Today we are putting a few staff accounts on Subdomains. This is a pretty major change to the site that we've been working hard to get out as fast as possible. You can see an example at (In the next hour or two at) http://pauledmondson.hubpages.com
Once we get data and work through bugs that turn up, we'll expand the test. I have a list of people that volunteered to be part of the test. Thank you!
If you missed the original announcement, check out the blog and the forums to catch up.
http://blog.hubpages.com/2011/06/prepar … ess-panda/
http://hubpages.com/forum/topic/77245
A few things to be aware of as part of this test. Facebook likes will get reset since the pages have a new URL. Internal links in the text and link capsules to Hubs on subdomains haven't been updated, but they will redirect (We'll do this at a later stage). Most programed links like related hubs, links from tag pages etc have been updated to point to subdomains.
If you see bugs related to subdomains, please post them here. I'm sure there are a few.
I'll share with you the changes we see with this initial test.
The "more" tag (above your Hubs on your profile page) doesn't work properly - it goes to "latest Hubs" for all Hubbers instead of yours.
I get the same result if I try to subscribe to your RSS feeds - I get ALL latest Hubs instead of YOUR latest Hubs.
Thank you for finding this bug, Marisa! I'll let engineering know.
Does this mean that the Facebook "likes" will be reset and added or will we lose them?
Peggy, unfortunately the count will be reset to 0 (although any existing likes on people's Facebook walls will be OK; they will redirect to the new, correct URL).
This has to do with the fact that Facebook doesn't follow redirects and will treat the new Hub URL as a new page when counting shares and likes.
Is it part of your testing to test and see if this change actually does what you want it to do?
And by that I mean by making these changes the good hubs rise up in rankings because they're not limited by the bad writers on here.
And the bad writers either stay put or drop even lower?
Hopefully that is part of your testing, not just to see what it doesn't hurt our rankings because they are redirects... but that it will improve our rankings too.
Otherwise it seems like a HUGE change to make without really knowing if it does what you want it to.
Yes, absolutely - the goal is a significant increase in traffic/rankings. Otherwise, as you say, it's not worth the move.
Good good! I can't wait to hear about the results or to experience them myself!
Wasn't that also the goal with changing affiliate marketing rules? And duplicate content? And topics we could write on? And the word-to-product ratio? And on and on ad nauseum? Sheesh.
Those are all things that would benefit Hubpages as a whole.
This is something that would benefit those writers who are good, and hurt those writers who are bad, without effecting the rest of the Hubpages users.
Very excited to see the results. I have faith this will be just the thing HP has been hoping for. Good luck Paul--anything I can do to help, please just say the word.
Keeping the faith!
Very interesting. I've no idea what any of that means - but I'm about to read the forum and blog postings.
Yes sudhakia, you surely are. And here's hoping you get what you're looking for.
I hope you're not getting paid for your spam. You're not doing a great job.
Wow, froggie! s/he's already banned from HP. And I never even got to see the post.
Something tells me it wasn't worth seeing, though.
I reported the profile as spam - did it disappear? If so, that's AWESOME!
Throw me in on the test if you could, I read the thread but didn't get a chance to volunteer when you put it out.
Liking what I am hearing.
Is hubpages adding the +1 feature?
One glitch I have noticed - If I click the "more" button on your list of hubs from your profile page I do not get your hubs, I get taken back to the main site and a general list of hot/latest hubs.
They get a 301 redirect to the subdomain page. It's a permanent redirect so all the external links will still work.
I'm very interested to see how this is going to work out, if you still need volunteers, sign me up, I'll give it a shot.
I am looking forward to it being rolled out to the guinea pigs like me! :-)
Paul, Are you going to be emailing the people that volunteered to let them know that they are going to be part of this?
In the thread where this was first announced, Paul E said Yes to that question:
http://hubpages.com/forum/topic/77245?p … ost1673927
The stats no longer show accurate hits --- in fact shows only a few.... is this a problem that is being fixed - or is it a change to Hub Stats.
I asked the question here
http://hubpages.com/question/127372/wha … hubs-stats
few follow so far and no answer
Paul, if you are still looking for volunteers - I am interested.
I am very excited about this change. It's a good effort to distinguish between authors and hopefully to improve our rankings, if we write well.
On subdomains we will lose the count of any existing "likes" from facebook as a result of the change.
The good news is the initial data looks promising, but too soon to tell.
Hubpages can use my account for the new subdomain test. I have already opted to volunteer for this test in the hubpages blog. I hope all works well. I am pretty confident about Hubpages getting massive traffic again with initiation of subdomains. Best of luck to all of you.
I think i know why we are not ranking so well. because when people on the internet are using content generators they use hubpages as its main tool of resources, i know this because when i created my first ever hub i got over 200k in links in minutes which i never did so its dragging us down because of the NOFOLLOW syndrome we have on our hubs. do a test run on your subdomain with and see if i am right ps also look at the ancour text people are using.
use this website to show you what i mean. http://www.bluebacklinks.com
Ha ha ha ... I just used that on one of my domains and discovered somebody's writing quite OK stuff and saying they own my domain. Oops, they made a typo! But I've got loads of backlinks from that
shhhhh
As near as I can tell, that site gives the backlinks to HubPages, not to individual hubs. All the links I found were to HubPages, with none to my own hubs.
No wonder you found so many!
Hello Paul, I have checked your old profile link and a few hub links and all are redirecting well to the new subdomain. That's really great on your part. You people are working so hard.
Plus one more thing. pauledmondson.hubpages.com profile has also been indexed in the search engines within a few hours of starting the test. Good job.
Paul Deeds and I will discuss further the next phase Wednesday. I've looked at the accounts that volunteered. Thank you! We know the type of accounts we want to test. I'll confirm over email with those folks in the coming days.
I wonder why HP doesn't just contact those with the "type of accounts" they are looking for?
It would help to understand the "type" of hubs desired for the test before volunteering hubs of the wrong type, I would think!
I would imagine that if I were impressed into a test that caused the death of 1/2 my traffic I just might get a wee bit irritated.
@Randy Think about it. HP need to test a wide range of scenarios. It's okay writing to the high performers, but what would the other emails look like? "We've got plenty of hubbers with well-written high performing hubs, but we also need to test some hubbers with badly written hubs that perform poorly and we wondered if you'd consider volunteering?" It's not going to work, is it? ;-)
Is that what that email was about? I thought it was a jealous hubber!
I would get the email directed at "mediocre" hubbers, methinks! ;-)
Would I be right in thinking that this change will open up to each and every one of us every hub url going? Like if I wanted to write a hub called Make Money Online and couldn't use the URL because it belonged to someone else, I can now? Well not now, but in future when the change is rolled out.
@IzzyM That's a possibility. It may not happen at the beginning, but it's something that may open up in the future.
It seems correct that it can be done since the entire URL would be unique. But thinking this through more carefully, we have to ask, what happens to the redirect? That would have two Hubs with the same URL. However, I don't see this becoming an issue if new Hubs do not have a 301 redirect. There would be no need to redirect new Hubs, only Hubs existing prior to moving someone into their own subdomain would need to be redirected. But there might be other issues with the conversion that I may have missed. Whatever it is, Paul is doing a great job at keeping on top of things.
could we have the subdomain as a regenerated code so that we could manage all our hubs or wil that still not work
Paul, how are user names that have spaces handled? For example, in my case I have a space between my first and last name. The present URL uses a plus sign (+) instead of the space. Will that work for subdomains too? If not, I have no problem with eliminating the space, just like you do with your username. As a matter of fact I think I prefer that. The + sign looks strange at the left side of a URL.
The tentative plan is to let people select a subdomain independent of their username, so you shouldn't have to worry about a username with a space in it.
Thanks Paul. That sounds great! I tested the redirect on one of your hubs the old way, and it properly returned a 301 status. You guys are doing really well. Feel free to include me as a volunteer.
Um... what's the point to the change?
This will cause traffic issues for links on outside sources, at least until you get the links redirected. I myself, will not be changing the many links I've placed elsewhere on my blogs.
This is going to make some url's very long, as there are so many people who do not alter the hub url to vary from the title. I, myself, used to to this. I would rather not a long drawn out URL.
Can we opt out?
Whitney, you will not need to change links to your Hubs. The 301 redirect will take care of that. It is done at the same time as the conversion. Try it with Paul's Hubs and you'll see. I sometimes replace pages on my own business site with related pages and I use the 301 redirect so that any existing back links don't get broken. That works fine.
This is really good to know Glenn, thanks for sharing your know-how!
Sounds like a good option, but not sure if it will suit eveyone though
I thought the "rel-author tag" is enough already. I hope the initial tests will be overall positive. I am a little bit chary about losing some inclusive and comprehensive benefits (linking) we get from HubPages about this subdomain thing by author.
All the stats in my hubs state from hubpages. Infact, i get many google hits before this change. The real problem is my hpad cpm drops to around 1. It may be due to HPADS detect even the high quality google traffic as hubpages traffic due to redirects. I am confused and turned off hubpages ad programm due to this.
Apologies for dual submission but my suggestion is relevant here as well.
My suggestion is that articles submitted to HP become an 'internal only' by default [using a nofollow tag or similar].
If an author wants their article out there on the www for Google to index they would need to request a review to get it approved.
Google will only see the approved (do follow) articles and so this will reduce the Panda penalty.
HP can remain a 'writers' community with a policy of allowing everyone to submit articles.
Users of the site will still be able to see all the articles, search for them etc. from the HP home page.
This cuts down the work load for approvals - much could be done electronically with two tools - one for basic submission and one for wider www index submission. A system of approved authors could also cut down the work load - with penalties for junk.
This would lift the Google rating for the entire site which will benefit everyone.
It could be done relatively quickly by making every article 'internal only' except for 'approved authors' and requesting authors to seek approval for the articles they wanted indexed on the www.
I would suggest that many HP authors may be quite happy to have some or all of their articles as 'internal only'. It provides a learning environment for authors.
The sub-domain idea for authors is a good one, but its a lot of work and it still leaves the 'home' site with a poor Google rating after Panda penalties (which probably affects advertising etc.). I suspect that the 'poor' rating for the HP home page and URL will still pull down the rating of the sub-domains.
Most of the work could be covered by software and by approving authors. Authors would have to apply for approval to be indexed and would know what was required - this would cut down the work.
Sorry the tag is NOINDEX
Pages with this tag could still make money and have HP ads and adsense. While HP authors are not allowed to click on ads, non-authors can. While the pages would only be found indirectly, not through search engines, they would have the same viewing status as any other page. If the page was popular it would be read and earn money - but much less than an indexed page. Because of the downgrade to rank after Panda many of the hits and payments may come from this indirect source now for many authors. Links to the page would still work, but they would not boost ranking because the page is not indexed.
As I said on another thread, if approving an author is going to be a big part of the process, why not simply require approval when an author joins, as is the case at Infobarrel? If an author had to submit their first few articles for manual approval, that would knock out all the automated spammers and discouraged other spammers. Plus it would catch all those who misunderstand what HP is about.
Given that HubPages' existing filters can't identify junk, I'm still wondering how you propose they will identify which pages need to be de-indexed.
This was a reporting bug, not an actual change in traffic. The bug has been squashed now, hooray.
hubpages better quash all their rubbish content and very soon or else panda is going to kick us to the floor, matt cutts even said that one piece of bad content can bring down the whole website.
Here' s a radical suggestion.
Given that ICAN is going to allow all sorts of extensions e.g.
.apple
.ipad
.ibm
etc.
Why doesn't HP buy the rights to
.hubs
Then every author could have their own domain name!!
That's a big purchase, but somebody should do it...
That would not seem like a very large purchase if it saved hubpage's neck.
Yeah, and I suppose if you divide that by the number of hubbers it isn't all that much..
We could probably scrape that much up amongst ourselves.
An interesting thought process may emerge from talking about this.
That's not even necessary. Dividing us up by subdomain will be fine as HP is already testing with staff. Google treats each subdomain as individual without combining rank.
I don't know much about this but there are obvious 'loss of link juice issues' with sub-domains + others such as if the sub-domain get banned the whole URL gets banned ++++
to quote from
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/subd … z1QuRI6rjN
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
With a subdomain, the forum or blog will be listed as a separate entity in the Google search results, which is good for owning the results and one’s reputation management. However, Google and other engines will generally not list more than two of these subdomains in the search results, unless those subdomains can prove to Google that they are independent and relevant entities.
I would like to reference Vanessa Fox, an ex-Googler and contributor to Search Engine Land :
Google is no longer treating subdomains (blog.widgets.com versus widgets.com) independently, instead attaching some association between them. The ranking algorithms have been tweaked so that pages from multiple subdomains have a much higher relevance bar to clear in order to be shown.
It’s not that the “two page limit” now means from any domain and its associated subdomains in total. It’s simply a bit harder than it used to be for multiple subdomains to rank in a set of 10 results. If multiple subdomains are highly relevant for a query, it’s still possible for all of them to rank well.
Home Depot is one site which has cleared the relevancy bar at Google with subdomains at HomeDepot.com that are actually marketed as individual sites. Take careers.homedepot.com and look into its backlinks, even if this subdomain was on a whole different domain, like HomeDepotJobs.com, it would probably rank just as highly.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Major problem with the redirecting - not able to view any of my Hubs - please fix ASAP!!!!
What if HubPages were to take the wordpress.com approach, where you could use your own domain name, instead of using subdomains? Would that improve rankings?
I want the flexibility of using my own domain, but with all the wonderful publishing features of the hubpages platform.
jacob
On Wednesday HubPages will begin a full roll out of subdomains for each of its authors ?
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/07/13/ … %E2%80%9D/
Nice of them to tell us first, wasn't it :snort:
No it wasn't short notice at all. Paul announced the test two weeks ago. You should be happy it's finally being rolled out to the rest of us. You have a score of 96 when I looked ... so you are one to benefit getting your well-deserved traffic back after Google registers all the changes to subdomains. Be patient, it may not happen overnight. But I am sure it will be worth it.
He announced the *test*, yes. The WSJ piece was an announcement of a full roll-out. I agree with SF and others - the test hasn't had time to "mature" yet. Don't all web pages get an initial boost in the SERPS and then experience a die-back? It could be that the good results in the test were down to the boost, and that once the boost is over, they will languish in the doldrums - possibly for even longer than they would have done had they remained as part of HP's main domain.
The fact that people only get to hear about it second hand or via Facebook is rather disturbing. It's almost as though we're being told that we have to have a Facebook account in order to have even a chance of being kept in the loop.
Just what is it about HubPages and Facebook? They seem to be best mates these days.
Thanks for posting this. As usual, the writers are the last to know.
I just saw the link on my Facebook page, and read it...
Wonder when we'll hear more?
Assuming this means that the couple of hubs that I have that have thousands of Facebook Likes on them will reset the counter at zero then as per mentioned? I am not thrilled about this...I assumed we would be given an option and I would like to see evidence that this is going to indeed be beneficial to ALL of us.
I am not prepared to give up the Adsense income that I make on my main profile on the basis of a "test" that hasn't even had time to age yet. My income has NOT been affected by Panda..sorry but it hasn't and I am happy with the way things are. I would have expected that we would receive further detailed information about this, test results, etc., before we are all just changed over. Not happy to hear about this second hand. I'm becoming more and more unhappy with the distance of the staff. This is very frustrating. The last thing I would expect is to hear about something that affects my income on effing Facebook of all places.
I'm not saying that this isn't a good move, I'm just saying that making a change like this without providing evidence is not appreciated. Maybe it is time to move on....
I must admit I'm a little worried that I am hearing this second hand?
I think the point is that advance warning would be nice, especially if this is going to change all urls and break all incoming links? That could, at least short term, make things even worse.
links will be 301'd- I think thats been clear since minute 1 - its the first question asked (over and over again)
I was thinking along LEA's line - a thanks for telling us, type of thing.
I doubt anything will happen today (or anytime in the near future), regardless of what the article says. My understanding is that we will have an opportunity to choose a name for "our" subdomain, but HP has not requested one from me at least.
Simone made a comment in the "awesome.hubpages" thread about a decision to use usernames?
I just glanced at it .. but thats the last Ive seen on the topic until this WSJ article.
Its odd using "blogger" as a comparison - as on blogger you have almost full control and get 100% of your advertising.
If HP goes a forced subdomain route ... we will be giving up 40% just to use their limited publishing platform .. Im curious as to how this will pan out for new accounts. Does HP have the juice to push a new subdomain farther up the SERP's then a new self hosted or blogger blog that would be more profitable in income opportunities?
A couple of weeks ago I posted that question and Paul said "The tentative plan is to let people select a subdomain independent of their username..."
I hope to get that request soon.
301ing Hubpages en masse could in itself cause a massive drop in page rank. That is one reason why I had assumed it would be staged.
Some usernames may not work as subdomain names. See my post about that.
I've started a new thread about the next steps with subdomains.
http://hubpages.com/forum/topic/78912
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