What is your take on the idling of hubs? Should it be looked upon as an opportun

1. 71

   poshcoffeecoposted 12 years ago

   What is your take on the idling of hubs? Should it be looked upon as an opportunity to improve them.
   
   More and more I get hubs idled. Should I update them and add more content or simply move them to another platform?

   replyreport
2. 0

   JThomp42posted 12 years ago

   Always edit them and they will become featured again.

   replyreport
3. 60

   Goody5posted 12 years ago

   It's your hard work, and it deserves to be seen by others. Here's a quick way to edit all of your idled hubs and get them back into the lime light once again - http://goody5.hubpages.com/hub/Quick-fi … led-status  I wish you the best on this.

   replyreport
4. 87

   bac2basicsposted 12 years ago

   Sometimes when you look at idled hubs you can see room for improvement , but I personally think that no hub should be idled, for me even a few hits a year is worthwhile when I have put so much into them . Maybe HP is the wrong venue for some, I find a lot of my recipe hubs get idled and am thinking of moving them elsewhere.

   replyreport
5. 60

   duffsmomposted 12 years ago

   It depends on the hub.  Often if it is poetry or a recipe, the hub may well appear just the way you want it to. I certainly am not going to change poetry or a recipe so that it is featured again.
   
   I think this is an absolute nightmare of a policy here at HP.

   replyreport
6. 81

   brianrockposted 12 years ago

   I know a lot of people are angry about the idling policy, but I don't think you should be.
   
   Hubs get idled because they receive virtually no search engine traffic. Idled hubs simply get de-indexed to remove them from the search engine index. If you have another traffic source (i.e. Pinterest or another referring website) you can still send people to the hub and earn money from the views and the ads.
   
   If an article goes two to three months with no search engine visits, then HubPages is doing you a favor by idling it. They're telling you that, as is, this article is worthless. Hate to say it, and people hate to hear it, (and I'll admit I've published plenty of worthless pieces over the years) but it's the truth if you want to approach publishing as a business.
   
   For some articles, there is no hope. There's simply too little search traffic or too much competition. For others, you can tweak things like titles, subheadings, and word choice to appeal to slightly different keywords. This is one advantage of writing long hubs (1,000+ words). You're more likely to use what are called "long tail keywords" in your post, and therefore rank for low competition, long search phrases.
   
   For example, I've written about modeling comp cards before. These can be called comp cards, composite cards, zed cards, sed cards, and other similar things. Most people searching for them, however, use the term "comp cards." If I write my article using "sed cards" in the title, subheadings, and throughout the text, I'm not going to receive any traffic - even though the article may be well written, informative, and useful. Change the article to use "comp cards" instead of "sed cards" (and maybe keep one reference to the odd spelling for those people that do search for it), and suddenly I've got a much larger potential readership.
   
   If you're publishing for vanity and not for business - i.e. you want to display a bunch of poetry, philosophy, personal ramblings, or whatever - then you should definitely move to a different venue. If you're publishing for business, you should edit the hubs you think target a reasonable market and delete the ones that are hopeless.
   
   I get the feeling this is a somewhat unpopular opinion, but somebody's gotta point out the obvious and break up the echo chamber here in the answers/forums.

   replyreport
7. 85

   jansharesposted 12 years ago

   For initial idling, I would say yes, use as an opportunity to make that hub better. It can probably use a tweak or two that will be beneficial and potentially increase traffic. But for the hub that keeps getting idled and you feel there's nothing else to do, you may have to look at other alternatives.

   replyreport