Is there a time limit to leave lenses in unpublished status?

1. 67

   Arachneaposted 6 years ago

   I'm thinking, when my lenses all pop over, to unpublish them and work them at my leisure. I just need to know if they will be deleted after a period of time in non-pub status.

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      calculus-geometryposted 6 years agoin reply to this

      No, drafts can stay unpublished as long as you want.  I think I have one that I started a year ago or so. It's still there in my list of hubs.

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      Marisa Wrightposted 6 years agoin reply to this

      No limit, but as Lobobrandon says, leaving them unpublished too long will cause them to lose their ranking in the search engines which would be a bad thing. You may have to settle for publishing them in a less-than-perfect format to start with. If they trip any filters, the worst that can happen is that they'll get unpublished again.

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      Emma Vineposted 6 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks for asking this question. I too plan to immediately unpublish my lenses when they come over and the revamp them as soon as possible.
      
      Unfortunately, I have heard two different transfer dates. One was the transfer would begin the 25th, then today I read the transfer would begin September 2nd. We'll just have to keep a close eye out apparently.

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         Merrciposted 6 years agoin reply to this

         Why unpublish and lose any momentum, when we will have 4 months to edit them?  It's one thing if you plan on publishing elsewhere, but seems like we should leave them live as HubPages has kindly agreed to bring them over pretty much intact.

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   Merrciposted 6 years ago

   That's good to know! Thanks for asking Arachnea, and for your fast answer Calculus-Geometry.

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      Arachneaposted 6 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks, calculus-geometry. I appreciate the swift reply.
      
      
      
      You're welcome, Merrci. So much to learn. Wasn't sure where the start to get an answer to this one.

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3. 91

   lobobrandonposted 6 years ago

   Arachnea, when your lenses get transferred over they're going to have 301 redirects. If you unpublish them the redirects may still be there, but most of the rankings gained would be lost and it would be just like starting over (With a small boost). Think about it, not sure you want that to happen.

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   relacheposted 6 years ago

   Given that web traffic from now through Labor Day is some of the slowest of the year, I'm going to leave my lens that transfer over live and published, and just edit them from most popular on down.
   
   This big a move is too important to hide the content from Google, IMO.

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   Gods Provisionposted 6 years ago

   What is a lense?

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   LindaSmith1posted 6 years ago

   A lens to someone from Squidoo is a hub to hubbbers.

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   Gods Provisionposted 6 years ago

   Ah okay! Thank you.

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   BrianRSposted 6 years ago

   HubPages have said that they will be lenient on the lenses when they first come over and give more time than usual to allow them to be brought up to the HubPages standard.
   
   So it would be better to leave them live (from a search engine perspective) than un-publish them. But clearly the quicker you can align them to HubPages standards the better.
   
   All new Squidoo people would be wise to get familiar with what HubPages standards are and this is a good place to start http://hubpages.com/learningcenter/contents

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9. 92

   lisavollrathposted 6 years ago

   I know it's hard to think of having ugly, poorly formatted content hanging out in public with its underwear showing, but unpublishing the migrated lenses sort of defeats the purpose of those 301 redirects. Your traffic will be redirecting to a page that isn't available, which will tank the page's search engine ranking. It's probably best to leave them live.

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10. 67

    Arachneaposted 6 years ago

    Yes, I understand we will have about 4 months to bring our lenses up to speed (oops hubs). I prefer to run links and make 'em pretty anyway before they get too much traffic. Some will need more than a bit of whittling. More like jack hammering. I suspect some things will be a mess because there's no compatible feature or module for the specific content to transfer too, e.g., some of the additional modules we were able to use in lenses.
    
    I also keep in mind that the first view of an article is how the reader will form an opinion of the writer's material. Not that anything I've posted is stellar in quality necessarily, but I'd hate to lose repeat visitors because the unedited hubs weren't up to speed. A personal preference, I suppose.
    
    Since the edit feature was removed as of this morning (I believe), I'm leaving the rest for the transfer and building a few new ones from scratch.

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       lobobrandonposted 6 years agoin reply to this

       I'm not sure if you're going to get repeat visitors. We here usually focus on traffic from search engines, social networks and the like. If you think you're going to lose hub pages followers on the issue, think again - because that's not going to gain you anything monetarily. Anyway as you've stated, to everyone his/her own.

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          Arachneaposted 6 years agoin reply to this

          By repeat visitors, I mean, folks who visit over and over again not only to the one hub but others.

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             lobobrandonposted 6 years agoin reply to this

             My question was "From where do you get these repeat visitors"
             
             On a blog you'd have an email list etc. Just curious

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                Arachneaposted 6 years agoin reply to this

                lobobrandon, if a person visits your hub they have the potential to become a repeat visitor. if something about the article e.g., quality, topic or validity sets them off, they may not revisit to view any of your other hubs. i can control these elements by being conscientious of what i post. i'm sorry if i missed your question in your first reply.

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                   lobobrandonposted 6 years agoin reply to this

                   Okay here's what I think:
                   
                   You're not going to get any visitor if you don't have those hubs published. So there's no one to scare away. Even if you scare away someone they're not going to remember you the next time they return (To be potential repeat visitors from then on).
                   
                   Anyway good luck

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       Marisa Wrightposted 6 years agoin reply to this

       Arachnea, I'm curious whether you got a lot of repeat visitors at Squidoo?   Here at HP, our focus tends to be attracting one-time visitors from Google, and that's where 90% of my traffic comes from - so I don't give repeat visitors much thought.   People can't sign up for our RSS feed or any other method of being notified about new Hubs, so regular readers aren't that common IMO.

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          Arachneaposted 6 years agoin reply to this

          I can't say whether I did or not. However, I also write fiction as well. That's where I draw my thoughts on repeat visitors from. I'd been at Squidoo for only eight months and sort of on hiatus for about 2 months now. It's my habit, however, to bookmark and revisit sites such as these when I find a writer whose content is of interest beyond the initial post I may have read by them. So, yes, there's traffic produced by Google as you mention. However, I'm more interested that the first experience with anything I write be a positive one to what ever degree I can make it so.

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             Marisa Wrightposted 6 years agoin reply to this

             One feature of HubPages - which may or may not be the case at Squidoo - is that the identity of the writer is not obvious to the reader, and most readers won't even notice who wrote the Hub they're reading.     
             
             People tend to assume the opposite because we all have our own sub-domain, but in fact that was just a ploy to get out from under Panda - it was not intended to highlight individual writers.  In fact, after sub-domains were introduced, HubPages made several changes to de-emphasise individuality - removing the "author" box from our Hubs, removing the RSS feed, removing the ability to search within an individual author's Hubs, adding large numbers of "related Hubs" by others to our Hubs, and making the Group links at the end of Hubs look the same as those related Hubs (so it's not obvious they are by the same author).  We are staff writers on a large magazine, not individual site owners:  our profiles exist mainly for the benefit of other Hubbers, and are not often visited by readers.
             
             I'm guessing that for fiction Hubs, readers are more likely to go looking for the author's details.

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                Arachneaposted 6 years agoin reply to this

                I don't believe we're on the same page. I logged out of HubPages and went to one of my hubs. My username is still present. I didn't say repeat traffic would be looking specifically for one of my pen names. When I visit an author who writes UGC, I don't necessarily care about the name specifically or even a rl name. If the content is written by pink elephant slippers, and I like it, then I'll revisit that authors profile page or whereever their other articles are written and read other pieces of interest. If I was concerned that readers know me as Tanya Jones, then my user name would be just that or something similar.
                
                Going back to the original topic. If a person visits one of my hubs and likes what they see, then they could potentially come back to read more by the writer they know as Arachnea from my profile information. They may be a drop in the bucket of readers finding my hubs for the first time through Google, but they are an important part of a readership as well. Also, they becomes lines in the connections that is the internet. If they comment in their social media about something they read that they liked, then perhaps someone else will find their way over here as well.
                
                So, when my lenses come over from Squidoo, there will be lots of work to do in the way of clean up. or so I anticipate. I'd rather someone not see me with the curlers still in my hair, so to speak.

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                   Marisa Wrightposted 6 years agoin reply to this

                   I didn't say the author's name was invisible, just that it's a tiny link and photo which most readers don't see. 
                   
                   I think as writers, we're more aware of other writers and more interested in who's written what.  The general public are more likely to return to a topic  here than bother to find the individual writer's profile, because the breadth of Hubs on their topic of interest is far more "in their face" -  they're far more likely to click on a related Hub and keep reading around their subject, than scroll back to the top and find the writer link. 
                   
                   Anyhoo, how you manage your account is entirely up to you - just making you aware of how things work here.

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                      Arachneaposted 6 years agoin reply to this

                      Thank you, Marisa Wright.

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                         TIMETRAVELER2posted 6 years agoin reply to this

                         Arachnea:
                         
                         I don't know how things worked on Squidoo, but on HP fiction generally does not do well.  I wish it did!
                         
                         I agree with Marisa because to do well, you need those search engine views.  Followers here generally come from within the HP community.

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                            Arachneaposted 6 years agoin reply to this

                            Thank you, TIMETRAVELER2. Ha! I guess it's just as well I won't be writing fiction here on HubPages. I self-publish my fiction short stories and novels. As for differences between how Squidoo did things and HubPages does things. I think all of us migrating over pretty much expected to find some differences and some similarities. So, that makes it easier to transition. I think the common denominator being they're both UGC sites.

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    bettysharesposted 6 years ago

    Good to know thanks.

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