New Here (hello!), what's Next?

1. 74

   Pax Pacisposted 7 years ago

   Hello! I'm happy to be here. I have always enjoyed writing and am looking forward to writing more hubs, as well as reading great ones! I have a few questions:
   
   How do I find the best hubs to read? When I look at "popular / best" on the search tool, I get a lot of discussions and questions instead of articles.
   
   What gives with moving hubs to other sites? I've noticed a couple of my hubs have been shuffled off to skyaboveus.com and I can't find them on hubpages anymore. Is that normal?
   
   Does topic affect a hub's score? The hubs I have written so far are in the 76-81 range, and I am wondering if that is primarily due to "still learning how to write" or if my topic choice (likely not that popular) has anything to do with it?
   
   I appreciate your help!

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2. 85

   Marisa Wrightposted 7 years ago

   It's pretty impressive to have Hubs moved to a niche site when you've barely understood how HubPages works yet!  Well done!
   
   HubPages was founded several years ago, when it was normal for writing sites to welcome all kinds of writers, and allowed them to write about anything and everything.  Unfortunately that led to some pretty low standards for sites like HubPages, and the search engines (especially Google) got fed up and slapped penalties on them.
   
   As a result, all of HubPages' main competitors have gone broke or closed down.  HubPages has survived but has never managed to be hugely successful because Google just doesn't like generalist sites, so it's hard to build up good traffic.
   
   Recently, HubPages decided the best way to deal with that problem was to stop being a generalist site, and instead transfer the best Hubs to new specialist sites (Google likes specialist sites!). 
   
   Currently there are staff trawling through existing Hubs to find the best ones to move.  Also, when you write a brand new Hub, it's automatically considered for an immediate transfer.   That's the way of the future for the site - all the good stuff will go to the "niche sites", as they're called, with only the articles that aren't good enough being left on the old one.
   
   I've written a few Hubs to help out newbies, you'll find them on the slider on my profile.  Don't worry about the scores, the way they're worked out is complicated and they really don't mean much.

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   1. 74

      Pax Pacisposted 7 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks for the quick response! That makes sense. Is there a directory for the specialist sites, or some way to reach them from hubpages?

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      1. 85

         Marisa Wrightposted 7 years agoin reply to this

         No there isn't, which is a bit mad I know.  Sue Adams just made a helpful list of them on another thread, here it is:
         
         http://hubpages.com/community/forum/138 … ost2854073

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