HubPages FAQ

This HubPages FAQ is dedicated to all earnest moneymakers out there. To every would-be Kevin Trudeau, every marketer of fake Rolex watches, every Junior Popeil; hang in there. Your ship will come in. Your CPC will someday exceed 7 cents.

We start with a question baffling Real Writers throughout cyberspace. If hubbers are so intensely dedicated to turning a profit, why can't they form grammatically correct titles for their work? Isn't a title really really important?

Umm.... they do it on purpose.

The Google Keyword tool mines web searches from around the world for trends. Not all the trends are grammatically proper. Hubbers long for frequently searched keyword phrases not yet recognized by major web sites. Those little nuggets are the holy grail of HubPages profitability. We lust after obscure combinations of words describing popular topics. The phrase "Say it with Flower" tends to grate on English teachers but sings to us. We understand that web searchers might accidentally drop the trailing 's' from 'flowers' when composing a search phrase to submit to Google. We realize that a few hundred people a month might make the same mistake. Economies of scale float our boats.

An undercurrent of fear drives every HubPages writer who intends to someday make a living from the site. They live in terror that Google will reject their work if the title doesn't precisely match the content. They purposely include their intentionally improperly formed title phrase throughout their hub. They feel obligated to pepper an otherwise 8th grade writing level (present company included) with their erstwhile search phrase. Perhaps it works, perhaps not.

Nuance and mythology of Fake Rolex watches aren't all that interesting, but hubbers continue to pound out overlapping hubs addressing every minute detail of such. Why bother writing about the same topic over and over?

Google considers each page individually. Google doesn't sit back and say "that's too many words about Submariners and Lady Datejusts." Google embraces each hub on its own merits. For better or worse, we don't know precisely what those merits might be until the inscrutable Google indexing algorithms perform their computational magic. We might get lucky.

Google machinations cannot be known by mortal man. A cruddy hub about Bollywood bathing beauties might garner thousands of hits yet still be saddled with Scientology advertising. Sometimes the Google algorithms simply exhaust themselves. The logic finds itself at the bottom of the flowchart, stuck in the catch-all case. There's nothing left to publish save a public service warning about Swine Flu. it just happens that way.

Nothing is more frustrating than spending 15 seconds scanning a hub only to realize that no useful information is forthcoming. These hubs are simply a vehicle for presenting more ads. Literally gabillions of web entrepreneurs are paying 5 to 7 cents a click to locate their little get-rich-quick text ads on our hubs. Advertisers understand the numbers game. If they can entice enough web surfers to their sites, a statistically significant percentage will pay $39.95 to download their eBook. Any hub written in any nearly readable manner will garner such ads. Hubbers understand that providing just enough verbiage to slip part the Google indexer will nonetheless attract numerous ads that translate to income when clicked. Perhaps composing 1000 words almost but not quite describing how to make money on HubPages represents a marketable skill.

Agreed, there's no such thing as a dumb question. However, this query straddles the demarcation line between insightful and insipid.

There are no bad hubs.

Every hub has a purpose. That purpose may be so minutely unrecognizably narrow as to elude your first or your tenth reading, but it's in there somewhere. Keep looking. Don't try to convince yourself that a less than stellar hub might offend Google or chase away Yahoo. Sooner or later the firehose will be turned on you; let's all play together. Feel free to launch your own version of HubPages that accepts only high prose from Hemingway descendants; let us know when you achieve a Google Page Rank of 7.

These Hubbers are 'good' because I like their work and they are nice to me.

• Hal Licino
• Shadesbreath
  
• Aya Katz
• Uninvited Writer
• Breakfastpop
• GreatAmerican
• Stan Fletcher