Hub Hopping Question...

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   Lily Roseposted 14 years ago

   Ocassionally I like to try and "do my part" and I do some hub hopping.  My question about is, how broad is the definition of spam?  For example, I see hubs written all the time that are relatively short and appear to just be a "commercial" of sorts for the writers, or someone else's, e-commerce business.  To me it's spam, but I'm not sure if it "officially" is...

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   1. STAFF

      pauldeedsposted 14 years agoin reply to this

      If you're not sure, just go ahead and flag it and we'll take a look.
      
      We're fairly tolerant, too tolerant some might say.   The main things that we look for are content that violates the adsense program policy, and content that violates our rules around linking and quality.
      
      Thanks for doing your part to keep HubPages clean!

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         Pcunixposted 14 years agoin reply to this

         It's the "quality" judgement that's hard for me.   I see an awful lot of things I think are very poor, but I am hesitant to flag them because I'd be flagging so many.. 
         
         Maybe if we got some feedback from flagging - like no, that one was ok and yes, we agree on that one, we could learn to make better calls and help y'all out more?

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   2. 75

      IzzyMposted 14 years agoin reply to this

      Getting back to this first question, I have flagged quite a few hubs for being duplicate content - stuff that is is stolen from another site and posted here under a good SEO url.
      But is posting duplicate content against TOS?
      I've read here about how hubscore gets penalised for duplicate content, and how certain privileges like being allowed outgoing links are withdrawn, but do these hubs get unpublished? I've actually never gone back to check. I thought they did, but recent forum comments suggest they don't.

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         relacheposted 14 years agoin reply to this

         http://hubpages.com/help/user_agreement

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            IzzyMposted 14 years agoin reply to this

            Some interesting stuff in there, Relache. Thanks for posting.

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2. 67

   relacheposted 14 years ago

   When you hit the "flag" button, you are presented with several options for reporting.  Each of these options lists some qualities to tell you how HubPages defines each option.  You don't actually file a report to admin unless you complete that report page, so just click on the flag button sometime so that you can read all the guidelines, and then click "cancel" to just back out of the process.
   
   Many very short Hubs are what admin calls "low quality" and those should be flagged too.

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3. 75

   WryLiltposted 14 years ago

   I generally hub hop once every day or two. After hopping maybe 30-40 hubs I usually flag at least five. I think a lot of the older hubbers let their hubs mature a bit before publishing, or have such good quality the hubscore jumps above hopper value pretty fast (that's the only explanation I can think of). Most of the hopper hubs seem be by relatively new users and of course new users often aren't clear on exactly what they should be doing.
   
   So I say flag away - if the newbie is meant to stay here they'll learn to hub, if they aren't they'll leave the site and go spam elsewhere. Low quality spam makes good quality hubs look bad.

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      Pcunixposted 14 years agoin reply to this

      I'm not understanding this "maturing" bit.
      
      Are you saying that if you create a hub but don't publish it for a few days its score increases?
      
      I think I have seen several other people say the same thing.   Is this just something odd in the way HP works?  Otherwise I can't understand how a hub only you can see gains any value.
      
      ???  Confused ????   :-)

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         Marisa Wrightposted 14 years agoin reply to this

         I'm only guessing here, but although the writer is the only human being who can see an unpublished Hub, HubPages' scoring system can see it and begins to assess it.  As you know, traffic is a big component of score but there are several other parameters that can be judged before the Hub is published.

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         1. 86

            Pcunixposted 14 years agoin reply to this

            Perhaps a little experimentatiin is in order?
            
            I could deliberately write a fairly poor hub and not publish it and see what happens to the score, and then re-edit it to higher standards and let it sit a bit longer.  Naww, too much effort  :-)
            
            But.. other than keeping you out of HubHopping (and I'm not sure why you would want to be kept out), what  advantage is there?  Are people doing this purposefully or is it just an artifact of writing in advance?

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               WryLiltposted 14 years agoin reply to this

               To answer a few things in your post:
               
               Hubscore - try saving a hub as unpublished with JUST a title - no content. I have previously (so I could remember to write about that topic). I've had JUST a title go into the mid 60s. So I can honestly say - I have NO idea how hubscore actually works!
               
               I don't think people purposely keep out. Although as I'm sure you know, views by other hubbers don't bring you any money. So I guess some of the older hubbers don't care either way. The hopper was only introduced a few months ago, anyway.
               
               From what I've seen only low score hubs (which generally means either new or poor quality) are in the hopper. Mostly 45-55 from what I've seen.

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         2uesdayposted 14 years agoin reply to this

         In answer to does an unpublished hub's HubScore increase my experience of this is - yes for me it does.
         
         It seems to be worth holding back from writing it and publishing it in one go - if you want it to have a slightly higher score when you first publish it. That may not be the case for everyone but that is how it appears to work to me.
         
         I have unpublished hubs that I have worked on, left unpublished and come back to from time to time to add something and they have a higher score than a couple of my published hubs. As an example of this 75 is my highest unpublished and 56 my lowest published.
         
         I think it even works when you unpublish a hub to work on it - add or edit it, but am not so sure about that as I have only tried it a couple of times.

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            WryLiltposted 14 years agoin reply to this

            Once a hub is created it has an ever changing score no matter what you do.
            
            But you shouldn't worry about hubscore since hubscore has absolutely no effect on how much traffic you get to that hub. So the faster you publish the better!

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   rebekahELLEposted 14 years ago

   I'm very surprised by the amount of very short hubs. I hub hopped for a while today and didn't really know if I should flag them. They were informative, but short. One was nothing but videos and a short text about a celebrity. ?

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   1. 75

      WryLiltposted 14 years agoin reply to this

      Remember that photos also count as content, to a certain extent.
      
      Most of what I flag is along either the lines of a blog post "This is what I did today, then my boyfriend dumped me" or "I joined an awesome site made $20 in three hours, check it out! [referral link]".

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5. 86

   Lily Roseposted 14 years ago

   Thanks fro all the replies - and to Paul for clarifying as well.  I'll continue to hop when I can and will check out the further descriptions for flagging.  Thanks everyone!

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6. 0

   kimberlyslyricsposted 14 years ago

   Tx Paul
   
   and are you still getting younger/  just curious

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7. 77

   Shadesbreathposted 14 years ago

   OMG, it just occurred to me... does it say, "Help us out" on hub hopping as a means to help weed out the spammy, horrendous crap?  LOL
   
   I swear my first thought was that it was written like that as a plea to help get new writers read.  And I was like, "My god, that's so much work to get to a good one."

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