I've read the blog post, checked all links. If I am a reader in the sense of passer by, so if I'm not specifically searching for the Hub I end up on, I'd close all of them right away. Reading online is tiring, and too long texts don't make it, unless one searches for specific topics like History, science, etc.
Commercial pages do not need ten thousands of words nor personal stories to encourage the potential buyer to click on the "buy" button. But HubPages NEEDS commercial pages.
Anyways I'm not posting in this thread to comment on samples: there's is no accounting for tastes.
All of this is deja vu. I've seen it on Squidoo, with the result we all know.
But the one thing I question is the punishment on here against anybody daring to add Amazon ads on their pages. These along with eBay and Adsense are those that enable to platform to live. Without them, no earnings, no money to pay the staff, the system, the coding, the maintenance, and so on.
So, is the platform bound to die?
Amazon capsules don't show up when the browser's ad blocker is turned on. What do these capsules mean to search engine robots? That they are actually ads?!?
There is mention that HubPages acquired Squidoo's technology or part of it, somewhere in these forums. And indeed, they copied Squidoo's Amazon modules layout. Is there any way to copy their entire code? On Squidoo Amazon were NOT ads. They did show up even with ad block in full motion.
They were text/link modules. And thus considered as that by search engines.
I don't know if it's still in their policies - and they most likely straightened them since then - but when Amazon Omakase was released, we couldn't use it in conjunction with Google Adsense. Omakase was against Google's policies. All technologies similar to Adsense were strictly forbidden on sites that would run Google ads.
Regarding advertisements Google has strict rules. What if the adjunction of those Amazon ads would violate G's policies? I mean, when too many of those ads are too many?
Before penalizing all your writers why didn't you run a test using Squidoo's technology? I mean: text + product link + image link -- they might have passed the filters with flying colors provided that there aren't too many of them and that their text was different than the one on Amazon?
If all those Amazon capsule links were automatically provided with a "nofollow" tag that can't be removed even if the Hubber's score is above 85, they would be simply ignored by robots.
Wouldn't this help instead of keeping writers off from generating money for both HubPages and themselves?
As far as my traffic on here is concerned, those changes didn't improve its rate. And I seriously doubt they will improve in the future. I unpublished a lot of Hubs that are going to be moved because I already lost too much money since the big move from Squidoo and don't intend to keep losing the benefit they generated for myself even in the latest Squidoo's months, when the site was agonising (and here, I refer to Amazon and eBay sales not to tiers payments).
Pages removed in mass, also remind me of a very bad time on Squidoo. Because I'm still unsure that mass deletion of pages is a good sign for search engine robots.
0
