Understanding the effects of pending, nofollow, indexing & promoting

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   Denmarkguyposted 11 years ago

   I've been searching the forums and Q&A in hopes of gaining any kind of insight into the overall effect of a newly published hub going through a "Pending" period... or, as it seems to be called "undergoing our Quality Assessment Process."
   
   OK, I get the purpose of having "quality assessment." I also understand (somewhat) the effect of a nofollow tag... the page (hub) is invisible to searches.
   
   What I am not really getting is the best timing for starting my own promoting/announcing of new hubs, through social media, through my blog, through adding a link to my web properties.
   
   I write mostly to niche markets. When I've written a new hub, I let a bunch of people know, through facebook groups, twitter, listservs and so forth. Let's arbitrarily say that such an announcement results in some 500-1000 page views to the new hub within... let's say, a week. These views have NOTHING to do with traffic internal to HP, and NOTHING to do with Google searches.
   
   So my question here is... am I best served by waiting with this self promotion till after the nofollow tag is gone (and if so, how the eff do I know when that happens?), or do I just do it as soon as the hub is up and visible?
   
   What I am considering here are some variables:
   
   On the downside, a bunch of links to the new hub are going to start showing up around the web-- first my own, then through other people's Facebook posts/shares, retweets... then the next group through people (not related to me) putting links in blogs and web sites. So, if I understand correctly Google will see these... but they'll lead the crawler to a hub with a nofollow tag, and NOTHING will happen? From this angle... I should obviously WAIT.
   
   On the other side, will the immediate spike in (self-generated) traffic to a new hub HELP it immediately go to "featured quality," in short order, so the nofollow tag gets removed really fast? And then, will the remainder of that initial "traffic bulge" result in Google's bots going "whoa, what's up with all these links to this hub" and reindexing the hub (now withOUT the nofollow tag) relatively quickly? From THIS perspective, I can see how it could make no difference when I promote.
   
   What (if any) is the official HP take on it-- I understand they want google to find high quality hubs just as much as the authors of those hubs. 
   
   I'm hoping some of the people here with much more HP experience than I can shine some kind of light through this fog!
   
   Thanks in advance,
   Peter

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      wildernessposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      From other forums, I gather that the problem is that Google doesn't do "nothing" when it finds a hub with a "no index" tag - rather it takes note of that and declines to come back and check again.  Sometimes for days or weeks, which means that it won't show up in the search index for weeks.
      
      HP is working on decreasing the amount of time a hub is in the pending status, but until it becomes zero, I won't do any promotion until it is featured, and sometimes until Google has actually indexed it.

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      1. 82

         Denmarkguyposted 11 years agoin reply to this

         Thanks-- that makes sense. It feels a bit counterintuitive to work hard on creating an article... and then do nothing to tell the world, for a while...
         
         The hub I put up last night still has the little "pending" swirly icon... but when I did a "view page source" the only nofollow tags were attached to my amazon modules. Is that an effective way to determine if the tag is gone, or does HP serve a different set of headers from elsewhere?

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         1. 94

            wildernessposted 11 years agoin reply to this

            This one I can't answer, but the no-follow tags aren't the problem.  The "do not index" tag is what seemingly makes trouble.
            
            Somewhere in the 5 million forum posts in the last couple of months, GreekGeek (I think) mentioned how to see if there is a no index tag.
            
            It should be gone in just a day, two at the outside, according to Paul E.  It's not like you're waiting for a week to come off pending - why not just wait until it's featured?

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            1. 82

               Denmarkguyposted 11 years agoin reply to this

               Well, just for reference, I officially published at 12:30am last night, and the hub just went from "pending" to "featured here at 3:00pm-- so 14 1/2 hours, give or take.... which is better than they have been.
               
               Thanks for your help and comments.

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2. 95

   EsmeSanBonaposted 11 years ago

   Great question--I've wondered the same.  Thanks for posting!

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