What should you do with your Idle Hubs? The Solution to all those Zzz's
What Are Idle Hubs ?
Recently, in an attempt to improve traffic on Hubpages, a new program has been implemented. Certain hubs have been marked as idle, and once they are so marked, they are de-indexed. You can tell an idle hub has been singled out for this kind of treatment by the "Zzz" that appears on the far right column of your hub statistics.
What is an idle hub? How is its idleness identified? I'm not sure exactly, but the general idea is that your hub is not getting much traffic. This can happen for a number of reasons: it could be a seasonal hub, and its subject matter is not currently in season. It could be a hub on an obscure topic, and not too many people are searching for the keywords it triggers. Or it could be a badly written or badly optimized hub.
In any of these cases, the same result will ensue: de-indexing.
What does it mean that a hub has been de-indexed?
When a hub is de-indexed, it is still there in your account. It has not been deleted. It has not been unpublished. All it means is that it is not available to the search engines.
If you give the address of the hub to someone else, they can access and read it. If you post a link, people can still get there. But to the Almighty Google your hub is dead. It will not be found in search, because the search engine does not have it in its index.
What should you do with your idle hub once it has been de-indexed?
There are a number of remedies for de-indexing:
- You can add content to your hub and change it around and within 24 hours Hubpages may choose to re-index it.
- You can move your hub to a new location.
- You can leave it where it is as is and share links only with your friends and people you hand flyers to that you randomly meet on the street.
The PubWages Option
How you choose to deal with your idle hubs is entirely up to you. The solution does not have to be the same for every person. In my case, I decided to move my idle hubs one by one to PubWages. Here are some of the reasons for my choice:
- I write high quality hubs that would suffer from constant re- tweaking.
- I was planning on reaping passive income from older hubs that matured. If I have to re-edit periodically on each hub, then the return on investment for my efforts will be diminished. Think of it this way: what is the hourly rate for your work? Will it go down if you have to spend more hours on the same task?
- I own PubWages, so I stand to earn more there than on HP on the same article.
An Example of an idle hub that I moved to PubWages
The good thing about an idle hub, and in this Hubpages are doing us a huge favor, is that once it has been de-indexed, it will not be counted as duplicate content if you move it at once to a new location. Here is one I moved yesterday:
A Young Chimpanzee's Growth and Development
I even changed the title a little, as this article used to be called "Bow's Development". When I wrote the article I knew less about SEO than I do now, so it did not occur to me that not too many people would be searching on Google for anything about Bow by name. On the other hand, people might be searching for information about chimpanzees. This is the sort of tweaking that might have gotten the hub re-indexed had I done it on Hubpages. But I figure that on PubWages I do it once and for all, and I can keep from reworking on the hub countless times, as will be required by the new idle hub algorithm that Hubpages has adopted.
How You Can Join PubWages
If you would like to join PubWages and move some of your idle hubs there for a share in revenue and for proper indexing with Google, drop me a line and I will send you some instructions. However, don't just register with PubWages without letting me know your user name, because I delete all unknown accounts. There are too many spammers out there!
Looking on the Positive Side of Idle Hubs
The way I see it, this new policy concerning idle hubs is not so bad. Hubpages identifies for us those hubs that are not faring too well on the Hubpages site and it even de-indexes them for us, so we do not have to do it ourselves before moving them. That way we get a chance to move them someplace else where they can do better.
I am keeping my active, non-idle hubs on Hubpages for so long as they continue to do well here. And any hub of mine that is not doing well here, I will move to a better place. It's a win-win situation!
(c) 2012 Aya Katz
