We are sending back for revision about 30 of the approximately 250 hubs that come in a day. We don't look at every single hub, we have some filters that help us identify likely candidates. Fairly soon, we hope to move those filters directly into the publishing process so that we can divert potential problem hubs before they are even published (and before they show up in your Hubtivity).
That said, we make mistakes from time to time, and there is some variability in each of our reviewers standards. That's why there is an easy way to resubmit content that you feel wasn't fairly sent back for revision.
Here is a list of things that we don't allow in hubs, with some explanation.
57 in the last month.
We've been very vigilant about removing this kind of stuff, and most of the purveyors of it have stopped wasting their and our time.
22 in the last month.
These don't come up too often, but I suspect we are not finding every hub that violates this policy. For most hubs 10 or 15 tags should be sufficient. If you have a 100 tags there better be a good reason. Please don't pollute the tag space by tagging hubs that are not related at all, or are only tangentially related to that tag (generally, the more specific a tag the better) When making a tagging decision, ask yourself "Is a fan of the 'X' tag likely be interested in this hub?". If the answer is no, don't put that tag on your hub (or you'll likely get down voted or flagged by actual members of that tag fan club).
31 in the last month.
Someday we may have separate sites for different languages, but for now English only is the rule.
551 in the last month.
HubPages has become a popular place for search engine optimizers to dump articles with links back to a site they want to promote. Generally these people aren't really interested in participating in the HubPages community or even getting traffic to their hubs, they just want back links. Usually the content of the article is sub par or lifted from another site, and often the sites they link to are not very worthwhile.
A lot of these hubs are easy to detect, but some of the purveyors are wily and will adapt to our counter measures fairly quickly.
We're all for free speech, but if we adopt a policy of allowing this kind of content the site will quickly be overwhelmed by it. We're happy to oblige contributing members of the HubPages community with a reasonable number back links to their other sites. Previously we gave new members the benefit of the doubt, but now you have to prove you are worthy of having your links FOLLOWED first.
To that end, we've recently taken the step of applying NOFOLLOW to the links in hubs that have a HubScore below 50, and to all the hubs of authors with an author score below 75. This negates most of the SEO value of the link. Getting to 50 and 75 isn't too difficult but it requires some participation, and gives us time to ferret out the deviants before they gain much from their behavior.
311 in the last month.
Generally these are hubs where the intent is not malicious, they just don't meet our minimal standards.
These would include:
- Hubs that are short and strictly personal in nature. For instance a picture of a deer, and the sentence "I like hunting and guns".
- Hubs that are basically just an RSS or News feed (these might also fall under overly promotional)
- Hubs that aren't finished. These might say something like, "This is my first hub. Just testing."
- Hubs that consist only of a link, or 1 sentence and a link. Once and a while one of these might pass muster, but there are dozens of good sites that are built around this kind of submission, such as reddit, digg, and stumbleupon. If you're intent is to try and kick off the discussion of the content of a link or share the link with your fans, then following one or more of these steps will reduce the chance that your hub will be flagged:
1) add a paragraph or so of your own thoughts
2) collect some quality links from several related sources to further the discussion
3) add some interesting photos or videos that illustrate the topic
(Another option would be to share a fun link or try and start a discussion of an article in the forums. The forums aren't a place for self-promotion or search engine optimization either, but if your intent is to foster discourse or share something that isn't self promotional that's generally fine. In terms of short posts, we're liable to let a little more go in the forums than in a hub).
Hopefully that sheds a little light on our policies, and how to steer clear of the business end of them.
