Overall quality score.

1. 88

   SimeyCposted 12 years ago

   I note that Hubpages have an internal scoring system and while I can see it's not appropriate to post this on a hub by hub basis, it would be useful to have an overall 'average' internal hub score (using these ratings). This of course assumes that every hub published is given a score...
   
   ...as I battle with Google the one thing I do not know is the overal 'quality' of my hubs - I have some very good hubs, but I probably also have some very bad ones - but I have no quantitative method of deciding which I should re-write or discard to increase the overall quality of my domain....
   
   The 'hub score' I see on my statistics really isn't a good indicator (IMHO) as it combines many different factors - I want a quality score that doesn't care about back-links, traffic, income etc - I simply want to know if overall my domain is high quality or low quality...

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   1. 60

      Jason Menayanposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Hi SimeyC,
      
      We actually do a sampling of Hubs to test - we do not rate Hubs by author, or all Hubs. The Hubs we sample from are across all those published.
      
      We do hope to develop some sort of quality rating in the future. In the meantime, we just suggest looking at your Hub compared to the top 1-2 results in Google for the term you'd like to rank for, and being brutally honest with yourself.

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      1. 88

         SimeyCposted 12 years agoin reply to this

         It's a little difficult to do that with 500+ hubs! LOL
         
         Being serious, this doesn't always work as there are times when there is garbage at the top, or similar content that just happens to rank higher - as an example I have a Lens on Squidoo, and a Hubpage that essentially are exactly the same (the hubpage was written well before the lens) - the Lens ranks 2, the Hubpage ranks 10 (aside from a paid ad that is!). There's no logic as to why the Squidoo lens ranks higher - before August the Hub was actually ranking higher.

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2. 85

   K9keystrokesposted 12 years ago

   SimeyC, providing you don't already do this;  would seeing your page rank for each hub help you understand your quality of work in the eyes of the Google gods? I have a Google toolbar on my computer that allows me to see what the PR is for every hub I have ever written. I do have to pull each page up to find the rank but I find it to be a true indicator of the value placed on the work. Mind you, the technical stuff is NOT my strong suit, but I do find this a manageable task.

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   1. 81

      Aficionadaposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      But PageRank actually is merely a measure of links, not overall quality.
      
      I was not aware of that prior to a forum conversation with Oli; then, when I researched it, I learned that is correct. 
      
      Also, the name does not mean the "ranking [value] of a webpage" as we could easily infer.  Instead, it is a link-number ranking measurement devised by someone whose last name is Page.  I believe he became one of the founders of Google, if I'm not mistaken.

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      1. 85

         K9keystrokesposted 12 years agoin reply to this

         I love that I learned something cool from you, thanks! I had to giggle a bit about the "page" being his name and not meaning a page of written material. I sure appreciate your correcting my understanding of the tool...it only reinforces the notion that the technical stuff is NOT my strongest suit!
         Much respect Aficionada~

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         1. 81

            Aficionadaposted 12 years agoin reply to this

            Thanks for this kind response, K9ks!  I had always had the impression that PR measured quality, until I was corrected.  I even installed the Google toolbar and felt so good to see the PR of various Hubs climb!
            
            I think HP is the greatest place for learning new things about the internet, and most of those things have come from other Hubbers, in my experience.

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            1. 85

               K9keystrokesposted 12 years agoin reply to this

               I know what you mean about the G toolbar, I was thrilled with the visual aspect of the tool as things would become more valuable to Google (in my mind anyway). And I could NOT agree more, I have learned 30% of the stuff about HubPages from the learning center (which rocks!) and 70% from the wonderful HubPages community...and you in particular. Thanks again, your wisdom is highly valued in my HubWorld!

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               1. 81

                  Aficionadaposted 12 years agoin reply to this

                  
                  
                  Oh my goodness, I'm flabbergasted!  You just made my day - thanks so much!
                  
                  (Now I'd better go back through all my posts and see if I've led anyone astray by mistake!  )

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                  1. 85

                     K9keystrokesposted 12 years agoin reply to this

                     (())

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         2. 88

            SimeyCposted 12 years agoin reply to this

            Back to being serious! PR is a good indicator - but I'm looking for something to simply tell me if I wrote a good quality hub or not! I guess there's a lot of subjectivity....but if Google are looking for 'quality' then i want to know that I am writing 'quality'!

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            1. 75

               WriteAngledposted 12 years agoin reply to this

               The trouble is, if Google "quality" is measured by a robot, it might bear little relationship to what real human beings view as quality.
               
               Also, even among human beings, quality means different things to different people. If someone needs reliable information about complex academic topics, they will go for a certain type of article as being of high quality. On someone else's qualitymeter, that sort of article may well be downgraded because it is not written for a reading level of 5 years and thus is considered inappropriate for the Internet audience.

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               1. 95

                  wildernessposted 12 years agoin reply to this

                  I think you're absolutely correct that a robot has a different definition of what "quality" is.  I also think it is a good part of why so many great hubbers have seen the plunge in their traffic and SERPs.
                  
                  The (literally) stupid robots see something they don't like (a misspelled word, one too many keyword repetitions, one too many quick backlinks, a comma out of place - whatever it might be) and declare a perfectly good, high quality hub to be substandard.  And then decide that the entire subdomain is of pitiful quality based on one or two hubs.  A couple of hubs with the word "I" in them may shut down an entire portfolio - we just don't know - but it has little to do with the actual quality of the hubs.
                  
                  Google may try - I'll give them points for that - but their effort is pitiful when the result is a downcheck of some of the hubs I've seen on HP that are head and shoulders above the average in "quality".

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                  1. 88

                     SimeyCposted 12 years agoin reply to this

                     This is one thing I've never understand. Why would Google rank a brilliant article down simply because the author has 25 other mediocre articles (or not other articles at all)? If the article is brilliant then I want to read it....

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                     1. 81

                        Aficionadaposted 12 years agoin reply to this

                        
                        Sadly, I believe it also works the other way to some extent.  That is, I believe Google ranks down 25 brilliant articles because the author has a few mediocre ones as well.  At least, that is the way it has seemed recently.
                        
                        My assumption has always been that our scores on HP were originally designed to help give us some clues about quality (with performance assumed to be one indicator of quality).  I know that some random factors were thrown into the mix, to make it hard for devious people to game the system.  But I don't believe our HP scores really do that job very well now. (Sorry, HP!)
                        
                        I understand that on Google, with billions of articles to measure, there has to be some automation - period.  And I understand that quality depends, to some extent, on the target audience as well as on the purpose of the article.
                        
                        I'm excited to see Jason say that they are hoping to develop a quality rating in the future.  I have brainstormed (by myself) to come up with specific ideas for efficient and effective ways to measure quality.  For example, I personally enjoy seeing polished grammar and punctuation, but I also know that excellence in those areas does not guarantee having a good article.  In fact, I have read some wonderful articles, stories, forum posts, what-have-you, that have been full of punctuation flaws, sloppy spelling, and sometimes even poor word choice. 
                        
                        I think that one measure of quality has to be whether the article (or whatever) has achieved what it set out to do:  to entertain, to inform, to educate, to persuade, to sell.
                        
                        What criteria would the rest of you use to measure the quality of a Hub?

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         2uesdayposted 12 years agoin reply to this

         Now that has sent me off at a tangent wondering if the name had not been Page but something else what everyone might have been struggling to attain rather than PageRank -
         
         examples- BrownRank, SmithRank, JonesRank, not quite as authoritative are they!

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         1. 81

            Aficionadaposted 12 years agoin reply to this

            Great point!

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         2. 85

            K9keystrokesposted 12 years agoin reply to this

            Brilliant 2uesday!

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         3. 88

            SimeyCposted 12 years agoin reply to this

            HankRank has a certain ring to it

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3. 56

   laptop-coolerposted 12 years ago

   It would be interesting to see how a quality score for an article could be brought together.

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