How To Improve Your HubScore

The first thing that any Hub author needs to learn (and accept) is that HubScores go up AND down. The HubPages website re-calculates statistics about every 15 minutes and many new authors immediately freak out and go running to the forum to post a message with a headline screaming "help, my HubScore is going down...!"

First of all, take a few deep breaths and stop panicking. There's nothing that's happening to you that doesn't happen to the rest of us. HubScores are based on a variety of factors and as these fluctuate, so does the score. Over time, you might even notice that your Hub has peak and off-peak times. I've got Hubs that regularly move up and down across a 10-point range during the course of a single day. As a result of these changes, your Author Score will also go up and down. It's perfectly normal.

The HubPages FAQ can tell you how HubScore is computed. No, it won't give you an exact formula. That would make it too easy for spammers and bad players to game the system. However if you're looking to build a strong Hub or want to improve the score of one you've published already, here are some suggestions that can help you.

Have a good title and summary.

Really good titles are three to five words, and are a statement, NOT a question. (That only really works on the tv show Jeopardy) Jokes or clever phrases might seem fun, but something that really says what the Hub is about works much better. Make sure you've written your own summary text too. You want a few short and to-the-point sentences that say what the Hub is about and includes some good keyword phrases.

Have effective and relevant Hub tags.

The tags you use on a Hub should relate directly to the Hub topic and content. Most people do not search by single wods anymore, so make sure to use "keyword phrases." These two and three word combinations work best when also happen to be found in your actual Hub content. Do not try include every phrase in the world that you can think of as this too can hurt your Hub.

Have a good variety of content.

Do you have a mix of content capsules as part of your Hub content? Having a few pictures, a video that goes with what you wrote about and links to other resources help provide a really good mix of info for your Hub visitors. There are nine different types of content capsules. Having five or six of them is a good way to ensure you have diversified your content sufficiently.

Time

A just-published Hub is going to have a low score. They tend to start out somewhere in the 40s. During the first few days, this slowly climbs until the Hub finally develops it's natural HubScore range. It takes a bit for the HubPages system to study and learn the new Hub, and it's proably not even been recognized by the major search engines yet. I let new Hubs grow on their own for anywhere from two weeks to a month before I consider what their score is and if I want to try and boost it. This also allows for a useful amount of statistics to gather so that I have good information and feedback.

Traffic

The biggest factor many people overlook when it comes to Hub performance is traffic. If your Hub is getting a few visits per day, it will easily be outranked by Hubs on the same topic that are getting hundreds or thousands of visits. If people who are interested in your topic aren't finding your Hub, you're not getting meaningful traffic. Getting fellow Hub authors to visit is NOT meaningful traffic. You really want to attract people from outside of HubPages. If you write about things you truly enjoy and like, you probably have friends who share your interests or other websites where you talk about the same thing. Tell those folks. And if you are building backlinks, make sure they come from a quality site or they won't actually help your Hub.

Linking multiple times to the same resources.

HubPages doesn't want you to just promote some other website. That's their #1 definition of spam. If that's all you're trying to do, there are plenty of other places that will let you build landing pages (that's what those sorts of pages are called). Once you have more than one or two links to the same web domain on a Hub, you start to negatively impact your score.

Linking to poor resources.

You're going to get the most benefit out of your links by making them go to other great resources on your topic. Linking to a site that search engines consider a "bad neighborhood" can also lower your score. Using cloaking in your links turns them into "wildcards" that add to the domains you are showing and tends to trigger Hubs into being considered "overly-promotional."

Duplicate content.

HubPages runs a filter to see if your text appears somewhere else on the web. If it does, that too will cause you to have a lower score or even get your Hub unpublished. Some peole complain they can't help but use quotes or other prevalent content to make their hubs, but it's just a matter of keeping the quoted stuff down to a very small percentage of your page. And if you stole the copy from someone else (plagiarizing), that person can contact HubPages and have your Hubs outright deleted and your account might even be banned.

Being a soapbox and not an informed opinion.

Hubs are not blogs. (Repeat that to yourself a few times) If all you've done is post a personal rant, it's not going to be as attractive to a reader as an informed argument that includes links to facts and other information. You'll also get more comments and better reader interaction from something that resembles an intelligent discussion more than a one-side monologue. One of the biggest reasons Hubs get flagged as "substandard" is that they are just an opinion and not a well-informed and researched article that's of genuine interest and use to everyone else.