Controversial suggestions to mop up and prevent low quality content.

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   LeanManposted 12 years ago

   As everyone knows (unless they have been on a mountainside in Outer Mongolia without their laptop) Google has penalized HP quite hard during their recent updates - one of the major issues is that of low quality articles/hubs on the site bringing down the site as a whole.
   
   So now HP is making many changes to try to remove and prevent these low quality hubs from appearing on the site. Changes that many have been debating at length in the forums so no point in mentioning here.
   
   However I hubhop on a regular basis and tend to flag 80%+ of what I see, so if this is representative of what goes on the site then we have a huge amount of low quality "crap" being added daily and a huge amount here already!
   
   So we have two issues, get rid of the low quality we already have and preventing more being added.
   
   Ryankett has just published a great hub regarding what HP could (Should) do about this situation http://hubpages.com/hub/Possible-Busine … r-Hubpages
   
   However I would like to add a few extra suggestions for HP to consider...
   
   With regard to those articles already on the site, how about "de-indexing" all hubs with say a hubscore of less than 60, or all hubs belonging to hubbers with an author score of less than 60 - use HPs own measures of quality to automatically tell goggles crawler bots which pages to skip!
   
   Where a subject area is overly saturated or spammy such as Forex, only allow Google to index the top 50 hubs (or less) - based on hub score, Author score, traffic etc..
   
   Add a second hub-hopper for existing hub pages, give the people on the site an opportunity to broaden their reading and do a little quality control on what is already there!
   
   Make the hub-hopper more sensitive to the skills of those hopping, give them hubs from the categories in which they write so that they are better able to judge them.
   
   
   
   With regard to stopping low quality from being added I would like to echo some of Ryankett's ideas;
   
   CLOSE HP to new accounts - tidy up and get the house straight before opening the door to new writers.
   
   Language profiling - some may claim it is a racist approach -  but have some form of probationary method to judge the skills of writers from non-English speaking countries. (I live in one so it would have effected me - although I am English! Plus my grammar is terrible and my spelling atrocious, but at least I know how to right click the words underlined in red!)
   
   
   I think HP is a great platform and I would love to see it back where it belongs, but I think that the HP team should make some tough decisions to make some of these changes!
   What do other people think???

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      darksideposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      I second this.

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      1. 64

         Mutiny92posted 12 years agoin reply to this

         The formula for hubbing has changed. 
         
         Hubbers are finding the effort vs. profit ratio adjusted (at least for me!)
         
         HubPages is spending a lot of money and labor cleaning out old hubs and monitoring new ones a lot more rigorously.
         
         Something has to change soon otherwise I don't see how the economics will continue to make sense for almost anyone.

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2. 64

   Mutiny92posted 12 years ago

   LM,
   
   I think there needs to be some sort of prescreening before hubbers are given the greenlight for free publication.
   
   On one hand, that would take a lot of time for HP to review these newer hubbers, but I think at some point it would be offset by the time they DON'T have to spend removing crap from the website.
   
   I also recommend increased filtering.  For example:
   ht tp://hubpages.com/hub/Beziehungen
   ht tp://hubpages.com/hub/abendmode2011
   ht tp://hubpages.com/hub/sexcam-weiber-t2
   ht tp://hubpages.com/hub/the-brandneue-trend-trends-typically-erstellen-einige-neuen-perspektiven
   
   These are a few hubs with no english in them at all.  I suspect that their coders can find ways to find these via a script.  It would save their staff a lot of work if it was dealt with en masse as opposed to "when a hubber flags them".
   
   Ditto goes for the hubs that Jason said are deceptively titled like "Facebook Login" - We can go through and flag, but that puts HP even further behind on reviewing hubs...OR...they can run a script and notify hubbers that their pages are deceptively titled and will be taken down unless the issues are addressed.
   
   http://hubpages.com/search/include:hubs+www.+login
   http://hubpages.com/search/include:hubs+www.+logon
   
   I would think it would save a lot of time to deal with these in an automated fashion as opposed to relying on hubbers to flag them and add to the workload of their staff.
   
   Just some ideas...

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3. 78

   LeanManposted 12 years ago

   Thanks Mutiny, I am sure that there are many things that they could do automatically as you suggest..
   
   But the longer they leave things the worse it gets!
   
   I have just been looking at the hubs in one category, and probably flagged well over half the first 20 for being copied and low quality - I decided to further look at the authors of some and flagged some of them as they had multiple copied hubs and poor quality hubs.. This site is full of low quality material and it is getting worse!
   
   I really hope that HP can do something!!!!!! Because from the volume I just saw I can't see hubhopping and a handful of moderators managing to do the job!

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4. 79

   skyfireposted 12 years ago

   Probationary period is good option to filter out hubbers/auto signups but that will kill open publishing on hubpages. As for low level grammar/writing skills point, spun content/spinners proves the point that it has nothing to do with SE. Besides that i'm not one of those who claim - 'non-native english writing kills SE traffic' and then make awful grammar mistakes. That's like being hypocrite and insecure at the same time. HP can do many things to improve traffic but that will work only if they stop assuming google's guidelines.

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5. 60

   TomC35posted 12 years ago

   There definitely needs to be more clean up of low quality content, but the risk of allowing users to flag other users is the possibility of abuse by those who want a cheat for punishing competition.
   
   I think about what happens on Craigslist.org.  Someone will post spam, but then they get flagged, not by someone who is sick of spam on the site, but rather by another spam poster trying to eliminate competition.

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   1. 81

      CMHypnoposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Flagging a hub doesn't mean that it will automatically be removed, it just brings that hub to the attention of the moderators who then make the final decision - so if you see any crud on your HP travels flag away!
      
      While I agree with all the quality issues, it does move HP away from its USP of being an easy platform on which to publish. Do HP want to/are ready to move away from this model into one which is more restrictive/screens prospective writers

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      1. 78

         LeanManposted 12 years agoin reply to this

         Hi CMHypno, I think it depends on whether we are talking about the mechanics of publishing online or being a successful platform that writers will want to use.
         If the rules are so lax that "any old spammer" can get the stuff published then it will continue to drag down the site to all of our detriment. I think HP has so much spam and low quality hubs because it is so easy to use and so easy to get stuff to rank, if you had to prove yourself first then it would put off many of the "amateur spammers" and those that are not too serious about what they are doing.
         What do we want? A site where anyone can write whatever they like or a site where people can get their work to rank in SERPS and make some money?
         HP is a business and many of the writers are using it to earn money, without the right quality measures in place we will all fail.

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6. 95

   Glenn Stokposted 12 years ago

   I have to agree 100% with every single point both LeanMan and Mutiny92 made, with no exceptions.
   
   It's easy to do too. All HP needs to do is include an HTML meta robots tag specifying "noindex" on those hubs that don't qualify, so search engine bots will ignore them. HP already does this on profile pages of low-scoring Hubbers. I know because I checked. But they don't do it on the low-scoring Hubs, at least not those I checked. 
   
   Although LeanMan explained it very well, let me just include a statement in my own words...
   
   Google has their own ranking system as everyone knows. HP has their own ranking system with the HubScores.  Presently the HubScores do not effect the search engine placement, which is a function of their own algorithms.  But by using the robots meta tags HP can make the Hub Scores carry over to affect the search engines indexing.
   
   This is a very serious issue. I thought my traffic was coming back up two months after the Panda Updates were in place. But now I see it going down again. It is quite clear that garbage on the site effects all of us.
   
   When you see Hubs containing sentences such as "you kann Really geben your Personal private model" and "Bags are a half of girls" you will realize the urgency of this problem. That first example was definitely spun in my opinion. Looks like it was spun from both English and non-English articles copied and merged together.
   
   I took  those quotes from Hubs that are still published. I am sure they were flagged already even though I just flagged them myself. But I can also understand that they are still there because HP staff is overwhelmed by this garbage.  Flagging will only alert HP staff. It's up to them to review and make a decision, and I respect that.
   
   The solution is this...since those Hubs which I took those quotes from have a score around 40, they would automatically get kicked out if HP does what LeanMan and Mutiny92 had suggested.

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      Mutiny92posted 12 years agoin reply to this

      "Bags are a half of girls is also duplicate content from ht tp://my.opera.com/monclerjacken/blog/show.dml/15600202
      
      I thought their filters were picking these up?

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