Delay Followers Notification until a Hub is through Pending

1. 86

   Marisa Wrightposted 12 years ago

   Right now, while a Hub is pending, it doesn't show ads, it has a "no follow" tag etc.  However our followers get notified and they may share the Hub during that time.   It would be nice if that notification could be delayed, too.

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   1. 87

      Nell Roseposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Hi Marisa, I did mention that to hubstaff. I actually wanted them to not show it to anybody at all until it had passed. by the time you go to share it on facebook etc everybody has already done it without the ads. yes I agree with you, if we don't share it for obvious reasons then others shouldn't either, even though they are being kind its defeating the object really.

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      1. 52

         janderson99posted 12 years agoin reply to this

         IMO
         Hubs should remain unpublished until they are through the pending process. The NOINDEX Tag is making them GUILTY until proven INNOCENT. There is no point sharing them without ads, especially when it causes indexing delays. Simply add the pending process to the steps to being published either as 'normal' or 'featured'. This pending limbo is counterproductive.

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         1. 95

            Melovyposted 12 years agoin reply to this

            janderson99, that's the best suggestion I've heard. About 3 out of every 4 hubs I publish takes about a month or more to be indexed now and I can't help wondering it is why my views have never recovered from the September crash.

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   2. 70

      brakel2posted 12 years agoin reply to this

      I agree that they should stay unpublished until they are through the pending process. Many have been stolen. Delays in indexing have occurred. Sometimes they end up on page 14 or so after the delay and don't get much traffic. There are too many reasons not to allow access to a pending hub. It's scary, as it causes unnecessary stress.

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   3. 58

      Dale Hydeposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      I have previously mentioned this as well, to no avail.  Good luck.
      
      I will say one thing, as people share your hub while it is still pending, it stimulates Google to run over and see what is going on....then....Google sees the "noindex" and it takes weeks, even after the hub is no longer pending, to get Google back most of the time.

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      1. 86

         Marisa Wrightposted 12 years agoin reply to this

         This is exactly why it would be better if notifications were delayed.

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         1. 73

            KrisLposted 12 years agoin reply to this

            I haven't suffered much from the this practice, but I agree that it makes all kinds of sense to wait on making a hub visible until it has gone through the 24 hour pending period.
            The current practice penalizes those who are trying to make money on hubpages.

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2. 81

   Rain Defenceposted 12 years ago

   I often publish then go back in a few times and tinker with what I've written til I'm happy, so I think not showing anyone til through pending would be good too. Not that anyone has ever shared one of my hubs, to my knowledge anyway, but you never know, it could happen one day!

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3. 60

   wjack2010posted 12 years ago

   +1
   
   I don't understand why people can see it whilst pending, it makes me lose out on money as the views don't count, and it's when the Hub is first published when I get my most views.

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   1. 88

      Jean Bakulaposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      I agree that nobody should see the hub until it's passed through the whole process. It seems a new hub gets a flurry of interest right at the beginning, and then if it's a good hub, it continues getting more views as it ages. But just letting our fellow hubbers read it while it's not Featured or Normal isn't helping us, it makes the process confusing.

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4. 82

   formosangirlposted 12 years ago

   It is interesting that almost all of my hubs that have had visitors today and yesterday did not have the "featured" sign next to it, and therefore, had no advertisement. If Management wants to promote good content, then why should these articles be even visible? Depending on how they arrived to my articles, I am a little ambassador for Hubpages. When I check Google Adwords, my visitors have come to my articles through keyword searches and not because Hubpages has actually promoted or "featured" me or told me that it has helped people hop onto my hubs. A few of my hubs have very popular keywords versus no visits for the rest of my articles.  In fact, I would be very interested to know which articles per day Hupbages has actually helped me through the "hopping" method. If providing more information to Hubpages writers is a perk, I would be very interested to know how many of my Hubs are being "featured" this way.

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5. 81

   Rain Defenceposted 12 years ago

   Although I think it would be a bit better if this happened, it doesn't make a huge difference overall either way. If a hub is good it'll get a few hundred thousand/million views over its life. The few at the beginning make little difference to that total.

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   1. 84

      IzzyMposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      I totally disagree with this statement.
      
      Hubs that are stuck with a noindex tag at the start sometimes get ignored by Google for weeks afterwards, even if you get them to index it.
      
      When it finally starts to see views, Hubpage's idle feature kicks in.
      
      It doesn't matter how good a hub is, sometimes Google will ignore it, and why give them a reason to.
      
      Hide all non-featured new hubs, else feature them right away. Like HP does for their pets.

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   2. 86

      Marisa Wrightposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      That's not the issue.  We don't want to attract attention to Hubs while they're in Pending mode.   It's not just us - HubPages management agrees, which is why they don't show ads during that time (because they can attract Google's attention).    Delaying notifications to followers is simply another logical step.
      
      The problem is, as Izzy says, that if Google visits the Hub while it has a "no follow" tag attached, it will go away and may not come back for weeks and weeks.  So you may miss out on more than just a few views - and your Hub may end up going back into Idle because it's getting not traffic.  Vicious circle

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6. 70

   brakel2posted 12 years ago

   One of my newer hubs could be doing much better if it did not go through pending.process  it took forever to be indexed  I never saw it in the feed. It may go idle now. Writing for my pleasure, I guess. I like it. It was even reviewed by a friend who is a psychologist.

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7. 70

   LetitiaFTposted 12 years ago

   This is the best idea I've heard in a long time, Marisa, as is simply not publishing hubs until they are out of pending purgatory. Both solutions seem like they'd be easy enough to implement. However, I've been thinking that the very purpose of pending may be to ensure that the flurry of HP views is over before Google indexes a hub. It may have been a google suggestion intended to limit ad views by hubbers, who are unlikely prospects for Google advertisers. There's a chance we'll be in purgatory for a while...

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8. 78

   derek gulbransonposted 12 years ago

   Thanks all for this discussion. Sounds like the primary concern here is that the Hub will be crawled while it's in a NOINDEX state, and that that will prevent it from getting into the index quickly once it does become Featured. This is obviously an issue that's very important to us as well and the discussion here is most helpful. Here's what I can tell you.
   
   We monitor the crawl rate and index status of all of our Hubs fairly religiously on a daily basis (as I see many of you do as well ). We consider this probably the most important thing we are working on right now. Much of the conversation we have internally on this subject closely mirrors the discussion here. We release changes on a daily basis to better assess and improve this specific process. Taking the last two weeks as an example, we know our changes have resulted in a 26% increase in the accuracy of Google's index status of Hubs.
   
   If Hubs are shared while they are in a Pending state, we are currently seeing these Hubs go into the index very quickly once they become Featured. One of the changes we made this week was to include more of the recently Featured Hubs on the topic pages to help ensure they get crawled as soon as possible. Marisa raises the issue that it may be weeks before that Hub gets crawled again. While that may have been more common initially, we feel that most of those issues are largely behind us now. 
   
   We'll continue to watch crawls very closely and make further adjustments. And do continue to let us know when you think you've spotted problems.

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   1. 52

      janderson99posted 12 years agoin reply to this

      There has been a massive spike in crawl errors in the last two days (350=>588) of the type
      URL:
      http://janderson99.hubpages.com/hub/hea … ting-Risks
      with no source listed in 'site map' or 'linked from'
      could this explain the traffic plunge?
      
      
      

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      1. 90

         Judi Beeposted 12 years agoin reply to this

         I've noticed the same thing - most of my hubs "not found" are in two categories.  No idea whether it has a bearing on the traffic decline, just saying.

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      2. 78

         derek gulbransonposted 12 years agoin reply to this

         janderson, those URLs respond with 410 so Google should eventually drop them from it's index entirely. We suspect the apparent spike is the result of Google fixing some bugs to handle the 410 properly. But according to Google the crawl errors have no adverse effect on search performance and can be safely ignored.

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         1. 52

            janderson99posted 12 years agoin reply to this

            Thanks Derek,
            Can you confirm that these links are not available to users of the site and so do not affect traffic. My concern is that having hundreds of these in my sub may mean that people are getting the error messages rather than going to the correct page. Also having all these redundant links in the site map for my sub can't help my reputation with big G. This issue has been around for at least 6 months and appears to be related to a hang-over from the old topic structure. I noticed that you can still get latest, hot, best, listings for HP and subs even though there is no pathway to them. Not sure why.

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            1. 78

               derek gulbransonposted 12 years agoin reply to this

               Those URLs are not now and never were available to visitors. They were at one time used in a javascript call to some analytics, and Google decided to start ingesting the strings as if they were URLs. We removed the strings entirely probably about 6 months ago. We'd also like to see them gone entirely from Google's index and agree that 6 months is an unduly long time for them to still be floating around in places. According to Google, they're not hurting our (or your) reputation.

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               1. 52

                  janderson99posted 12 years agoin reply to this

                  Thanks for that,  RIP that issue!
                  Cheers

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   2. 95

      Melovyposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Derek, I wish I could agree with you that these issues are behind us, but for me it is still a big concern. 3 out of 4 hubs I wrote last month still aren't indexed (the other took 2 days at most.) I know those hubs have been shared - 2 of them by HubPages itself on Twitter, and I've seen them on Pinterest. Also in October I had a HOTD that was shared widely and yet it still took over a month to index. Both it and another hub took at least a week to be indexed after they had been crawled by Google and Bing, and one of last months hubs shows it was last crawled by Google 5 days ago, but it is not indexed.
      I agree with the suggestion these hubs would be better left unpublished until pending is over.

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      1. 84

         IzzyMposted 12 years agoin reply to this

         Else all references to the hub are removed from HP.
         
         I published one recently (not on this name) that I found shortly afterwards through an HP search because of the image it carried.
         New hubs might have no ads, but their images are still floated within HP increasing the likelihood of Google finding and reading them with their noindex tag.
         
         This hub has now been featured for 48 hours, but has no Google views whatsoever.
         
         The googlebot has not returned.
         
         I know I could send it easily, but HP is a site for new users who don't know how to do these things.
         
         This 'pending' of new hubs is a big mistake on an open publishing platform.

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         1. 95

            Melovyposted 12 years agoin reply to this

            izzy, can you explain what you mean when you say "I know I could send it easily"  please? I ask because I followed instructions I was given to manually submit a hub for indexing through Webmaster tools, but this didn't seem to make any difference to how long my hubs too. I did it with 3 or 4 and then gave up.

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            1. 84

               IzzyMposted 12 years agoin reply to this

               The googlebot is just like a little nosey mouse, wanting to know what is going on.
               
               You can submit the hub to Google via webmasters tools -> Fetch as googlebot.
               
               I know that doesn't always work. Just 'seeing a hub' does not mean that Google will actually index it.
               
               If you have felt the need to go down the road of asking Google to 'fetch' the hub, you might as well ping it too.
               
               Go to pingler.com or whoever and input the hub url.
               
               This is sending a wakeup call to the search engine bots.
               
               If you are not too sure if either of the above are working, just send the hub over to Twitter or Facebook. maybe even Pinterest.
               
               The whole point of publishing on an open publishing platform like HP, is that you shouldn't have to worry about those details.
               
               Now you do.

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               1. 95

                  Melovyposted 12 years agoin reply to this

                  Thanks Izzy. I will try pingler.com as well.

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9. STAFF

   Paul Edmondsonposted 12 years ago

   As an FYI, We don't advise using pinging tools outside of Google's available set.  It's been reported that some of these tools do more damage than good.
   
   The best way to get a site crawled regularly
   - Have pages connected to the domain
   - Sitemap
   - Promote it a bit
   
   Google makes a decision on if they want to keep the page or not.  When they don't, updating it or promoting it tend to be the best options.

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   1. 95

      Melovyposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Paul, thanks for that information. I only pinged on hub with pingle so far, so will follow your advice and won't do any more.
      I have one more question if I may: when you say the best way to get a site crawled regularly, do  you mean that we should have those 3 things for our individual domains does being on HubPages mean the first 2 are already taken care of? (Sorry if this is a dumb question, but I am still trying to figure out Webmaster tools.)

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   2. 84

      IzzyMposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Which tools do more harm than good? Have you got evidence to back this up? I'm not saying you don't, it's just that I would like to read the reports for myself.
      
      This is the first time I have seen you ever post to say not to use pinging tools. Apologies if you have and I missed it, but this seems to be quite an important concept.
      
      Perhaps if all new hubs were to be featured straight away, we wouldn't be having this issue of Google not indexing hubs. Used to be they got indexed and sent Google traffic sometimes within minutes of publishing. This never happens anymore. It usually takes weeks for such traffic to start trickling in, in my experience anyway.
      
      By all means, hold back hubs from new users until they have proven themselves, but why you are including experienced hubbers is beyond me.
      
      If new hubs do not attract Google interest, perhaps the best thing will be to write the basic outline of a hub, perhaps 500 words, then hit the publish button.
      
      Wait until it is featured, then go back in and do a major edit to update it to a 1000 words or so, plus photos and other capsules.
      
      This should bring the bot rushing back, and hopefully indexing will follow soon.
      
      You are surely not suggesting that hubbers artificially backlink their hubs when you talk of 'promoting' them? I know you used the words 'a bit', but loads of users will ignore that bit and spam sites to death.

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