How Hubscore Works

All this information is available around HubPages, in the FAQ or in some cases discussed further in the forum. But rather than send you off on a wild goose chase to find it all I've collated the information to present it here as an easy to find resource.

Please note: This is not an official hub, but it does have quotes and statements by HubPages staff.

We use this to determine the quality of individual Hubs, much like Google ranks popular pages. Many factors contribute to our rating scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being our top score. A HubScore is used to determine your Status.

• Amount of traffic, including percentage from sources other than HubPages
• The length of the Hub (the more unique writing, generally, the better)
• The uniqueness of content (copying content already available on the Web will be penalized)
• The number of thumbs-up votes from unique users
• The overall quality of the Hubber (author HubScore and Status)

We reserve the right to change the factors used to assess a Hub’s HubScore as we continue to determine those that measure a great Hub.

The bottom line is if you write original, useful content, your HubScores will reflect the quality and work you've put into them.

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This will give you rough idea of what different HubScores mean in terms of percentile rank across all published hubs. I've also included approximate traffic numbers for hubs in some of the ranges. Traffic is just one of many factors that go into HubScore, but it should give you an idea of the ballpark to shoot for to achieve various levels.

• 96-100 - 99.9 percentile (3000 page views a month)
• 91-95 - 99.3 percentile (2200 page views a month)
• 86-90 - 97.7 percentile (1300 page views a month)
• 81-85 - 94th percentile (900 page views a month)
• 76-80 - 88th percentile (90 page views a month)
• 71-75 - 78th percentile (30 page views a month)
• 66-70 - 65th percentile
• 61-65 - 48th percentile
• 56-60 - 31st percentile
• 51-55 - 20th percentile

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I'm pleased to announce a new factor that goes into assigning Hubscores. Hubs which largely contain content that can be found elsewhere on the web are now penalized slightly. This should help make the Hubscores better reflect our desire for quality original content.

It is true that too many links to the same site or sites can affect your scores, both on one hub, or across all your hubs. We would prefer that hubs be unbiased and provide links to the best resources on the web. If your agenda is to promote other sites (especially sites of dubious value), unless you are very careful about it you will probably run across one or more of these: 1) your scores will be reduced and many or all of your links will be nofollow, 2) your hubs will be moderated as "overly promotional" and unpublished until repaired, 3) you will be identified as a problem author and all new hubs will have to be reviewed before being published, and finally 4) you will be permanently banned and all hubs unpublished.

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The number of duplicates must reach above a certain threshold before the duplicate penalty kicks in.

Some of the things we look at when computing your author score, in no particular order:

1. your participation in the HubPages community, such as: reading and commenting on other people's hubs; forum activity; flagging content violations; rating other people's hubs (thumbs up and down)
2. total number of published hubs
3. the hub scores of your published hubs
4. the total traffic across all your published hubs
5. how recently you've published
6. your fans

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How does HubPages determine an author's Status?

Your Status is determined by a combination of your HubScore and the number of Hubs you’ve created. This system is very important, because it’s our way of ranking the quality of your Hubs, and it ultimately helps us weed out spammers. Look at the chart below. Your Status is designated by the various names in the chart, i.e. “Hall of Fame”, “Rookie”, “Spammer”, etc.

              HubScore

# of Hubs     0-24     25-29       30-74      75-100

400 or more   Stop     Prolific    Elite      Hall of Fame

100 or more   Spammer  Producer    Very Good  All Star

20 or more    Rookie   Experienced Good       Expert

19 or fewer   Novice   Junior      Average    Prodigy

Note that simply publishing a lot of Hubs won’t boost your Status. This is to prevent spammers from simply dumping loads of content on HubPages. Spammers tend to pack content full of keywords just to drive traffic to their site. Our HubScore algorithm alerts us to these people, and we automatically lower their HubScore (Note the designation on the chart below labeled “Stop” and “Spammer”, and the corresponding low HubScore.)

To boost your HubScore, your content must be original and useful. A lot of high HubScore Hubs will lead to a higher Status. And if you have a high Status, HubPages will help drive more traffic to your site. High-Status Hubbers bring great value to the Internet community. They reflect well on HubPages, and will be rewarded for their efforts.

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One small factor is intentionally assigned completely at random in order to induce some fluctuation into the score. We want the scores to move a little. We also don't publicize every single component of the score, since we don't want to make it easier for or to encourage people to try "game" the system.

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Don't get too hung up on HubScore for Hubs that are published within the day or so. HubScores can be on the low end until meaningful data starts to stream in and get computed along with all the other Hubs in the system. We have so many Hubs (over 80,000 at this point) that the computing load has become tremendous and computations for each HubScore aren't instantaneous - there can be a lag.

Hubs that are not published do not affect your HubScore.

When the Hubber score (AuthorScore) is below 75 all links in all hubs by the author will have nofollow applied (which means no, or very little benefit in search engine rankings).

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We've recently taken the step of applying NOFOLLOW to the links in hubs that have a HubScore below 40 (it was 50), and to all the hubs of authors with an author score below 75. This negates most of the SEO value of the link. Getting to 40 and 75 isn't too difficult but it requires some participation, and gives us time to ferret out the deviants before they gain much from their behavior.

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1. One link or two to domains that have been heavily "abused" by other Hubbers (like tinyurl.com), in the context of plenty of other "good" links, will not have an effect. However, repeatedly using tinyurl across your Hubs, again and again, will.

This question is often asked in the forum.