Delete the News Capsule?

1. 89

   Marisa Wrightposted 12 years ago

   It seems the News Capsule is now out of favour.
   
   That's a bummer, because over the last couple of years, it's been recommended as a great thing to add your Hubs to keep the content "fresh".
   
   As a result, I (and many other Hubbers) have a News capsule on every @##$%^& Hub. 
   
   That means I (and many other Hubbers) need to go through every Hub just to remove the News capsule.  I don't believe I have a lot of other tweaks to do - unless someone comes up with something else! 
   
   I'm wondering, if the News capsule really is so "on the nose", would HubPages consider deleting that feature?  And if they did, would all the existing News capsules disappear?  That would be a nice easy solution

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      Michael Willisposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Or if they could allow a way to only allow the title of the News feed. Like we can do with Links. This way it could still refresh without the description.

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      Edweirdoposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      I use the news capsule everywhere, too, and there's been no "official" word as to whether or not it's a bad thing.
      
      The main argument seems to be that it tends towards duplicate content, but that seems like a stretch (IMHO). Unless it's being wildly misused, its comprised of just a few sentences of content, and I find it hard to believe that such a small amount of duplication could be harmful. And I find it hard to believe that Google isn't smart enough to recognize a feed (which they probably provide!) as a big problem.
      
      I can't imagine that a targeted news capsule (meaning it uses appropriate keywords and not just the hub title) could do that much harm. In fact, I've been considering moving my news capsules from the bottom of my hubs up into the main body, so that it becomes more relevant to the content and not just a lame excuse for creating "freshness" - which is why I included most of them, if I'm totally honest about it!

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         Michael Willisposted 12 years agoin reply to this

         I did the same at first with the News capsule. But I went back a while back and revamped the News capsules to show less feeds, change keywords and even deleted some.
         Some of the News capsules I have used add to the hub and would hate to have to lose them. Hopefully HP will have a definite answer on this soon.

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2. 82

   skyfireposted 12 years ago

   News content triggers duplicate content ? That's news to me. I wonder how autoblogs are using news+rss feeds in their favor.
   
   News/RSS feeds at the bottom of the page are not page leaks. Besides if they used to work earlier, why they stopped working suddenly ? Because we're labeled as content farm and they're not going to hurt or help us in anyway at current stage.
   
   My only concern is about nofollow tag on news capsules and pagerank sculpting theory. I tend to agree with the point raised by potpiegirl(Jenifer) last month, why link to some site with nofollow tag if you've no trust and only doing it for syndication ?

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      Michael Willisposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      She made some great point in her article. The News feeds I have used are to authoritative websites. I would think these would be dofollow and could help.

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         bgamallposted 12 years agoin reply to this

         As I said, Business Insider allows embedding of every article on other websites, and there is no penalty.

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3. 59

   recommend1posted 12 years ago

   I think it would be nice if there was an authorative response from Hubpages about all these issues.  We seem to be operating on rumour and gossip with a few wise words of advice froma few hubbers we respect, like sunforged, and a deluge of twaddle mixed in.
   
   If some things cannot be defined exactly then some inexact definition should be available as general advice or some discussion of the thinking behind it.
   
   As the size of this site decreases (with the junk jettisoning efforts that should have been done long ago) we are also losing good contributors that help the site rate upward.
   
   While I am criticing - allowing the site virus infection by one of their own ads was incompetent, not fixing it until it had rampaged through the site and probably onto the computers of our visitors over the entire weekend was slack in the extreme and the real damaged from that may not be apparent but could be considerable.
   
   I would suggest more monitoring and more duty staff, and more appearances in these threads with definitive information - such as that just given by Maddie in another thread here contributing to the definitive position on duplicate content. And the note on poetry by Paul yesterday.

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4. 92

   puter_drposted 12 years ago

   I could be wrong about this(and often am, just ask my wife)
   
   
   I think the idea is that you cannot use the news capsule to be the primary thrust of the hub. I have seen some in the past where the hub is one news capsule after another.
   The text that is actually written in the text capsules is static and not subject to daily changes, and it seems like that is the text that is used to determine the word count for the level of product ads.
   I don't think the news capsules are being phased out, but the use of them is a bit more regulated.

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5. 55

   prettydarkhorseposted 12 years ago

   Use it judiciously it said in the HP blog written by Ren "http://blog.hubpages.com/ "Second, we found that Hubs which successfully maintained their traffic were much more likely to judiciously use the Amazon, eBay, news, RSS and link capsules, so we ask if you choose to add news and RSS capsules, you make sure that you have plenty of original content in your Hub to accompany it and that you write at least 50 words of text in your Hub for every product you feature in your Amazon and eBay capsules."
   
   and Mr Paul Edmondson said that news feeds is the second most correlated with traffic views decline when they ran a test.
   
   "Yes.  We ran several tests and Hubs that used Amazon were the most likely to see a decrease in traffic, followed by the news capsule. We can only guess at the reasons, but it's possible that it looks like copied content, possibly resembles a scraped site, and could have an ad to content ratio that is to heavily weighted toward ads that the new algorithm doesn't like as much.  Again, just possible theories.  However, we are pretty sure that if the content engages the reader, the search engines will come around."

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      Ign Andyposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Great point prettydarkhorse.
      
      Previously, I put news RSS in most of my hubs. But then when I checked, most of the contents are irrelevant even though I customized the keywords.
      Now I prefer no news capsule in my hubs.

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6. 89

   Marisa Wrightposted 12 years ago

   Thanks for all the replies!  It's good to get this in perspective - some of the other threads were painting a completely different picture!

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   1. 68

      Michael Willisposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      I have made some changes to News capsules. Most RSS capsules I have deleted, since with my topics, they can change too much to be relevant after time.
      The News Capsules that add relevant information to my hub,I left intact and allow fewer feeds.

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7. 66

   Flightkeeperposted 12 years ago

   It seems as if this whole change in the google algorithm is throwing everyone for a loop.  Until someone in hubstaff tells me that we can't keep the newsfeed (and if they do, they should announce it in big fat letters somewhere), I think I'll keep mine.

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   Lisa HWposted 12 years ago

   When I've had a Hub that would get some related news if I added a news capsule I've added it.  (As it is, a lot of my stuff doesn't have much news going on that's related - so that's good, I guess.  ) 
   
   Yes, I've always gone with the "conventional wisdom" that adding a news capsule meant adding ever-changing, fresh, content.  That's what we've all been told by "whoever" for all this time.  Since the option of adding a news capsule has been there, I assumed the conventional wisdom was, in fact, wise.
   
   I think this kind of thing highlights one reason Hubbers/Internet-writers should be very careful about just accepting, and going with, whatever the latest, widespread, advice is (particularly if that advice is about "what Google likes").

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   1. 89

      Marisa Wrightposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      I agree, and that's mainly why I started the thread! It's been good to see the idea being debated instead of just being accepted as gospel.

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   WoodsmensPostposted 12 years ago

   Yeah I agree. Some people run across this forum with all the answers like they are the chosen one to give a new hubber advice wether it be correct or not. I remember a few running around a few months back every forum saying oh yes I do this and I do that. Now those same people are deleting the same advice they were dishing out like the found the golden ticket. You have to be very careful taking advice from the know it alls in this forum.

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10. 69

    Richieb799posted 12 years ago

    I used the News capsule until I heard someone say the RSS does exactly the same thing to let the search engines know your pages are alive.

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11. 91

    Howard S.posted 12 years ago

    I have disabled nearly all of my News capsules rather than deleting them. It will be easier to undo this knee-jerk that way. I am still leaving them in the few cases where they actually contributed something. I have found it more difficult to exclude irrelevant stuff from news than from RSS or Amazon.
    
    With less than 40 hubs, it's not a big deal for me to make changes. But I still don't want to. I figure it's probably not necessary. I think I get good refreshing out of the pertinent HP topic...RSS. I usually use hot in order to avoid some of the garbage that shows up in latest. I rarely use best because I am afraid it won't refresh often enough.

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