Raise HubKarma Easy

HubKarma is a new Hubpages metric used to measure how much a Hubpages author links to other writer's hubs in the community. The idea is to encourage authors to link to other Hubbers so that visitors can more easily find additional high-quality content on the HubPages website.

That is the official, "nice" version, anyway.

The slightly more cynical (and realistic) version is that real links created within the content of a hub count for much more when it comes to search engine rankings and indexing by companies like Google and search websites like Bing. However, a significant number of HubPages users are writers who publish content for free on sites like HubPages in exchange for the backlinks that can be created to the author's own webpages and content elsewhere, typically off the HubPages domain. As a professional freelance writer, I am one of those users. HubKarma is designed to encourage these authors to also link within Hubpages.

HubKarma is relatively new at HubPages and as such has been rolled out gently with little overall effect on the average hubber. However, HubPages says that the HubKarma score does have a "small" effect on a writer's HubRank, which is the author score for the site.

HubRank is important because, along with each hub's HubScore, it determines whether a writer's Hubpages links are nofollowed. Writers with low HubRanks will find that those links they wrote articles to get have been stunted by being given the nofollow tag which prevents "link juice" from passing to them.

The good news is that it is very easy to increase HubKarma. For those hub writers who have been around for a while and published more than a handful of hubs, there are going to be some hubs which did not turn out quite as expected. Also, a prolific writer on HubPages will have hubs that were written just for fun or otherwise not an integral part of the hubber's linking strategy. Using these hubs to link to other HubPages is a great way to raise HubKarma without diluting the value of the carefully crafted backlinks on other Hubs.

For example, not long after starting on the HubPages community, I noticed a lot of hubs about Bollywood. Having no idea what Bollywood was, I did a tiny amount of reading and then wrote a Hub about it called, what is Bollywood.

This hub is of little use to me since it is unrelated to anything else I write about, and more importantly gets very little traffic, as I have put no effort into promoting or linking it in any way. Using the Suggest Links tool provided by HubPages I was able to create links to other HubPages hubs in just seconds. 

Because HubKarma is an overall score that applies to the writer's score overall and not to each individual hub, these links will boost my HubKarma without lowering the value of backlinks to my banking advice webpages, for example.

I'll let you know how many HubKarma points I get for each new link.

Ironically, after posting this hub and mentioning how I used one of my throw away hubs about Bollywood to link to some other hubbers, traffic to that hub has increased from about 1 page view each day to around 20+ page views per day.

That's not a lot of traffic by any measure, but it is a significant increase for a formerly dormant hub. Kind of an interesting turn of events.

By the way, my HubKarma is up about 4 points based on those links, so maybe it's time to throw out another one. I have also published a few more "normal" hubs with no links to other hubs besides my own, so at least the technique is keeping my numbers from going down.