Affiliate link changes coming
Problem is, we have zero proof, evidence or acknowledgement that these changes will help or that HP has made any effort in stopping the new crap from being added.
A Cynical person may notice that HP is devolving and shaping the site into a place that will best earn through their own HPad program and is severely limiting many of the reasons that attracted more "experienced" writers/marketers.
They can stand to lose lots of past writers in a gamble that most wont put forth the effort to move their content and they can keep advertising in job forums and attracting a user base that is for the most part ignorant of other opps on the net.
You will notice that the HPads occur more frequently when you are logged in - thats because the writers of this site count as hits to the advertisers.
If I was really cynical, i would say that Hp is NOT a content farm, its a writers mill, attract new blood, send them around the site - get money from impressions - rinse and repeat.
eventually they wont even need outside traffic - just turn on impression based ads and make me run through 400 hubs 10 times and you already earned a days pay.
I care
As SF stated earlier... this is laughable and hopefully Not an example of a rudderless boat with zero direction or knowledge of how to row
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Paul Edmondson
Level 1
4/19/11
What are the best practices for open publishing platforms due to the recent Panda update? In particular, where high quality content on a domain has been negatively impacted on average as much as any other content? Is it a question of content moderation, site architecture, both or something else?
While we believe the democratization of publishing and earning potential is an important part of the progress of the Web, we want to avoid a situation where a portion of content negatively impacts the rankings of high quality content. It appears HubPages has been impacted by this while YouTube has not, despite HubPages having a more strict content policy. In Google's view, what is the recommended moderation standard that open publishing platforms should enforce?
Open publishing platforms tend to use one of two domain models. Wordpress, Tumblr, Blogger organize mainly by subdomain, while HubPages and YouTube organize all the content under a single domain. Is there a recommendation on the best practice for open platforms regarding architecture?
In an effort to give Google clues, HubPages' internal linking structure promotes the best content. For example, we program the "related articles" suggestions with content that we think users will find useful, and we submit sitemaps with a set priority so Google knows the most important content. We also understand the challenges of fighting off spam, spun articles and various forms of attacks; we believe we do the industry's best job of fighting spam in an open publishing environment where every individual can have a voice.
Feedback from Google on open publishing platforms best practices is greatly appreciated.
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pubcrawlercom
Level 2
4/19/11
@Edmondson,
I don't think site architecture has anything to do with penalization or promotion. There hasn't been anything put out by anyone about this topic since Panda.
Now if you are on Wordpress.com or Blogger expecting to be running a real site and have good ROI on what you are writing, get off those hosted platforms and onto your private installation. You can be certain that platforms like that have many bad neighbors on the same IP, URL root, etc. There could be an association penalty and expect to see that more clearly in the future in Google's search. Been recommending people host their site for eons (not my business). Otherwise you are just sitting in their BS cloud and who knows who is doing what with your data.
Producing sitemaps says to Google that you are a savvy web person. Sets off the webmaster/SEO person flag. If your software does this by default (like Wordpress) then fine. But if it doesn't it's telling and Google labels you to watch and risk factor applied.
Only reason to publish sitemaps is to tell Google there is something somewhere they somehow haven't discovered. I find that usually means it's deeply nested content which Google seems not to care about. Likely to be lower traffic pages and less valuable. So exposing them to Google is giving Google a big list of you bad content likely and they seem to be using that to penalize a site now.
Planning on imploding all of our sitemaps to Google, removing them and disallowing Google to ever get near them again.
Sitemaps are rather unnecessary, unless we make search engines obey our mandates. That they not rummage or free root through site, but rather are told what to grab, when to grab it, when to return to get it again. Search engines won't comply with this so generally why bother?
As far as using SiteMaps to prioritize your site. I think that's mainly a myth also. You have natural site navigation from your homepage that shows what is valuable on your site. No sitemap is going to override that intentional order.
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_______________________________________________________
I wonder if ALL those wwww.yahooooo hubs hiding and earning in the background have anything to do with our wee G problem?
Why Mr Edmondson would you allow such crap to remain on this site.... if you are genuine in your statements re Quality etc?
When after 4 years of deceptive and misleading BS search engine stuffers as were generated by the entity 'Writers on Hub Pages' (the name of which in itself is an insult and indirectly points at all of us who write here!) - Originally 2640 BS articles which for 4 years generated income for management... WHY Now did you LEAVE 104 of those articles up on this site, after taking down 2300 of them? Why not all of those articles?.. that act in itself contradicts everything you are promoting... Credibility-wise Why?Of Course I Ask these Questions Only as an intelligent, logical and practical thinking person, who writes High Quality Content Here. I assume that you refer to the quality work which it seems, (by the continued presence of BS here and the constant denial of it) that the Quality Content acts solely as the 'Front' of the site, diverting attention from the BS stuff that lives out the 'Back' of it and generates questionable income?
Have you considered that previous 'Writers' point?
Does the Anti E Book stance have anything to do with the fact that the Bulk of the Quality works here and Poetry have been scraped by parties (who continue to remain members of this site) and that such works have then repackaged and sold it throughout the world as the scraper's own E-Books that also contain links to their other interests?
Does this realistically not concern the management?
Apart from loss of traffic and income, such an event would also clearly create a Duplicate Content Shadow on the bona fide writers here.. would it not?
Of Course if you object to such questions and ignore the relevance of them, then in the absence of any straight and credible answers or positive directions that intelligent, logical and practical thinking people actually need to allow them to retain faith in a place that they have promoted (albeit maybe blindly) for more than a year of their lives... I guess you could demonstrate again the value of having such honest people on board and merely repeat this message!
This was in relation to the 68aticles thread which was silenced in favor of the Thieves... Who Continue To Remain Members of HubPages and Continue to Provide HP with Income Opportunity, irrespective of the fact that they have actually helped reduce the income opportunities of others here! Does that make sense?OK - get ready for a long response. I read through the thread, and here are my responses to some of the issues raised:
- Why the rolling changes? While it would have been nice if we could read Google's mind, or if Google had told us exactly what kinds of content we had to get rid of in order to get back in their good graces, we couldn't and they haven't. And while we could have spent months analyzing the anecdotal evidence of which sites got their rankings back and guessing why, then we would face a barrage of complaints asking, "Why aren't you doing anything?!?!" Trust us - since the traffic issue affects us just as much as it does you, this is a top priority. When we've reached a reasonable level of confidence about a quality standard change, then we roll it out. To say "this is the last change you'll see again" would close us off from instituting another standard tightening-up that we might learn is crucial in Google's eyes.
Believe me, I understand that that multiple standard changes can feel wearisome. They are not staged, and they are meant to act as quickly as we can, and also give us a chance to evaluate Google's response to them. We are trying to get your traffic to your Hubs back.
- redirects - My apologies; I should have mentioned this in the blog post (I will amend it). All redirects will be resolved and the rules applied to any site we see in the chain or as the terminus. So, tinyurl and bit.ly are not problematic by themselves, but, if they redirect through or to clickbank, for example, then the link is prohibited.
- misleading Hubs - If you see crap that is misleading (like "Facebook Login", etc), PLEASE flag it. That title is misleading and we have a moderation category for it ("Deceptively Titled").
- preventing article spinners - We are working on it. A lot of spinning is obvious, but so much of it is so subtle--you really have to have a human read it, and see if it sounds "off"--that this is something difficult to automate. Sorry that we can't magically detect spun garbage, and no one is more sorry than our moderation team! (They're the ones who have to read through all that garbage day in and day out)
- Google forum post by Paul - Yes, Paul wrote a blog post about it here.
- wording of violation emails - We understand that some think they're harshly-worded. When we soften them, people complain that we're not being specific enough. If anyone has a suggestion on how to word them better, please, let us know!
- eBooks - There seems to be some confusion about what's allowed and what's not allowed. There are some ebook purveyors (like clickbank, which promotes books like "How to Get Your Ex Back" and "How to get rid of Man Boobs") that attract people who spin articles or paraphrase marketing language in the form of a useless Hub. These are the types of links we are forbidding; high-quality Hubs with these links are extremely rare.
If you want to promote your own ebook that you're offering for free, feel free to do so. If you're not sure if the ebook platform you're using will be prohibited, please just wait for an email in the next couple of weeks. I don't have a complete list, and exposing a complete list will just allow spammers to engineer workarounds.
- Panda 1 vs 2 - Each person is different, but on the whole, Panda 1 (US) affected us quite a bit more than Panda 2 (non-US). You can take a look on Quantcast for overall site stats that are fairly reliable.
- Amazon UK links - These are considered affiliate, but not prohibited affiliate links. This means you can use them, but not in those areas (like acai berries, how to get six-pack abs, etc.) that we've said are overrun with low-quality garbage. If you're not sure about whether you've written on one of these topics, just wait for the email in the coming weeks. In the future, you'll know as you work on a Hub, since an alert will come up telling you.
- HubPages Ad Program layouts - Some have suggested that when you're logged in, you see more ads. That is not the case. Hubber traffic is miniscule compared to search traffic, and ad revenue from Hubbers is also miniscule. You can take a look at this blog entry to see how layouts look with Program ads, and with AdSense alone. It also explains why we reduced all ads. (Keep in mind that if you don't like the Program, you can always shut it off and use AdSense exclusively!)
Whew! OK - props to you if you managed to read the whole thing. We don't usually patrol the Forums looking for any thread that we could jump in on (which is why we have been primarily communicating about these changes in the Blog, which has one, and only one, set of comments to respond to), but I'll try to respond to any other questions or legitimate concerns today.
I'll also add for the gloom-and-doomers: at the beginning (as in, back in 2006), a lot of people were publishing Hubs even though there was no search traffic to speak of. We looked at the way the site was run and decided it was worth our time to publish, with the hope that the search engines would eventually recognize and "reward" high quality content with visitors. The Panda updates have made clear that Google can't or won't separate the wheat from the chaff, but expects us to do it for them. Here's to hoping they'll recognize our collective efforts again.We've traditionally not made an overt request for ideas, since most Hubbers have (as they should) felt free to offer suggestions on their own. As you can see in Paul's first blog post on the topic, Hubbers weighed in with suggestions and many of them became part of the quality updates we made.
We also have an entire forum where Hubbers can start new threads suggesting things to the staff. We really do read what people suggest.
Since what affects your traffic, collectively, also affects us, we are open to suggestions. There are many members of the community, some in this thread, in fact, who know what they're talking about and are respected by the staff as much as the community at large.
In terms of guessing what Google wants, a lot has involved putting ourselves in a visitor's shoes, as many here have mentioned. How would you feel about a page that purports to have an answer to your query, but instead points you to another site that's selling you a book for $40 for the answer? We all get annoyed by this; it's reasonable to think that if Google is doing its job correctly, it will want to minimize these sorts of pages in its search results, too.
Thanks for the feedback, and don't be shy about offering suggestions.
Speaking from an editor's POV, you cannot imagine how extremely time consuming that really is. When editing, all too often I find myself making the darn changes because typing out what needs to be fixed would just take too long. So...I wound up coming up with some stock text, which is exactly what the HP team is doing.
Also, it's a scientific fact that the brain begins to turn to mush after reading/editing/moderating roughly 10 of these articles.With the ~1,000 Hubs a moderator evaluates a day, writing a description of what's wrong specifically is really tough. Keep in mind that users will email asking what's wrong, a moderator will reply, and a large percentage of them will either play dumb or contest the "ruling" in a neverending email war of attrition.
I will say that when a Hubber complains that they have no idea why their Hub was modded, and I have a look, I can usually identify the problem within a minute and can point to something in the FAQ entry on it that explains why that's not allowed. Maybe not 100% of the time, but probably 95% of the time.
Thanks, sunforged.
I would say it might be a bit of a consolation that those of us on staff who Hub extensively are forced to update our Hubs according to the changes, too, but maybe it's not.
But we really do stand by the changes, too. We had begun the process, ironically, of doing a major overhaul of our standards, about a week before the Panda update. Panda just made this all very much more urgent.
EDIT: Yes, our approach is meant to eliminate the incentive to do that, and thereby eliminate the behavior.Yes, we have discussed that. There's an entire range of options we've discussed.
The problem with that specifically is that once it leaks out that all you have to do to avoid getting labeled as spam on HubPages is to require a profile photo, we'll suddenly have thousands of new accounts with Britney Spears profile pictures.
It's a constantly moving target. But we are getting better at identifying the cruder versions of garbage.
That's better, Jason - I second SF's praise.
A few more in-depth communications like that, and you may well get people back onside.
Have you thought about putting that in the Newsletter? A lot of Hubbers don't frequent the forumsWho's to say Google will be fine with that tomorrow? As we've seen, "favored sites" are constantly in flux.
People were surprised when eHow and other sites escaped Panda 1. They were slammed by Panda 2. Who's to say there won't be a Panda 3? Maybe some of the slaps will be reversed. Trying to stay optimistic.
Money talks with authority. You are an authority site if you pay for it. That is why affiliates are taking it on the chin, as well as those who have good content on sites not deemed authority. I think Hubpages is too naive about the sinister nature of Panda. It was a money play.
So, I think Hubpages may have to hire all of us as experts in certain fields.
I don't think that this is such an easy thing to fix. I hope it is as I lost 2/3 of my traffic.
Therein lies the problem...
I too would like to say "Thanks Jason." Walking through the forums more often will always improve your ability to dodge the cabbages and spuds that many of us are able to lob.
I like Eric and Eric's idea here and I believe it is a Very Viable solution to many problems, provided it is implemented with 'other benefits'
- Which if explored from a totally different perspective could factually and commercially boost HP into becoming THE Preferred Platform. That is after all, the position that (for whatever reason) has been lost, compromised and manipulated by secondary parties, etc.
- I'm not that sure that indepth Strategic Planning has been applied to this site, as if it had, then the promoted belief that HP should adapt to Google, would not be the benchmark to making adjustments. Consider (as I'm sure you did in the adds program) - What If Google were not in the picture or a contributing factor in regard to HP performance, income and growth?
- Perhaps if one or two the hubber 'resources' that you still, by the skin of your teeth, have here.. could provide you with that level of practical professional advice - you should consider exploring that option professionally. I believe that very point is one of the reasons 'other entities' are able to negatively influence HP.. Nothing personal, but I think you guys need this sort of help, to get back to your Core Business and Lead as opposed to Follow.
Thanks for taking the time to respond Jas.. It's the First Step!
People have come and go since I've been at HubPages (about 4 1/2 years now). We understand that some changes may make us lose some valued users. That said, we haven't regretted any of the decisions we've made, and hope some of those users have second thoughts and return.
(But, if they don't, we still wish them well.)Yes, they probably will. We're getting smarter, too, though.
It is a clever idea, and I think your point of randomizing it might be a good one. I'll bring it up with engineering.
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