Commercial Hubs Setting - What Is It
Is My Hub Commercial
When it comes to writing quality Hubs on Hubpages a lot of it is very easy to figure out. However, there are a couple of aspects of publishing Hubs that are not so intuitive. The Hub settings at the top of the screen on the edit screen are some of the possibly confusing settings. While HubPages help and the various HubPages guides cover these Hub settings in detail, for a new Hubber looking to quickly publish great Hubs, stopping the writing process to go digging through forums and help files to find answers, doesn't sound so great.
Instead, here is the quick how-to guide to tell if a Hub is considered commercial or not. And also, what it means if this hub may be considered commercial.
What Makes a Hub Commercial?
One of the most worrisome settings available to HubPages authors is the "this hub may be considered commercial" setting.
The problem is that a good writer may be concerned that by selecting Yes the hub is commercial that his hard work creating a high-quality informative Hub will be undermined when it is lumped in with lower quality spam Hubs filled with worthless information and ads links.
Yet, when the HubPages author tries to deselect, or uncheck, the this hub may be considered commercial box, they are met with a stern warning that seems to suggest that turning off the commercial setting is a very big deal and should not be done under most circumstances.
The conflict between not wanting to violate HubPages rules or terms of service versus not wanting to have their writing considered to be ad-filled junk is what makes choosing the right setting so difficult.
Fortunately, choosing whether or not to have a hub set as commercial can actually be broken down into two easy factors for the author to consider. The rest of the rules and regulations spelled out in the HubPages Guide and HubPages Terms of Service can be left to the lawyers and the weasels seeking to cheat the system via loopholes.
Is My Hub Commercial?
While the wording of the commercial hub setting seems to imply that this is a variable commonly changed by HubPages authors and that its setting is very important to give careful consideration to, the fact is that in almost all cases, choosing the setting is as simple as an easy true or false question.
Does the Hub link to any site other than HubPages?
That's it.
That is the easy true-false question that you have to answer.
Any hub that links to another website is considered commercial, no matter what the content of the hub is. So, if your hub links to a reference site, a resource, Google.com, your homepage, one of your blogs, or anywhere else, then the hub is commercial, in which case, just leave the default setting of commercial on. Since 90% or more of all hubs link somewhere else, even just for documenting facts, there is generally no reason to mess with this setting at all. There is no penalty for commercial hubs.
If and only if your hub does not link anywhere other than another HubPage then and only then can your site be considered non-commercial. Even if your hub does not link off of HubPages.com it is still commercial if it mentions any products or services that can be bought or sold, or if has any reviews or suggestions to buy/sell or otherwise "check out" something that can be bought or sold.
In other words unless your hub is purely informational and product agnostic it will be commercial.
Typically, non-commercial hubs are "cause hubs." That is, hubs which are dedicated to things like charities, awareness campaigns, and so on. (Keep in mind that many political hubs will be considered commercial, so review the rules carefully for those.)
