So what happened to ALL my tags with all my Hubs??????????? They are just simply not there when I go into EDIT!!!!!. No wonder I'm getting bugger all clicks! If they can't search for it, they just won't look! Any ideas anyone????
I just found further information regarding removing of Tags. This is not good news, sounds like the next thing to go will the Hub pages site.
With great effort, I have decided to not torture you.
According to HP, tags were/have/already been dead for months. All is well. Really.
If it's any consolation remember the tags only ever worked within HP, and Google didn't ever see them or factor them into their results, plus it appears HP haven't been using them for many months anyway.
Well, it just goes to show the interest there is in Hub Pages. I haven't taken it seriously because there were just the lack of views and now I understand why it's been like it for months. I have about 30 videos up and just no views. What ever the guff from Hub Pages is, it will never perform for people if the world can not put in predominant tags that personally relate to a person's Hub. Thanks for your reply. I look forward to earning my usual 10 cents a month!!!!!
Thanks, just confirms what i thought. They may have a boast of 50 Million views on Hubs per month, but I've yet to see them, considering my videos on Youtube have had well over 1 million views.
No worries Alan,
I figured some time ago that tags had little relevance externally for hubs about 1 year ago. I got an email this morning outlining that tags and rss feeds will disappear from current hubs. Also that they will not be available to future hubs.
I have it on reliable authority that Quantcast shows page views of about half of the 50 million views figure although I haven't ever checked into that personally.
I agree that interwebs is one tough town. However, I think HP is our best shot.
Ditto to my above reply. Sounds like the investment people I had my money with who sent out a letter saying they wouldn't take any more money for investing, and sure enough 2 months later they went into receivership and 6,000 people lost their money here in Australia.
Did I mention that life is also a tough town? Sorry about you loss. All we can do is keep plugging away each day. Hang in there!
I think it's understood "life is tough" but Hub Pages has always been a mixed bag and I've been with them for years. Only when I started putting more stuff up, did it stuff up.
Your post made me go check. My last half-dozen hubs are actually getting single-digit, daily traffic. That is amazing. Usually new stuff is a corpse for at least 6 months. I'd hang in there. Nothing to lose.
That's interesting you say that. I know that there are certainly a lot of Hubs, but how do people find your Hub. Through a search but if they can't put in words that relate, what chance do you have?
Well, anyway, that's what web masters have told me. People would have to be precise in search if they were looking for your particular subject. Though there was Google+ on my Hubs but it disappeared after a few days with Hub saying some sort of problem there. Don't think Google were too happy for some reason, though they have their ads there. Curious, indeed.
99% of the world disagrees, but I say screw social media. Mainly because I'm no good at it apparently. Keywords in title and content are the way to go.
Interesting but the title is limited to the subject at hand. They would still have to be looking for that subject and you would have to hope they have that particular word that describes the subject and it's in your title. You may be able to do that for an article that features plenty of words, but when you deal in film as I do, the title and subject matter is the thing. I do try to incorporate relevant words into a description but why only have that when you can double your chances with tags that may not necessarily be easily incorporated into a brief description. You never knock back business and getting it out there.
Alan, you do know that the tags used on our hubs always were invisible to the search engines? That they were only used for internal searches?
The loss of those tags should not hurt organic, search engine traffic at all. We might (or might not) lose a small slice of HP traffic, but that's all.
So the Google crawlers and Bing crawlers couldn't see the HP tags at all?
Psyche, I don't know how to do it and have to take the word of others, but apparently those tags were, in fact, invisible to google. Not a word on the page; invisible. They don't show at all in what the bots can see.
One of those (many) things that I'm not competent to check, but others have said in these forums that they have looked, somehow, at what the bots find and the tags aren't there.
So are the tags that Blogger, YouTube, Squidoo etc use a different type of tag than what HP was using?
If so...why in the world were they using them in the first place?
As I understand it, HubPages used its tags only internally, as a means to help determine which hubs were suitable to put in the "you might also be interested in" or "further reading" section or whatever its called.
That's my understanding as well, plus I think HP used them for searches. In any case they were not used by google.
Elsewhere in the forums, HP has commented that even HP quit using them months ago as they were being gamed by spammers. The net result is that those tags have been useless and unused for months.
Not even that, since 2011.
At least as far back as summer 2011, when I checked Google's cache of any Hubpages hub, the sidebar only had the word "tags" at the top of the tags box, then nothing underneath. The tag list wasn't there. It was hidden from search engines.
Also, Hubpages tags weren't fed into the META keywords tag. I could search all through the sourcecode of Google's cache of a hub, and the tag list simply did not appear. So there was no way that Hubpages tags were visible to search engines.
Considering that all search engines have dropped the META keywords tag as a ranking factor except for Bing, which only uses it as a possible indicator for spam (keyword stuffing), it's just as well that Hubpages hid them a few years back.
The only thing that Hubpages tags were being used for is to find "related hubs." And apparently there's now a new algorithm for populating those slots.
Which is consistent with YouTube by the way. Tags are genarally used for in-house filing systems. They're inconsistent across the whole web, and they're very often gamed.
Therefore, search engines have had to develop alternate ways to analyze and determine the "keywords" on each page based on its content, rather than on author's claims that "my page should be ranked for X and Y!" Search engine "keywords" and what we generally call "tags," labels that the author or readers apply manually, parted ways about 5-10 years ago.
Yes, because they're talking about tags on blogs. Tags on HubPages are not the same thing. It's a pity, really, that HubPages chose to call them tags, since they don't serve the same purpose and it therefore causes confusion.
Tags on HubPages were used for internal navigation, determining things like which Hubs showed in the "Related Hubs" section. Not for search. Besides, Google looks at things like your URL, your title, headings and sub-headings, and keyword density to decide what an article or post is about - even on blogs and websites.
I have recently been enrolled in the hubpages apprenticeship program, since following the lessons on improving my writing for new hubs, I have gone back and tried to 'fix up' some of my old hubs that were receiving very little or no traffic.
The results have been very encouraging even in the first few days. I have paid attention to using keyword research for finding titles for my capsules, splitting longer blocks of text into more capsules with headings, using bullet points and making use of the addition of different capsules such as the poll, rating and table capsule. I have also used the long tail phrases I researched where they fitted naturally throughout the article as well.
Whilst it is important not to overuse keywords, I think that this has improved my articles' visibility in search engines, certainly the number of google visitors has gone up. I have also found that using the Pinterest button and pinning articles to a relevant 'board' there has produced some good traffic and this is self-perpetuating as more people share the 'pin'.
I have to say that rather than bemoaning the loss of tags on hubpages and getting hung up on the fact that tags might be helpful in a wp blog, it is better to learn all we can to improve our hubs and get more traffic.
Hmmm, interesting comment. But unfortunately my Hubs are not articles but videos, however, I will be endeavouring to add some key words and headings relevant for searches in the descriptions. By rights, searches shouldn't care where words are. If someone types in "ghost" for example, then the searches should pick it up from any place on earth within the internet world. Or so I think it should.
Yes they do, but then the search engine has to make a decision what order to present the results in. Google uses a complex algorithm to make that decision. It stopped using tags long ago, because people were gaming the system and using irrelevant tags.
Instead, the algorithm looks for recurrences of the search term in the URL, title and text. For instance, if you only use the word "ghost" once, your Hub probably isn't directly about that topic, so it won't be included. If you use it three or four times in a short article, it's pretty safe to assume you are writing about ghosts, and your Hub will be listed. If you use it in the URL, title, every heading, every sub-heading and constantly in the text, then you're obviously a spammer and won't be included.
Having decided whether to include your Hub, the algorithm then uses a variety of other criteria to decide whether to rank you on page 1 or page 255.
The algorithm must work differently for videos, since the text isn't there to analyse. I assume Google must rely on the title match, or perhaps they make a special case for Youtube. I don't work with videos so I can't help there.
That's great but I work with videos. Thanks for the interesting info though.
In that case, the message is to go off and research how Google ranks videos, so you can make sure you're doing everything you can. They must have a system for deciding what order to display the search results in, and you need to know what it is! Their robots can't watch videos so I'm guessing they have to rely on the words surrounding the video - URL, title, description etc.
This article is relevant:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/4-ti … ube/46680/
Also did you notice what someone said earlier about all your Hubs being idled? Do you understand what that means? If they don't have a big fat H next to them, it means HubPages has put a "no follow" tag on them so they're invisible to all the search engines.
There's no H and some are featured and one is exclusive!!! I'd hate to see what a poor following is! Yet my rating is 73. But what you say re the H basically backs up my story, profit before anything else. If, apparently, no outside search can pick individual Hubs up, it's certainly limiting the world.
If there's no H, it's not featured, and it means the Hub is invisible to the search engines. The only way you'll get traffic to a Hub without an H is from other Hubbers, and from links you've posted elsewhere. From an earnings perspective, there really is no point in Hubs that don't have an "H". There is no way for a Hub to recover from that, unless you're able to revise and improve it, because it's basically invisible.
I misread your comment, there are a few H's but it's up to Hubpages to promote ALL the hubs of the people, otherwise what is the point? A Hubber can only do so much and in the end it's still the subject that matters. A subject that people want to see. With videos, that's it. You don't make it over and over to please people. It's either a hit or it's not, and then you move onto the next one. Obviously, with it's apparent limited capacity, Hub Pages is more suited to the written word which is what my original article was about. It was cheaper to have it here than pay for a web site that it was on.
The point is that Google's Panda algorithm penalizes sites which include poor quality content, even if that poor content is only a small percentage of the site. So HubPages is trying to create a situation where only the best quality Hubs are visible to Google. Like any automated process, it's not perfect, so the result is that some perfectly good Hubs get caught in the net. You're not the only one, there's been plenty of angst in the forums about it.
You're assuming that a "video Hub" is meant to be just visual. I'm not sure that's the case, I get the feeling that it's meant to be a Hub where your own video is the centrepiece, but otherwise it's a fairly normal Hub. I'm going to post a question elsewhere and see what they say.
Interesting, but yes, my films are only visual, but feature images from the film and a short article relevant to that film. In the end, it's still what the people want to see which doesn't mean they even know my stuff exists and they don't sit there and go, "well, today, I'll think I'll look up Wollongong, Australia, Royal National Park or The Devil's Party or Ghost Tunnel"...... it's all the luck of the draw in what a person wants. We, as participants, have only the words we use to grab an audience, or following, if you like. It is up to the internet places like Hub Pages to ensure we get the BEST publicity via obviously ONLY search engines for our product to earn money so that Hub Pages can exist and we All profit.
I don't worry so much about tags because Google no longer uses them in their search rankings. They are now more interested in other things, such as page titles, page descriptions/summaries, the amount of time people stay on a website, originality of content, quality and quantity of content and other things. But their site crawlers don't look at tags/keywords anymore. The search engines basically use the text in a website's content to form their own tags for each websites, then they use that and all the other data I mentioned, to answer search queries. That's why it's important to have descriptive and accurate page titles and summaries. If they differ from a site's content, that site will rank low in search results.
Websites that contain duplicate content. ie content that has been copied from other sites will also rank low.
Well, you guys are obviously talking about written articles, but I'm talking about films/ videos and Youtube. Youtube requires tags to find your film ( and as you know, Youtube is Google) so it looks like Hub Pages is obviously not a video site. Though only in recent months have they seemed to encourage video placement. Why? Because just about everyone has a camera via mobile (cell to the Yanks) with a video function. Previously I linked through to Youtube. The internet is mainly becoming a visual medium where anyone with a camera can put up that great epic or what people really want, some disaster, preferably to somebody else. Hub Pages is really horses for different courses Youtube is probably about 50 million, a day..
That's why Google run sites like Blogger and YouTube have gotten rid of Tags.
Hey...wait a minute.....
What would you suggest then for back linking. I have gone and written up summaries and linked back to HubPages from my own website. Just for my peace of mind is this the way to go?
I have done the same (sort of, I guess) on my Youtube Channel. Linked back through to the HubPages sites for further info but it seems to be really doing nothing. People are fickle. it's more like, if nothing grabs their attention in the first 5 seconds, then nothing will. With internet being a visual medium, todays generation, only think in terms of visual ( or so it seems to me), i.e.. video games and talking , i.e., mobiles (or cellulars). Out of the 173 videos I have on Youtube, only one is a smash hit with over 921,000 views (just a few hundred a day... in July, it was 5-6000 a day, but Youtube did "something"... changed their set up. whatever and the views plummeted). Other videos have had 20,000 looks or so, and my theory is, the more videos up, the more chance of cracking another big hit... But once again, you can not second guess the viewing public. It's just like making a movie, it's either a smash or not... and usually it's the "or not"!!!
Alan2Rich, I hate to tell you this, but the reason you're not getting traffic is that all but two of your 32 hubs have been idled. If you've been away from HP for awhile, you might need to be filled in on the conept of idle hubs. Basically, they have been no-indexed due to low traffic or other issues.
This may help you with why there are no tags - I only found out myself when I tried to add them to a hub I published yesterday! It seems that the RSS capsule is going too!
http://hubpages.com/forum/topic/106827
A new Hub would normally get about 20 views for me in the first 1-2 hours, I'm getting 1 view, and mostly 0...HubPages is going DOWN hill.
Thanks for all the advice, guys. Yes, me thinks Hub may be going the way of Revver where I first had my videos up and was suppose to earn money which I never saw. They had their own system. I had lost the original films but managed to download them from Revver before they became impossible for me, at least, to log onto. As for Hub, though I have been with them for several years for one particular published subject article divided into 3, it never really had taken off. On Youtube my videos, to date, have had total views of 1,050,721 with my smash hit being GHOST TUNNEL of 918,275 to date ( and I still have no reason why, but hey, who's complaining!!), so it's horses for courses as I say. I can't help it if my Hubs are idle, probably because of no tags!! I can't call every video Knitting A Jumper, or Baking A Cake.... Youtube have definitely not got rid of tags as they are required for video searches. Hub Pages have only recently jumped on the bandwagon for videos.
I've found adding tags on my blog posts definitely makes me rank higher in google search so I'm not sure about this no tags thing where they look at other stuff. I'm sure they do that too but when I started adding tags to my posts I definitely starting ranking higher in search.
Now alot of my posts on the one site are just photographs and I don't write(I don't have time) an entire article around it. The page title does have alot to do with it but I can't pack all the keywords into the title or the body for that matter so I'm really glad they have the ability to add tags on posts on my blogs.
I've had more hits and comments on this subject than I'm getting on my Hubs!
Hi, alan2rich, interesting thread you started here. I'm a bit miffed because I've been working on the tags, adding more, then find they've not been in use for months.
Out of interest, could I ask why you are putting videos on hubpages when you have so many hits on youtube? Why not put them there?
Hi Innerspin, easy answer, if I can double the films elsewhere, maybe it'll double the money!! Actually, I use to have links to Youtube, but they didn't play the ad when you clicked on them from Hubpages. So when Hubpages recently decided to have videos there, why not give it a go. You just don't show a movie in one cinema in the hope it makes money. I was curious to see what would happen. In some cases, the films carry different soundtracks as Youtube would subject themselves to copyright paranoia and blame sus internet music companies that seem to have sprung up from nowhere over recent times to claim things like Apple's Soundtrack Pro loops!!! Maybe I should write an article about that. Very hard to put into a few words but it's an absolute muckup around the world for original creative people who have the licence for these loops ( and other companies loops) only to be kicked in the guts by someone somewhere in Europe ( seems to be the headquarters) claiming the loops you paid for as their own! Apple Australia have confirmed that I have the licence (anyone with Soundtrack Pro or Garage Band has), but that doesn't stop Youtube and their detection software. I had one piece of Apple loop tune that was claimed by several different companies under different titles!!!! Go figure......!
Yay I noticed that too Alan..don't know if this is good or not! I guess we'll find out! Thought it was just me or something. lol
How can people find our hubs without tags that are searchable? How will it work now without this feature?
TAGS were never searchable on Google - as long as you use keywords and key phrases in your titles and sub-titles, people will be able to find you.
Thank you so much for your answer. yes keywords are the most important.
The tags were only relevant within HP, externally they were not available. Apparently HP haven't been using them (even internally) for many months now, yet you still will have got views. The views will come from your own backlinks, keywords that Google find in your hubs, natural organic back linking from external sources etc.
I had RSS feeds on most of my hubs, and I've been taking them off gradually, maybe about 10 every few days. It seems my general score is lower though, but then that isn't supposed to mean anything anyway, right?
Pay no attention to internal scores (too many people do). Generally these scores are flawed, and often a hub's score cannot reflect its success rate one way or the other. Google don't see (or care) about HP's idea of a 'high scoring hub' and most seasoned hubbers ignore them. Author scores are majorly flawed because they appear to be largely determined by general interaction on the site, e.g. commenting in forums, on other's hubs etc, which don't make you money, and give people who don't know better a false impression of your writing abilities (again Google don't see or care about these).
Re-RSS feeds, I haven't used them in God knows how many months (although I have empty ones that will vanish when HP do the final cull). I still get traffic well into four figures a day and have never felt they served much purpose in terms of traffic (backlinking is far more effective).
With my snow flake question, I certainly created an avalanche!. Software program searches may be able to pick up words, and definitely sound, but can not seem to detect what an image is. Well of course it can't. It may know something's there by the image size, but it doesn't know what it is a picture of (or film or video for that matter) unless there is heading underneath or words that tell what's in that image but even then the words may fail because the screen in front of us is visual medium. Why explain what you're showing in a movie! Youtube come out with all sorts of things when they say you have breached copyright, but in actual fact they are only 2nd guessing when they talk about images. It's all to do with the sound. Yet in the end, you can't getaway from the fact that that you must have a subject, product, that people are actually looking for, and if you don't have that, it's more good luck than management.
I remember looking at cached pages when we had tags, and the keyword tags were highlighted as were the keywords in the article. Can someone differentiate between meta tags and other tags?. I read two SEO articles that said that meta tags aren't as useful as they once were due to keyword stuffing but suggested that they still help. So now, I am totally confused, I guess there are many answers to the same issue. lol
I wouldn't have a clue, I'm sorry, starting to get a bit too confusing for me, but Hub Pages doesn't work for me because I am more video/film orientated and obviously Hub is nothing more than blogs. I reducing my video content on Hub and sticking with Youtube and their current 500 years of videos!!! That's enough competition for me!!
Neither is relevant on HubPages now. You were never able to add metatags here either.
Thanks Marisa. I wish I had your knowledge about SEO. I guess you believe we are OK as we are with keywords.
@Alan. Sure wish you didn't have to leave. We will miss you, but I understand about the videos
I'll probably keep my stuff regarding the Burrill Lake Open Air Theatre and maybe the one on Australia. I may get around to writing articles like a lot of people, but at the moment I'm trying to earn some sort of income from the internet but 9 cents so far for December on Hub Pages doesn't really cut it!!!
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