Hub Score; Why do Scores Go Up and Down

The hub score is a ranking from 1 to 100 that hubpages assigns to each article published on its site. The hub score is an internal system meant to rank hubpages based on quality and originality. The higher the hub score, the better the article is in the eyes of hubpages.com.

A fuller discussion of how hubpages are ranked can be found here.

The hub score that is assigned to any article is based on a number of factors including the originality of the content, how many people post comments, how many people give the article a thumbs up and also how many visitors it gets. The more popular hubpages get more traffic.

When you first publish a hub, the hub score is generally low (around 50) and then the score goes up or down as the system analyzes the content of the page, and other factors come into play such as whether people give it a thumbs up or post comments on the article.

If you look at your article on different days or even at different times on the same day you may notice that the hubscore has fluctuated and goes up or down from the last time you checked. The reason is that the hub score is not like a final exam mark; it is a dynamic ranking of your article based on a number of criteria. To use just one example: if you get a lot of traffic from the search engines then your hub score will increase; if the number of visitors to your site falls so will the hubscore.

Another factor influencing the hub score is its relative quality compared to other articles. Let's say you publish a hubpage about Low Fat cooking that gets a hubscore of 75. Then someone else also publishes an article about eating healthy and for a number of reasons, the system determines that the second article is better than yours. In that example, the system will not only assign a higher hub score to the second article, but your's will drop.

Incidentally, the same thing happens with respect to your personal hubscore. It goes up or down depending on a number of factors including the quality and hubscore of the articles you publish. But you cannot rest on your laurels after you achieve a certain score; if the relative score of your articles goes down, so will your personal author ranking.

Some things have changed since this article was first written. In an effort to improve the quality of hubs published on this site, Hubpages has introduced a number of additional factors which affect the hubscore and cause it to go up or down.

1. Mechanical Turk - This is a program which is operated by Amazon.com and it allows businesses to hire people (known as MTurkers) to do repetitive tasks for a small fee. Amazon uses MTurkers to look at every newly published hub and give it a quality rating. The higher they rate it, the higher your score will be.
2. Hub Hopping - As a variation of the above, Hubpages also relies on unpaid volunteer hubbers to randomly hop around looking at newly written hubs and give them a quality score.
3. Rating System - Each hub now has a feature where a reader can rate it as "useful", "funny", "beautiful" etc. The more positive ratings it gets, the higher the hub score will be
4. Visitor Behaviour - Google Analytics measures the behaviour of people visiting the hub. The longer they stay on the hub reading it, the more engaging the hub is believed to be and this means that the hub has something useful to say that captures the imagination of the reader. This results in a higher hub score. If on the other hand they immediately leave the page this probably means that the hub is substandard and therefore it will get a lower score.
5. Length of Article - Hubpages recommends that your hub be at least 700 pages long
6. Number of Pictures - Your Hub will get a higher score if you have at least 1 and preferably 4 relevant pictures.
7. Youtube Videos - Your Hub will get a higher score if you have at least 1 youtube video relevant to your topic.