What to do when hubs stop being featured - how to improve your hubs

Hubpages has been making changes again and we all need to think about how these changes affect us. The site recently introduced a new system of ‘idling’ hubs that are not performing well, hubs that are not getting much traffic or views. In other words hubs that the public are not searching for much with search engines like Google.

Hubpages showed that a hub had been made inactive and taken out of being available for search engines by displaying the letters zz against any such idle hub. You could check in your accounts to see what hubs had been idled.

But following complaints about this new system, which many thought was unfair, HubPages has changed it all again so that now the idled hubs have no symbol showing alongside them and are classed as ‘Normal’, whereas active hubs have the letter H showing that they are ‘Featured.’

H could stand for Hub or Hit, like in popular music. We all want our hubs to become hits!

It has all changed again and now the featured hubs have a small H in a black circle and those not featured have a blue circle with H in it.Black means good and blue needs tweaking.

So what does Featured actually mean? In actuality all it really shows is that your hub is available for search engines and people who want to view your hubs. It doesn’t mean it has any preferential treatment or is getting shown anywhere amongst special recommendations. It just means that it is active and not idled.

It would be easy for newcomers to this site to assume that Featured meant that their hub was showing on a special page for Featured Hubs and so would be likely to get far more views. It doesn’t mean this. It means that it is active and can be searched for, though there is a bit more to it than that which has been brought to my attention by the hubber known as nicomp, who says that a: 'Featured Hub is "Featured on other hubs and topics pages." Just hover over the icon on your hubpages.com/my/hubs/stats page and you will see.'

But of course this is good and what you want. You want your hubs able to be viewed by the public and other hubbers. The only way to make any money is if you get enough traffic and hopefully some of your readers will click on ads or better still, buy something from your Amazon and eBay ads. And after all, most of us at HubPages are hoping to earn money from our writings!

If you are writing a new hub give it the best chance you can of getting it Featured and staying that way. First of all think of a good title with keywords that people are searching for and write about a subject that Internet users are looking for information on. Split your hub up into several blocks of text with sub-headings, aim for a word count of 700-1,000 words, (though opinions differ on what an ideal word count is and some people will even go as high as 1,500 words), make sure you include some photos and videos and credit them correctly as to where they are from. Your own photos are best but you can also use ones in the Public Domain. Have a look at other advice hubs about these matters.

Take advantage of all the module options HubPages provides. Add a Map, or a Poll and add some links but make sure you have read the guidelines for what is acceptable here. Add some ads for Amazon or eBay items for sale, but make sure they are relevant to your text and don’t add too many. But really think about creating a hub that will be of such great quality it will be a success, a hub that will be featured, will stay featured and will generate a lot of traffic. You are trying to create a hub that people will enjoy reading so its needs to appeal to the eye as well as be an interesting read.

If your hubs have been idled or are now classed as normal then you want to improve your chances with them. There are many things you can do to get them featured again.

It is relatively easy to tweak a hub. You can add some additional text, add new headings or sub-headings, include a video or some photos as illustrations or you might want to think about changing the wording of your main title. Adding links or taking them away will also tweak your hub and may be enough to make it active again and classed as featured with an H showing that it is.

Changing the category it is being shown under is another minor edit you can make. For example, if I have a hub about Tenerife I might want to list it as in Spain or under the Canary Islands, which comes under Visiting North Africa.

If you find that your hubs do not stay featured, or if you have tweaked them and got the featured again but then they have been rendered Normal, you may feel saddened that your work that you were proud of hasn’t made the grade for this site. But don’t be disheartened and do not despair. Think about unpublishing your unsuccessful hubs, deleting them from this site and from Google search indexes using this Removal Tool and then publish them again at another website such as Wizzley, Squidoo, Infobarrel or elsewhere. Of course you need to make a copy of your hub before you delete it but HubPages give you 24 hours before they remove a deleted hub from the site and you can even go back and undo the deletion if you change your mind. You don't want to lose you work though. If you are like me you will hang on to all your creations!

I have found that a lot of my hubs were getting repeatedly idled because they simply were not getting the traffic needed so I have moved them to Wizzley and Squidoo.

Following the problems caused by the Google Panda update that drastically lowered the income of many of us on here, HubPages has had to bring in some changes to the site in an effort to benefit us all. I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t been happy with many of these changes and have complained about them in the forums, as have many others hubbers and some have actually left the site.

However, for me this is a site I can still count on for making some income from and until the problem caused by Panda this was a site I could count on for regular income from. I can see that the staff here are doing what they can to try to get this site back to how it was and for us all to benefiting from the changes they are introducing.

So I am staying put and treating this as a learning experience and time for change. The world changes daily and we must change with it!