The HubPages Editors have been hard at work evaluating Editor’s Choice Hubs; as of this week we have over 14,000 EC Hubs! While we are happy with the progress, we still have a lot of Hubs to evaluate. Thank you for your patience as we do our best to get to everyone’s Hubs.
We’ve been listening to your feedback in the Forums and wanted to take some time to answer the most common questions:
- Where can I find Editor’s Choice Hubs? Our plan for the future of HubPages has multiple phases and designating the best Hubs as Editor’s Choice is step one. Eventually you will be able to navigate to EC Hubs more easily; stay tuned in the next few months to find out how! We also have an accolade in the works that will be out shortly. 🙂
- How do I know if my Hub has been selected as Editor’s Choice? In My Account > Hubs > Statistics, EC Hubs have a banner next to their title. If you don’t have any banners, don’t fret; we likely have not evaluated your Hubs yet.
- If I edit an Editor’s Choice Hub will it lose its status? Editing a Hub will result in the loss of its EC status only if the Hub also loses its Featured status. Improving and updating your EC Hub should have no effect on its EC status. However, adding spammy links or doing other unscrupulous practices will effect your EC Hub and could warrant an action on all of your Hubs.
- What should I do if my newly-designated EC Hub starts to lose traffic? While this is uncommon (aggregate traffic to EC Hubs has increased), you have the option to opt out of the Editor’s Choice program in My Account > Profile > Edit Profile. Short-term fluctuations in traffic happen, but we believe EC Hubs are the best long-term strategy for sustained traffic growth.
- Why don’t I have any EC Hubs? The likely answer is that we haven’t gotten to your Hubs yet. However, if you have Hubs that have Style Tips, it might be a good idea to make some edits. 🙂
- Why are many EC Hubs written by Apprentices? It was easy for us to initially designate some of these Hubs as EC because they have already been through human review.
- Are EC editors evaluating new Hubs? Yes! We recently started evaluating new Hubs in addition to old Hubs.
- How are EC Hubs evaluated? HubPages Editors read and evaluate every Hub that becomes an Editor’s Choice. There are many factors that go into our assessment including, the quality of the writing and media, the aesthetics and layout, the number and quality of links, whether the Hub is specific and answers the question of the title in a clear and robust way, the usefulness of the Hub, and the Hub’s competition with other Hubs.
- Why hasn’t my best Hub been chosen yet? It is more than likely that we just haven’t gotten to your Hub yet. Designating EC Hubs is going to be an ongoing process; we have quite a few prolific Hubbers! Plus, some of the editors are extremely picky. 🙂 Remember to take a look at the Style Tips! They are a great indicator of possible reasons that your Hub is not selected, especially if your Hubs tend to have more than one. For example, a great Hub that has multiple products at the bottom along with a “Sign-up for HubPages” link is unlikely to be chosen.
- Can I turn off EC status on one of my Hubs and not others? We only allow the turning off and on of EC status at the account level. Designating Hubs as Editor’s Choice takes a great deal of resources, and we want to put our effort into Hubbers who are interested in participating long term.
If you have other questions, feel free to leave a comment, and we’ll do our best to answer them! Have a great day!
HubPages Blog 
That answers quite a bit of the recurring questions – thank you. My question for the accolade is does it display on each hub chosen? like HOTD, or does it display with the other accolades.
Also, do you have concerns that EC hubs may be more likely to be targeted by content thieves? anything in the works to help us do battle with the content scrapers out there?
I like the program so far and think it is helping to improve traffic and wish you long-term success with it.
Oh one more question 🙂 sorry… If hubs that weren’t selected are updated, will they be reviewed again for possible inclusion down the line?
Thanks!
Christin
Thanks for the comments, Christin. As of right now, the accolade will not show on the Hub. Hubs might go in and out of being Editor’s Choice, so we didn’t think it would be a good idea to show the accolade. Would you prefer to see the accolade on your Hub? It is definitely something we can revisit. As for scrapers, I don’t think that Hubs are targeted because they are EC. I know that stolen content is very important to many Hubbers. In most cases, it is unlikely that stolen content ranks higher than Hubs, so for me personally, it’s not that much of a concern. I think the benefits of having an EC Hub outweigh the slightly increased probability of the content being stolen. And for your last question, it is always a good idea to update and improve your Hubs. It is likely that all of your Hubs haven’t been reviewed, so updating them will give them a better chance of passing the first go around. Right now, we are making a first pass through, but we may go through previously-reviewed and updated Hubs in the future.
As a team we looked through quite a few Hubs yesterday. It is common that we read a Hub and love it until we get to the bottom of the Hub and it has a few problems, e.g., sign-up for HubPages links, copyright info that is not our form, and/or a bunch of products and links. A great Hub can be rejected for even one or two of these mistakes. If you want your Hubs designated EC, look at your Style Tips and update your Hub based on the tips.
Thanks again! 🙂
I think it could be cool as a designation on the hubs themselves, but I can see how that could be problematic since hubs can go in and out of being EC. It would definitely give hubbers ideas on what to strive for though and show readers from outside that the hub they are enjoying was hand-selected as being top-quality. This could perhaps encourage readers to stay longer – maybe? Anyway, either way is good I suppose. :).
I have several EC hubs, going back to improve hubs from my earlier days, whether they make EC or not, there’s always room for improvement.
Thanks for responding!