A Suggestion for a Preventing Most Overly Promotional Hubs

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   quotationsposted 12 years ago

   Today I hopped a few hubs and as usual I flagged a lot of them for being overly promotional, for having two links to the same site. The breach of the rules was obvious. For example, in a hub on the subject of weight loss there were two links and each one went to (I am making this up) buy-my-useless-weightloss-junk.ru or something like that. I didnt have to read the hub to know that it violated the terms of service.
   
   My question is this - instead of relying on hubbers to catch this junk, why not at least set up a filter program that looks at all outgoing links and if there are two or more to the same site then it prevents it from being published? This would not be hard. There are many sites on the internet that have tools that analyze a web page and will tell you all of the outgoing links in less than a second. I realize that spammers could get around this by setting up different sales sites and having more than one link pointing to different sites. But some already do and at least they would not be breaching the TOS
   
   The present system is obviously broken when I would say over 75% of published hubs encountered while hopping have the same violation - two links to the same spammy site. If hubpages is serious about improving the quality of the site and preventing a continued decline in traffic, they need to nip it in the bud. Relying on hubbers to catch these is too late - many may have already been crawled by google, leading to penalties against the site, and some may just slip through.

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      Marisa Wrightposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Having two links to the same site is not overly promotional.  If that's the only violation you can spot, then flagging these Hubs is unproductive and only wastes the moderators' time.  You need to look for other violations and report the Hubs for those, not for the links.  They're allowed.
      
      If you're suggesting that the number of outgoing links should be reduced to one, then suggest it in the "Report a Problem" forum.  Flagging these "legal" Hubs won't make HubPages change the rule.

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         Garrett Mickleyposted 12 years agoin reply to this

         I second this.

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         livewithrichardposted 12 years agoin reply to this

         
         
         Exactly, and this is the whole problem with the hub hopper. There are too many people flagging that don't even know the rules and are clogging up the system for the moderators. It's no wonder that it takes a week or longer for the staff to respond to an email.
         
         People need to take the time and understand the rules (which seem to be changing daily) and worry about their own material before they go off flagging other people's stuff. 
         
         I try to keep abreast of the rules but I refuse to hop hubs. The staff get paid a salary to moderate and they take 40% of my revenue share presumably to help pay those salaries. I think I've done my part by allowing them to earn on my content.

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         SunSevenposted 12 years agoin reply to this

         Are you sure Marisa? Well, can we be sure?

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      simon cowhamposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Hi Quotations, I was also under the impression that two links was ok. I will have to double check the rules. I enjoy reading a lot of the hubs that you describe as overly promotional. Some of the product reviews are quite interesting. How would reducing one link from a page improve the quality? I’m new to this and I would be interested in your opinion. Thank you.

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   CMHypnoposted 12 years ago

   You are allowed 2 links to the same site aren't you? I always thought that it was having more than 2 that made a hub overly promotional?

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   WryLiltposted 12 years ago

   http://hubpages.com/faq/#overly_promotional
   
   Having two links to one domain is allowed. That's why all the spammers do it.

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   quotationsposted 12 years ago

   Oops I may have been wrong about the number of allowed links. I was going by the Flagging function which allows you to flag as overly promotional if the hub has "2 or more links to a single site" (their words).
   
   To me that means that if you have any more than one link to one site, you are in violation.
   
   But in any case the ones I flagged were spammy, and whether its three links that should trigger a publication hold or just two I still think that hubpages should implement an automatic detection system.

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      WryLiltposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      "including more than 2 links to any one domain"

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   Laura Ginnposted 12 years ago

   Hmmm I hub hop quite a lot and have found loads of interesting hubs whilst doing it - things I wouldn't usually read too.  I haven't seen many of these spammy hubs, maybe I'm just not looking for them.  Surely if a person's hubs are all spam they would lose their ratings and their readership anyway?

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      WryLiltposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Their readership comes from Google and often Google can't tell if something's spam.

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   Marisa Wrightposted 12 years ago

   You're quite right, the flagging tool says "2 or more" which is wrong.

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