Introducing Idle Hubs
I tweeted, pinned, and liked your Thrift Store one. Let me know if anything happens.
Right now, I have two red arrows, and a sleeping sign. I am hoping that the idling hubs get refreshed everyday, and I just haven't waited long enough. I am deliberately not making any changes to these hubs to see whether traffic by itself will take off the idle sign.
- The Writers Dogposted 12 years ago
0 My husband and I have a combined Google Adsense account--we are averaging about a penny a day with them, and that is for over 200 hubs, some at least a year old, but most more than that.
My own traffic has never recovered from the Panda strikes, and like I said before on here, I had over 50 of my hubs marked with ZZZ's the other day. I pulled about 30 of them, and tried tweeking the others, but I don't hold out much hope anymore.
Was it Gamergirl who called us "ragequitters"? That's ridiculous. This has been a long time coming for me, and my husband. And if we completely call it quits here, it will be after long consideration, and NOT a spur of the moment decision...we've been on HP for over 3 years, so it's not something we want to just toss under the bus, so to speak.
But when you spend years on a site, you usually prefer to make more than a penny a day at it, and you also like to have more than a day to two to make hub adjustments before they basically pull the plug on them. My husband didn't get the chance to even touch any of his that were marked for de-indexing--he has a regular full-time job--so the majority of his hubs will go idle today, I guess.
Izzy--I'm not un-publishing anymore for the time being. I'm going to give the ones I still have up a little more time. A lot of those are linked together, as much as I can do it.
I had over two-thirds of mine "zeed"...I just didn't have time to re-do them all, so I only kept what I thought I might have the best chance with, and tweeked them what I could. I'm going to take the advice that was given to me, and set up a blog or website with the rest, since I've always read that it's better to not have all of your eggs in one basket anyway.
My husband is going to do the same, or we'll combine ours into one--we haven't decided yet.
Horatio Plot--I thought that I was doing the right thing by having long titles, ugh. I ran each hub through the Title Tuner, and added the words to each title that they recommended--was I wrong to do that? I thought that, by covering a lot of keywords, that it would HELP in the search, not hinder...
Thanks for your advice--I appreciate it. I may have been here longer than you, but I admit to not knowing a LOT about how to be successful online..I think that a lot of my confusion with titles comes from being a seller on eBay for many years before I came here. It was drilled into my head there to put as many keywords into a title to draw in people searching for a specific item or descriptor.
So when I see "should be something that a searcher would put into a search engine", I assumed that it meant putting in as many as I could, to draw in more people searching for specific keywords.
As far as my title above, I see what you're saying, although leaving out the words "Piddle Pad" would be leaving out the name brand of the item. So if someone searches for "Piddle Pad", instead of "Car Seat Protectors", then they would miss my hub, wouldn't they?
I will check out the Google Keyword Tool again--thanks for the reminder.
I do thank you for your advice, and will definitely check into re-doing some titles.
Greensleeves--Thank you for the kind words about my hubs--I needed that, lol!
I am going to hang on for awhile, to see what happens, and will hope for the best. I'm coming up on what is usually a very busy time for my best hub--we'll see if it still is this year, because I couldn't even find the darn thing on Google the other day...My Intuition told me that in all probability and historically, many Autocratic decision makers found great pockets of mumbling from the masses, on ALL occasions that it was decided Burning Books would improve the welfare of the subjects!
So... so many wasted words... such irony..... imagine which words would have been needed when the whole exercise was proven to have been greatly flawed!
LOL
I already was going to fix some of my overall inconsistencies like spelling or grammar anyway when I noted the new symbols by some of my hubs!
Some I was going to either delete or shorten as well.
I do have one question;
I have a couple of recipes that I already wanted to put into the new recipe capsules, but have realized that the url needs to be changed. So I guess my question is, do I make a whole new hub with a new url?
Now that I have changed one, it has the circle, but it still needs a new url.
(I made food for my dog which has since passed away so I was already going to change that)
Thanks,
KathyMaybe it is pending, look for the symbol and its meaning way down below your stat accounts page
I call it, "The Little Whirly Thing".
I'll pass this onto him, so he will know...
I love that story, too, and it's only one of many that he's written like that, and a lot of them have songs to accompany them that he wrote and recorded himself. It's sad that they can't even be accessed from Google now. Of his 160 hubs, over 100 have been put in the idle mode...
He, like many others on here, does not have the time to come back and tweek that many hubs--especially in the short amount of time he was given in the beginning. The loss of his hubs makes me even more upset than my own--he has so many wonderful stories, and the special comments to go along with them.Such a shame. I feel your pain. I don't write great, original hubs like that but I sure wish I did. Even tough the subjects are apparently not often searched for, it's a shame that on the occasion that they are, no one will find them.
Thank you, SmartAndFun. I wish that I could, too, but I tend to stick with how-to's, informational, and product hubs for the most part.
It's funny--he writes on two other sites based in England called ABC Tales, and Short Stories(I believe), and he gets thousands and thousands of hits on the stuff he writes for those sites. Kind of makes you wonder why that doesn't happen here, doesn't it?
- Arlene V. Pomaposted 12 years ago0
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It never occurred to me to try orgasmic picture positioning. Thanks, I'll give it a try. Absolutely hysterical comment Mark
That one made me laugh Mark.
Maybe that's what everyone has to do. Visit the hub and move a photo up. Then visit the hub again, and move it back down. That's two changes, and maybe do that a few more times and the Zzzs will go. Maybe if we underline an important sentence on one visit, then bold type it on the next, then put it into italics on the next - that's three more changes. Then on the next visit, get rid of the underlining, the bold typing, and the italics. Soon we'll all have hubs which score 100 with innumerable visits. Then everyone will be happy.
My reply to Mark, Alun 'funnies' got bumped by poor editing, you guys are hilarious
- Marye Audetposted 12 years ago0
- writeronlineposted 12 years ago0
This is all about trying to appease the God Google, and having failed to do so in spite of many 'conversations' with the big guys at the big G, HP's clearly now in survival mode.
Like any business in trouble and directionless, that calls for a new mantra:
"Evergreen is seldom seen.
Our pages must be fresh and clean.
No room for aged, no room for proven.
That's how we keep this baby movin."
Of course, that may turn out to be a suitable epitaph.. It's been over 24 hours since I published a new hub. Still shows the pending status
So that's why I updated 12 hubs today...
- The Writers Dogposted 12 years ago0
- Ethan Greenposted 12 years ago0
- writeronlineposted 12 years ago0
You probably won't find it now as it has been de-indexed when zeed by HP, but no loss to me as in the 8 months since publication, it has had exactly 1 Google view!
I just linked this one to show you what has been happening to some of us. Google simply withdrew and hid our hubs somewhere deep in their search pages, and many simply didn't show up even with an exact title search in inverted commas.
I think it was Paul E who once said one of the signs of a healthy account was having your long-tail or unusual title showing up as #1 in Google on an exact search. He said something was wrong if it didn't, but didn't really elaborate on what exactly.
Thanks for saying it is a find piece of work! I do appreciate that. As a writer we all enjoy getting some praise for our hard work
I linked it to show that sometimes Google totally ignores perfectly good articles, and I have been advised time and again by other hubbers that it can just take one bad hub on your subdomain to pull the lot down.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find the culprit, and my next step would have been a mass unpublishing.
Now with the 'on idle' hubs, I don't need to bother.
I'm not 'sulking' Marcy, nor 'complaining'. I'm simply making a point about what defines quality, based on as many years I'd warrant, as yourself in the 'real', commercial world of writing for a living.
You observe that newspapers "do not keep bad writers around just so they can pay them to learn." Absolutely correct. Due respect Marcy, but based on a number of hubs I've seen 'written' by some apprentices, I'd say that's exactly what HP is doing.
Let's at least have equal rules for what HP considers quality output - even if, by virtue of the point WriteAngled has made, HP no longer applies *equality* to all its contributors.
As to your dismissal of fiction as something newspapers don't make money off, that may (or may not, in all cases) be true. But there's plenty of evidence that fiction, in hardcopy and e-book form is not only alive and well - but generating enormous sums in certain genres
There's a great deal of very good work of long standing on HP in the creative writing sphere that can't somehow have become 'poor quality' overnight. Unless you believe that traffic equals quality. It just reflects a policy change from the site owners (as is their right, of course) 'No longer required', 'not relevant to our needs', apparently. So say that, HP. Don't consign it to the junk heap under false pretences that will simply alienate more previously loyal Hubbers.
BTW, Marcy, on the 'dissonance' implicit in the apprenticeship program, please don't trot out the defence that 'all you people complaining about the apprenticeship program are just jealous of us, because you're not good enough writers to provide any potential for HP". I'm bored with hearing it. (TBH, I know you're too grown up and professional to bother with that Marcy. I'm really just trying to forestall the usual avalanche of criticism from dewy-eyed HP glee club cheerleaders that normally intrudes into these types of discussions here on HP forums. Even if we with an alternative view on quality are 'only a few' that doesn't make us automatically wrong)
Cheers
- The Writers Dogposted 12 years ago0
None of the hubs on my main account were idled and I haven't made any tweaks, changes or updates to any of them. And yet for one of my most obscure hubs, I woke up to this this morning:
Sometimes sleeping dogs just wake up on their very own. Glad it didn't get idled.You know, I'm surprised I'm still able to speak... what with all the words you've put in my mouth
