Quick fix for your idled hub status (The sleeping Zzz's)

Good suggestion; I just added a word to the title but it does the same thing. Personally I just didn't see this as that big a deal, but some people sure got riled over it.

I replaced my title and a couple text capsule headings with keyword-rich alternatives and was right back on there. Hopefully that won't simply "fool" HubPages but will actually draw more google traffic.

I was irritated at first, but once I learned what the reasoning was, it wasn't a big deal anymore. But yeah, some people are taking it personally, like HP is trying to censor them or control them.

Kinda ridiculous...

I found it hard to edit poems. But what you suggested is easy, I will try this In Shaa Allah. Thanks for sharing Goody5.

I will share your hub.

You're right, I have a lot of poems, but I changed the odd words in the titles and it worked. Thanks for the tips about the content.

This is a great hub and thanks for the changing one word idea, i just put another picture in the hub and that worked has well. I to didn't think that it was such a big deal, but some people were acting like it was the end of HubPages.

Vote up and more !!! SHARING !

Nice notion Goody5! I've taken to doing a bit of a 'revamp' on all my 'snoozers' to wake them up and get them doing physical jerks. All the same, thanks for the tip. If things get on top of me I shall bear the alternative in mind. I have some books to write, after all!

That fixed the z idle problem. I am still concerned because I am not getting any more hits from Google. I hope you write an article on how to fix that problem. Vote up!!

Simple enough for a fix on an idle hub. This will help many worried hubbers to get some much need sleep zzz!

It is a good idea to let people know if a hub is not getting much attention from search engines, but since almost all my traffic sources have names starting with "google" I wonder why the algorithm they use will spare one hub and idle another with more views. It would be great if one could also rank one's hubs by earnings. After all while many of us enjoy writing most want to make money. If we did not we would be running a blog somewhere. It seems to me that the team at HubPages unconsciously think of writers as artists penniless by choice devoting all to our craft and that we think money a dirty word.

Great idea for a quick fix. As others have said, changing the title often helps, adding 'ad words' and adding videos or pictures.

Having a lot of hubs makes it a difficult task but I find just working on one or two hubs a day (with Zzs) will get the job done.

Voted up, useful, and interesting.

Thank you for this nice, easy and quick fix!

Voted up and useful!

The risk with this fix is that you are fixing the symptom but not the cause. Why would your hub not be getting many requests from search engines?

Useful fix. I actually unpublished two of my hubs, since they were time sensitive and out of date.

thanks for the suggestion...

Thanks for the great idea!

You are the man Goody5 ... as always I can count on you to solve some of life's curveballs. Now to go and edited those snoozing hubs of mine!

Good info. GBY

This is a good idea, Goody5. Voted up.

Thanks for the tip, Goody5.

Nice info, i was doing it earlier

Goody5...thank you so much for the info..I have been reading your suggestion hubs..what an education I'm getting with #101..and I have had issues with google lately, in reference to hp..after years of internet use..they questioned my name, didn't feel it was up to their standards.hello..it wasn't an avatar..it is the name I was given from the witness protection program.( just kidding, but that's what I felt like telling them).it took a couple weeks,but they finally replied with..oops,sorry for inconvenience....whatever !

I wish it was only stale hubs. I have one idled hub but it's only a couple of months old. And it was getting regular traffic, so it wasn't even idle. The problem is, even if you republish, Hubpages may not give the hub enough time to build up traffic before idling it again.

Great suggestions! Thank you.

This is true, it will cause your idle hubs to become featured again. To receive actual traffic to the hub though, it's usually best to spend a couple minutes researching your hub's subject matter and just add a new text module. This will help your hub stay evergreen and will ultimately increase your earnings! Great work on this hub.

Hello,

Thank you for posting this. I was wondering what in the world all these new changes mean. I tried it and it worked. voted this up and shared. :)

Great way to get it fixed real quick. I have been trying to edit my weaker hubs and add content to the ones with the zzz's all in all a good hub! Thanks for the advice voted up!

Thanks for the heads up and a really informative hub that is most appreciated.

great tips thanks for sharing.

lol...thanks for all your help...Yes I found it, but at the same time reading your article, it would take me forever to change a few words with so many hubs. Maybe just time to put some of my poems in ebooks and sell them. lol

Good ideas! Once I figured out how the idle worked I love it. When you go back an look at your work there is almost always something you can do to change it to make it sharper.

Great tips, thanks for sharing!

Thanks for the quick fix method Goody5. I've just left my idle hubs idle since this feature was introduced. Liked and shared!

I am going to re-read this Hub and try to do as you are saying...You are doing us a great service in our writing....Thanks so much...

Thank you so much for all the suggestions. I can easily "play the game" with some of the hubs, but will never change anything from poetry hubs where every single word has a special meaning in creating an image.

For Hub Pages to put my hard work on idle is arrogant to say the very least especially since ALL my hubs are checked as NONE commercial

I will definitely use your suggestion about changing the profile page to "show idle hubs". The change about the profile is also abusive and they changed it to the new format without my consent. To say that i am pissed will not even begin to tell the story. I am not surprised that many of the best writers have already left HP and many more are considering to do just that (me included)

I didn't think to do much about it because i noticed the idle hubs are seasonal hubs, in most cases. But after reading this, I will--thanks for your useful tips.

Hi Goody5,

To start with, i don't know how Hubpages decides a hub need to be featured or Zzzed. I had about three hubs that were receiving little or no traffic yet two were idled and one is still featured. Your suggestion is a welcome and i think the option to feature an idled hub on the profile is a much needed one. Voted up.

Am in the middle of "repairing" now! Thanks! Voted up & useful. Also added a link to my hub, "Five Tips..." https://hubpages.com/community/Five-Must-Dos-for-H...

Thanks so much for this! I am repairing my sleeping hubs now! Voted up and useful!

Thank you for the tips and how to enable idle hubs to be viewed again. I am just getting back to writing on here and wanted those idle hubs to be able to be seen while slowly working on them.

Thanks for this information Goody5, I was wondering what all the Zz's were now I know. I took a quick look at my account before commenting and out of 36 (not many I know) 5 are actually active so I have a bit of work to do. Bless you for keeping us all informed.

Voted up & U & I

good info. Thanks!

It also seems to work if you edit/add a pic to your hub.

Thanks for the information...I really appreciate it.

Thank you for clarifying the situation for me in two really good Hubs linked together for easy reading . . . you have done this before.

However wouldn't less hubbers mean less competition how does that weaken Hub Pages, or is it forcing the better writers elsewhere?

So if Google is out to police the internet how does attacking Hub Pages accomplish that?

Idle, HP wants to put good hubs on Idle while others should have never been published to begin with due to every error possible in them. My Remedy: UNPUBLISH and Use Elsewhere. Sick of HP games. I am working on becoming another loss to HP, by jumping ship.

The Yes No for featured hubs. Hubbers have no control their either since function does not work.

Such great advise. I made a change to one of my hubs and it worked like a charm

Yes it does, but then you are put on pending status again. I just waited 2 days for a hub to get out pending after making some changes.

On my own site, deleting inactive pages, seems to increase traffic to the remaining ones, I think it works by increases the concentration of link juice, it that is the case it is a good idea, provided you remember to monitor your own hubs.

Seems to me this method is just a band-aid for the bleeding Hub! OK, so you do this, it sleeps for another 24 hours, and then what??? It will probably "go to sleep" again because Google still won't like it.

Thank you, this is very interesting. I never even studied that part of my account page because I never really did care either way. You have now made me want to check! Happy Thanksgiving!

Excellent suggestion. I'm going to change a few hubs right now. Voting this Up and Useful. SHARING.

Yes changing some content here and there will most definitely wake up your hubs, however once a hub has been put to sleep it gets slapped with a no index tag, telling the search engines to do just that. The major problem with this is the fact that when the no index tag gets taken, off the search engines don't bother crawling pages they've already been told not to index even if you tell Google to fetch, thus a loss in SERP and targeted traffic is the result.

Hi Goody5, just stopped by again to say that your instructions have worked a treat for me anyway. I don't worry now if it does go back to the idle stage again, at least with your tips I know how to rectify.

I hope mary615 has tried it.

So, Page1 SEO tactics if a Hub gets Idled the best thing is to pull it and either put it somewhere else or republish on HP with some rewriting and a different title and url.

I have a bunch of hubs that don't include the sentence "Jason found the box was too heavy to move." in them. How do I get these hubs un-idled?

Excellent hub here on this latest change here on HP. Very insightful and, to say the least ----helpful indeed!

Thank you so much for this great hub to help us all out in a rather quick manner. I did not realize just a few quick changes would do the trick, although I have done so on one or two, and it worked.

Voted Way Up and sharing

In His Love, Faith Reaper

Many thanks for sharing this one. I was really in need of the particular solution. Its indeed very simple and informative as well explained in a very easy way.

Votes up and sharing as well.

Really excellent idea. It will surely help all of us.

Thanks for sharing.

Very useful information shared by you for everyone. Though I have not faced the problem of idled hubs so far, but sooner or later it might happen. Your information will be of great help then.

Very useful information indeed. Was of great help, as I returned after some time to see new symbols on HP... Thanks a lot!

Thanks for the information. I had discovered what you say is true, changing just one word (although I usually change more than that) will take away the idle hub status. As for poems or stories, if any hubber has written an intro, you can change/add a word in that to keep the poem or story intact. Sharing your hub.

Thanks for the information. :-)

I have a lot of idled hubs and am waiting for some time for me to fix them. It is true that you can easily make it featured by changing a word or two, at least temporarily until it gets idled again. But I am trying to figure out what is wrong with it - why it is idle. Maybe it doesn't have a proper searchable title. Maybe there are glaring errors in it that are turning people off. Maybe it just doesn't have enough information to please the people that are reading. Maybe it is a topic that nobody wants to know about. It is actually good to do this critical thinking, because it will help me decide how to write future hubs that hopefully won't be idle.

I agree Millionaire Tips, the IDEA behind the idled hubs is good, but I think the implementation could be a lot better. Simply flagging them as hubs needing work could help. I think deleting, reworking and republishing may help a lot.

This is VERY useful information, so I voted it UP + Useful!

I ran into this problem a few weeks ago. I decided to update the affected hubs by adding or refreshing my content, tweaking the title, rearranging the layout and where necessary, deleting modules. But for some, I made the decision to delete them from Hubpages and I'm ok with it. Some articles aren't going to generate a lot of interest for one reason or another.

Thanks for this information and a good tip there :)

Nicely explained and one word is all it takes. Thanks!

I like having the sleeping notice. It gives me a reason to go back through some of my older hubs and check to make sure that spelling and grammar are correct. I've also thought of new content to add to some of them.

Think about it: if changing one word is all it takes to un-sleep a hub, where's the value? What is HubPages telling us?

Thanks for the tips, let me see if it works for me or not.

Voted up!

nicomp most authors will change more than one word, if a hub has lost its traffic then the realistic options are delete or enhance. Hubpages wants traffic, we want exposure for our work and sites, that's the deal.

adrianlawrence : yes, most hubbers will change more than one word, BUT there's no way to know why a particular hub has lost its traffic in the first place. Therefore changing any number of words is an academic exercise and nothing more.

Now, if HubPages is committing to begin featuring the hub after a few words have been changed, then that's a horse of a different color. I don't think this is the case.

We do want exposure. Exposure cannot possibly be as easy as changing a few words now and then. If 50 million new people discover HubPages every month, then your hub is new to them whether you changed a few words of not.

This was a serious sweet and useful Hub. Cannot wait to see if it does the trick in terms of traffic. Thanks!!

its not so easy to put in place a system which check's if the author has really improved their hub, so I guess that hubpages is just going to idle the hub again until changes are made of such a nature that the hub starts to get real traffic again.

"its not so easy to put in place a system which check's if the author has really improved their hub,"

It's impossible.

Thanks for this. I will definitely give it a try.

I noticed that HubPages changed their tagline from "50 million people" to "35 million people".

I don't view the idle status as a punishment, but rather a suggestion (automatic I'm sure) that you might want to re-visit the hub and think about how to improve it. HP is trying to make the entire site more relevant to a greater audience (non-hubbers) so as to improve their SE status. Just changing one word so that you can get it out of idle state might make you feel warm and fuzzy, but it's not really helpful to the community and HP overall.

The idled hub thing is a good idea. Most of the idled hubs I removed and pasted elsewhere seem to be getting more traffic elsewhere. I remove ideled hubs when they reach zero views in 30 days. Someone said the no-index tag prevents search engines looking at them again even just to check whether the tag has been removed, so idling looks like a one-way street.

I fixed some of my idle hubs, some are changes to featured but some are still idle even it says needs more revision. Recently I just published an exclusive hub but it got idle status from the first it ever published. Even though thanks for your explanation, and I'll try to figure it out more. :)

Thanks for the tip! But it seems like it doesn't work 100%. Some of my hubs still remain as idle despite revisions.

I had that too. I revised again and it got through. I THINK the revised hubs are processed manually and it depends on who does the processing.

Yes, it would be quite easy just to do a "diff" on the two versions and see what changed. If the changes were not substantive, it might not get out of hub jail.

They can't be checked manually, or if so, it is done at random.

Try this: Click the edit button. Don't change anything at all. Click done editing and wait for hub to be featured again, after the pending BS.

Can't be done! I have done it.

Thanks! This is an excellent summary of idle status and how to work with it. I was aware of the issue, but busy with other things. Now that I'm starting to address this, your clear guide makes it easy to get going!

I actually appreciate the new Idle status - I believe it will keep my best hubs showing up on Google with higher page rank.

Today the HubPages tagline is "37" million people. In 10 months the entire population of the United States discovered HubPages!

Goody...Thank you so much! This is exactly what I was looking for! I appreciate the education. You're a Pal.......showed up in the nick of time, just like Superman....UP+++

If you unpublish a hub, does it stay there? And you can publish it again later?

I ask because I have 2 Christmas stories and wondered if I should unpublish them... But I don't want to delete them.

Okay. Thanks!!!

very useful and easy to edit. thanks ! voted useful

Please leave Christmas hubs published. I went into one yesterday. It was a wonderful hub. I went there because a broken link error message showed up on my stats. The reason? Someone had unpublished a hub I linked to.

Gee, tirelesstraveler, come and look at mine... hee hee.

Thanks so much for all of your helpful tips. I've been going through all my hubs and tweaking my writing and adding fresh photographs as needed. Making these changes has helped my status and frankly has encouraged me to be a better writer. Vote up and useful!

Just did it to all my inactive hubs - thanks for the idea!

Thanks for your teaching. I was actually stressed up because it has never happened to me. I have edited the hub and it's now on a pending status. Thanks once again, i hope it will be featured.

It worked! All but two of my hubs are now active, and one of the two inactive ones is one I was planning on rewriting anyway. THANKS A LOT!!!

Very sneaky, Goody5. I like it!

Thank You for the helpful tips

Very useful hub, i did read thet ever so often its good to just do a tiny tweek on your hubs for the sake of google, they like new material which you can get around that requirement by doing what you describe in your hub.

Interesting tips that I will try.I wonder what the real number of hub traffic is?How many hubbers quit each month compared to how many long term hubbers are here to stay?

Goody5,

thanks for the tips and techniques on changing the status

of an idled hub i think making a few tweaks the article and changing

the title of it are just a few ideas to begin with.

thanks again for the information.

Voted up and shared

This is a good "quick-fix" and I appreciate these tips. However, while I'm in the editing mode, I plan to take extra time to update and revise (especially my early hubs.) Voted up and will share.

Well, now I know what to do should one of my hubs become idled. Thanks for the tips Goody5!

Thank you for the tips. I am sharing voting and now following.

Useful tips. Thanks.

So now I understand what's really happening here and why I also should consider leaving hubpages.

@Junko , we are being killed by the NOINDEX tag that HubPages implemented. Most of my hubs are no longer indexed. That's pretty much why I don't write here any more.

I'm sorry to hear either stopped writing here on the hub pages or you are considering leaving. According to this hub - https://hubpages.com/community/Google-vs-the-Hub-P... over 141,641 of our fellow hubbers have decided to leave the hub pages since just September 2012. Hubbers are getting to be an endangered species with only 75,136 of us left roaming the earth now. I hope both you junko and nicomp have a change of heart.

@Possum Lover , why should I have a change of heart? I was loyal for 4 years. I have over 1.5 million page views. By my estimate I've earned HubPages over $50K. If they are going to block my scribblings from the search engines, I'm not going to contribute any more.

I've written extensively about the nonsense of 'good' and 'bad' writing on the Internet. This NOINDEX foolishness does not benefit us writers. It may increase the uppity quotient of HubPages in general, but it's a guessing game for me.

I'm not bitter, but I am annoyed. This is their sandbox and they can make their own rules. I'd like to say that I hope HubPages continues to be successful, but the truth is that I don't care either way.

Nicomp, I slowed my roll when the changes unfeatured almost all my featured hubs. I was thinking of increasing my production but I lost my motivation to write on hubpages since they moved the goal. If you find better option nicomp, pull my coat. I have more to write but I don't want my writing to be misused and shelved by hubpages. Thanks for the shout out.

Possom Lover, unless hubpages can make a visible positive move that will show Hubbers that Hubpages understand that without writers there would be no hubpages we all must go. The deal was we write and hubpages displays our writing to the world, if hubpages held up their part of the deal, we would all get paid. My hubpage time is running out.

@junko, there is money to be made at BubbleWs. The admins are capricious : they will delete your account or ignore your requests for payment if you violate rules that are scattered all over the site. The site randomly goes unavailable every other day. Editing tools are almost nonexistent and there are no affiliate programs at all.

Otherwise, you can publish little tiny articles and make a few cents at a time. It's like Facebook in that regard: people write "good night" articles or "my, it's cold today."

If you're OCD about good grammar and well-constructed postings the place will drive you nuts. It's actually quite relaxing compared to the structure imposed by HubPages.

Voted up and useful. Sometimes it takes more than changing one word to make sure the hub gets out of and stays out of the idled stage or the stage where there is no engagement or traffic. However, I liked that this hub provided a very easy way to get your hub featured by simply adding a word. Thanks for posting such a useful hub!