When You Are Changing an Article (Hub), What Do Your Readers See?

Many times in the forums I have seen successful writers share that a writer should not publish on only one site, that they should diversify - not put all their eggs in one basket. So, wanting to be a "good writer" and wanting to make smart choices, I looked around a little and decided to try to publish some articles on infobarrel. I unpublished 4 of my Alzheimer's articles on hubpages and started moving them to infobarrel. I figured, if nothing else, I could backlink my Alzheimer's articles between the two sites and work on SEO. But it was a very painful experience for me!

All articles on infobarrel have to be pre-approved before being published until you get to a certain level. (I never made it to that level.) This pre-approval process makes sure that everything published is quality content, but it's time consuming also. I had to wait two or three days after publishing an article for it to be approved and put out on their site. And it took a couple re-iterations until I got it right, so it took about 8 days to get my first article out there.

And then, a few days later, I saw a mistake on it that I wanted to fix. I had to unpublish it, fix my mistake and wait two or three days more days for it to be approved again - just to fix a typo! In the mean time, the hubs I had here at hubpages that pointed to those articles had bad links because the articles on infobarrel had been unpublished. What a pain!

So I wanted to know how things were handled here at hubpages and I asked a question in the forums: Can someone read your hub after you have published it, while you are doing subsequent editing? What I thought someone would think to be a silly question, turned into a really decent discussion. Many who took part in the discussion also learned new things. It's not a terribly long thread, so if you are interested, you might pop over there.

Here are some of the things that were gleaned from that discussion.

• Jerrico Usher answered the question with an affirmative. And even more interesting, explained that if the hub was published, crawled by the google bots, and then unpublished, a person can still view the cached copy of the hub in google search results. That was really good to know. So if I am working on it, and someone wants to read it, it is still available for them to do so. Almost like having your cake and eating it too.

See snippet below:

• Jerrico Usher also shared some additional unrelated information about something that I have nicknamed the "oops button". Jerrico shared of a time when a capsule had been accidentally deleted (I've done that one a few times), but the hub hadn't yet been saved by clicking the Done Editing button. By opening another tab and opening the same hub in the new tab, was able to retrieve the hub back in its previous saved state. Thank you, Jerrico! That is really great to know. Many times I have wanted to undo something that I had done, but found myself frustrated by my inability to do so.

See snippet below:

• Glenn Stok shared that changes being made on a published hub can be viewed while making those changes as long as the person reading the hub refreshes their browser. Other scenarios are presented about when someone might only see a fragment of your changes and how and why you may not want that to happen, and what you can do to prevent that from happening. Again some very good information to know. Check the forum out for more specific details.

See snippet below:

There many other little tidbits that can be gleaned in that thread if you choose to go read it for yourself. You may even have more insight into this scenario and can add to the discussion and find yourself mentioned in this hub in the future.

So to sum this up, a hub is still available for others to see even while you are in the editing mode. And even more surprising, the editing that you are doing is going out live even before you press the "Done Editing" button! This was fully verified by paradigmsearch.

See snippet below:

shogan added this amusing statement after paradigmsearch shared the above information, "That's potentially frightening, if you're goofing around with the editing." So, you might want to be careful about "goofing around"!

The changes that a person makes to their hubs are continually being saved and backed up automatically, and are therefore continually available for anyone to see. If you do not want someone to see the changes being made to the hub while you are working on it, you need to first unpublish it. Then do your edits, followed with publishing it again. Potential drawbacks to unpublishing your hub are also addressed in the forum.

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Copyright © 2011 Cindy Murdoch

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