What happens when I unpublish a hub?

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   Thomas Swanposted 3 weeks ago

   I have unpublished a hub. Does anyone know if it gets removed from search engines now? I would like to publish most of it somewhere else. Should I wait a week before doing that so I don't get "duplicate content" penalties?

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      theraggededgeposted 3 weeks agoin reply to this

      It will be removed from SEs but it might take a couple of weeks.
      
      Whether it gets flagged for duplicate content depends on where you republish it. Search engines don't penalise duplicate content. For instance, I have republished a few of my HP articles on Medium and on my own site. I've not experienced any problems even though they are still live on HP.
      
      With Medium you can set HP as the original and Medium as the copy by using a canonical link. That means SEs send external traffic to HP and not Medium, where you want internal traffic. That's how it's supposed to work anyway.

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         Thomas Swanposted 3 weeks agoin reply to this

         Thank you. That reassures me a bit. I'll be putting it on my own site. Medium looks like too much of a social endeavor... and now a financial commitment too!

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         eugbugposted 3 weeks agoin reply to this

         I've found it doesn't always seem to work though, the Medium versions appearing higher in the ranks than the Hubpages ones, so I had to unpublish on Medium.

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            Miebakagh57posted 3 weeks agoin reply to this

            Good God...well noted.

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   paolaenergyaposted 3 weeks ago

   Good question! I deleted a hub yesterday and it still shows in Google searches because it takes 24 hours to be deleted permanently. I republished it on my own website but have updated it with new content because it was a few years old.
   Hubpages Help section says: "The content you publish on HubPages cannot have been previously published."
   Source: https://hubpageshelp.com/standards/Lear … -standards

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      theraggededgeposted 3 weeks agoin reply to this

      So the Help section extract is talking about the other way around. The two things aren't the same. You can republish as long as it was published here first. It's your article and you can do what you like with it.
      
      However,  you can't post an article here if it exists online elsewhere. It's HubPages' platform and they set the rules.

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         Miebakagh57posted 3 weeks agoin reply to this

         In the later case, it equates duplicate content.

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      Thomas Swanposted 3 weeks agoin reply to this

      Thank you Paola. I'll give mine a check after 24 hours too. I wonder if there's a difference between deletion and unpublishing. I wanted to unpublish in case I needed to prove my authorship, although I didn't find any copies anywhere.

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         Glenn Stokposted 3 weeks agoin reply to this

         There is no difference, Thomas. The URL is removed in both cases, so search engines get a 404 error. You can try that yourself by putting the network URL directly into your browser. Your browser will give you a 404 return code.
         
         You're correct that it's a good idea to leave it unpublished in case you ever find someone plagiarized it. If that happens, you can republish it, and the original copyright year will appear at the bottom so you can file a DMCA takedown notice.

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            Miebakagh57posted 3 weeks agoin reply to this

            Thanks Glen for the hint...I see it helpful.

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            Thomas Swanposted 3 weeks agoin reply to this

            Thank you, Glenn. I see the 404 now. I hope the search engines follow soon.

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