Please Explain How The Scoring Works

1. 39

   stefanposted 16 years ago

   Hi,
   
   I would really like an FAQ on how the scoring system really works.
   I had seen my hubs beeing assigned a default of 50 and then without
   doing anything the score dropped to 12.
   Now for some unknown reason they are back up at 56,
   then after one pageview down to 51...
   This is a mystery to me.
   
   Do you count pageviews?
   Do you count backlinks?
   Or is it comments?
   Do affiliate links bring the hubscore down?
   
   I see hubs from different people that have very similatr content but very different hubscores.
   
   It would really be a fair move to just publish what really matters for hubscore.
   Not just "create good content". We all know that.
   
   I would really like to create more hubs on interesting topics
   but I want to understand first how scores are assigned.

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2. 66

   darksideposted 16 years ago

   I, like you, am new here. So anything I have to say is mere speculation.
   
   I think things that would effect HubScore would be:
   
   Pageviews
   Backlinks?
   Comments?
   Freshness of the content?
   CTR?
   Number of click thrus?
   Sales?
   Age of the hub?
   PR of referring sites?
   
   I have a hunch that HubPages won't disclose all the details of their algorithm. And really, I wouldn't want them to. I understand trade secrets and proprietary formula.
   
   One thing I would like to know is, given the way that it all works (and that I don't think it's giving away too many secrets) is "Does the performance of other Hubs (ie: their Hubscores) effect other Hubscores?
   
   If it were a simple ranking system 1 through to 25,000 I would understand that one day I'd be 5125 and that the next day, if I do nothing different, haven't changed anything and still got the same amount of visitors I could slip down to 6000th place. How? Because the 875 other Hubs that have shifted up performed better (more traffic, more sales).
   
   Now I wonder if the same transpires to the HubScore algorithm. Does the performance of other hubs factor into the HubScore of any one Hub?
   
   Am I close? Warmer? Warmer?

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3. 39

   stefanposted 16 years ago

   Thank you for your comments,
   
   Of course I would not expect that they reveal the exact algo but just give a general guideline.
   We all know how Pagerank works - at least we know around 80%.
   But that is sufficient to know what we should or should not do to improve PR.
   
   I have just taken a while to look at some hubs with a high score and see if there is something they have in common.
   Unfortunately I was wrong with most of my guesses:
   
   I have found that many hubs with scores higher than 80:
   
   - have no external backlinks (other than from hubpages itself)
   - have duplicate content (some the same as on Squidoo and articles in directories)
   - have not more than an article with a link at the end
   - have no comments
   
   All of those 4 things above I thought would be negative, but still they are ranked high.
   
   However, some things that hi-score-hubs also have in common that I now believe will be favorable to hubscore are:
   Most of them are:
   - older than 1 month
   - indexd by Google (some have Google PR 3)
   - made by users who have fans and many other hubs
   - have links to and from other hubs by the same user
   
   Still, it is strange to see that hubs by different people with very similar content can have very different scores.
   
   If pageviews count, then hubs with high scores will have a major advantage because they always show up in the featured hubs and people click on them, so they would get even more.
   
   I liked your idea of a relative hub score (100 = the best of all)
   However, that still doesn't explain why one of my hubs went from
   53 before lunch to 47 right now after lunch all in less than an hour :-)
   
   It seems that new hubs get an initial score which is the average of the user score, but then when they get evaluated individiually they will affect the user score - which seems to be the average score of all hubs a user has got.
   
   Still, it is strange that many hubs with scores higher than 80 or even 90
   just consits of one article (copied from an article directory), one affiliate link at the end and have no or very few external backlinks.
   
   Maybe somebody from the admin team could bring a little light into all of this.

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4. 66

   darksideposted 16 years ago

   I think a general feel as to how it works will only reveal itself to an individual Hubber when they've got a few hundred Hubs in their account.
   
   I've experienced that at Squidoo.
   
   You start to see trends that weren't obvious or apparent when you've only got a few, even dozens of lenses. Once you get 100+ you start to see a pattern.
   
   Of course there's always a big gap between what you think you know and what is the hidden truth.

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