and what qualifies as search traffic, please visit our FAQ.
HubPages Blog 
I had not seen this new criteria. How do promotional hubs get rated? I have some hubs that I suspect may get lower scores simply because they have Amazon capsules.
Hey Shasta! I wouldn’t worry so long as the Amazon products you feature are very relevant (e.g. explicitly referenced in the text of the Hub itself) and shown in moderation. 😀
That is good information about the featured hubs criteria. Now I can look over the hubs that are not featured and fix them.
Thank you Simone
I love reading about the details, about this all spelled out, so we know how all this if figured. Even knowing how many per day, month, or year, is helpful, as I’ve never been sure as to how many hits is decent. Thanks for writing this–very helpful!
Thanks HP both of these changes. BRAVO!
Seems fair enough, reasonable enough, and understandable enough to me. I think that outlining all this may help a lot of people feel a little more like the fate of any future Hubs (at least up to a point) will be a little more within their own control (but also help them decide, maybe what, if anything, they want to do with their “oldies-but-no-longer-such-goodies”,
These sound like really positive changes. I especially like having specific information on the criteria for a featured hub. Way to go HubPages!
Is there somewhere that shows what the rating of a hub is in case it needs tweaking?
Not at this time, Azure11, though our rating scale can act as a helpful reference point: hubpages.com/help/hub_hop_table#informational
Interesting. Will use this information. Thank you so much.