Just a heads-up -
Several of us have found our hubs being copied by thieves and used for what appears to be Black Hat back-link schemes. It also appears they are using our 'best' hubs - the ones that have the most traffic.
If you have had a sudden drop in one or more hubs, do a search by using quote marks around a random phrase in the hub (preferably one that reflects your individual writing style). When I did that, several other sites popped up that had urls totally unrelated to my hub, but had phrases from my hub as part of the search teaser or summary for each result. The quote marks are very important in order to find what's really going on.
In some cases, the text of the appeared when I got the link to open (often took a long while to load them). In other cases, though, the text was entirely unrelated - so I guess they have hidden text or something. But clearly, it is used to drive traffic to other sites. They would hyperlink to words like "the" and other words that do not relate to specific content. And of course, the links were used to drive traffic and get Google points for back links.
Since I am not a whiz yet at SEO, etc, (and I am by no means a whiz at Black Hat stuff), it was not easy to figure out. A good friend here on the site helped me unravel it. But now I know of others seeing the same problems. I'm thinking they are targeting sites like HP that have plenty of content about a variety of topics, and they're copying our work for that purpose.
I just happen to check Google for a couple of my best hubs and I was amazed at what I found a few days ago. My original hubs do not even show up in the search results, but several entire hubs were cut and pasted, including the ads and comments.
Fortunately Google's Panda and Penguin updates have eliminated that.
Wait...they didn't?
Nope, they sure didn't. I don't mind someone adding a link or copying smaller excerpts and integrating it into their own posting, but in this case the entire hubs (including ads and comments) are cut and pasted onto blogs. The hub is the entire post, then at the very bottom in a tiny font is a link to my hub.
I was looking at the traffic - where it was as of the date of the postings on the blog and the more than four months since then. The traffic dropped by about 90%. There were more than 1,600 hits from Google previously, but not even one under the "month" tab. I did report it to Google a couple of days ago, but I have not heard anything and it is still up.
Did you get a chance to check out who the site or blog is registers to? A guy named Dan Gordon has taken content from several of us.
i have done this random search from time to time often with upsetting results. This is a great question because it prompts me, as it should prompt all of us, to schedule a monthly task for searching on some random test from our hubs.
Hey Marcy, just found another one of mine at a new site:
http://www. egige.com/index.php (space added to break the link)
Hopefully this isn't another trend of people stealing our stuff!
Oh, geez - I hope you reported it? My first report to Google didn't seem to get quick results, but the second one got them removed right away. I think the first didn't have the right form or something. I know they want to get rid of sites that are 'link farms.' So irritating to go through this!
I just found another copied hub - on RedGage and also on BlogSpot.
Countering the disadvantage of relatively low traffic, I guess there's an advantage to writing hubs about conservation or the "green" life: No one bothers to copy them. I've only ever had one hub copied and I had that spammer removed from Wordpress. Just now I checked four hubs for copying and last week checked several more. The hubs are all showing up first in the search engines when I put quotes around specific phrases.
This is so upsetting news. I thought Google and HP will take care of that the original content is not copied. This is so frustrating. What can be done to protect our content. I am quite new to online writing and don't know all this SEO related precautions to be followed.
Hi, ChitrangadaSharan - no, HubPages doesn't handle that for us, and while Google will often flag duplicate content, it's up to us to monitor things, spot it and report it. The people who copy work are good at keeping us in the dark. I have several search results popping up for at least two of my best-performing hubs that don't even have the content openly published - they have other content, but the search results show up when you enter exact language from my hubs. So it's taking a while to get Google to act.
I thought they'd taken the sites down, but now I'm finding them again. And, because I've already reported things, I can't report the same sites again - the form Google uses won't accept the duplicate report.
Very frustrating . . .
by Susana Smith 13 years ago
There have been several theories about what content Google is penalising and rewarding in the search results but at the moment it does seem a bit random (from my end). Let's compare notes and hopefully we can see some common threads in there. What content of yours is holding on to its ranking and...
by Mark Ewbie 12 years ago
I need reassuring.Up until a few months back I understand, maybe wrongly, HP pages got additional boost from Google. That implies (to me) that Google wanted content farms to churn out pages so that every possible search term was covered by pages that had associated Adsense advertising.Now...
by Shadaan Alam 11 years ago
Hello all my fellow hubbers, hope you all are fine and enjoying your work!!This is my first forum topic and i hope i am able to explain myself well here- as to what i intend to ask you all.My question is: I read somewhere on the internet that if you want to drive maximum traffic to your main...
by Paul Edmondson 7 years ago
I wanted to share two trends I see in content that are very successful today. The first one is what I call the opposing argument to the search term. Google wants balanced search results. You will often see articles that promote a very positive sentiment, but rarely will you see opposing or...
by Jess Brazeau 10 years ago
So I was bored and decided I would Google some of the topics of a few of my most recent hubs... Two of them popped up on the FIRST PAGE!! WHHHHHAAAAATTT?!??! lol. Sorry, I'm not sure if this is the appropriate place for this, but I almost swallowed my own tongue I was so excited and I need to tell...
by Oyewole Folarin 11 years ago
With the recent google algorithm change, i noticed that hubbers who have spent 4 - 5 years are those having their subdomain slammed by google. Why?
Copyright © 2024 The Arena Media Brands, LLC and respective content providers on this website. HubPages® is a registered trademark of The Arena Platform, Inc. Other product and company names shown may be trademarks of their respective owners. The Arena Media Brands, LLC and respective content providers to this website may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website.
Copyright © 2024 Maven Media Brands, LLC and respective owners.
As a user in the EEA, your approval is needed on a few things. To provide a better website experience, hubpages.com uses cookies (and other similar technologies) and may collect, process, and share personal data. Please choose which areas of our service you consent to our doing so.
For more information on managing or withdrawing consents and how we handle data, visit our Privacy Policy at: https://corp.maven.io/privacy-policy
Show DetailsNecessary | |
---|---|
HubPages Device ID | This is used to identify particular browsers or devices when the access the service, and is used for security reasons. |
Login | This is necessary to sign in to the HubPages Service. |
Google Recaptcha | This is used to prevent bots and spam. (Privacy Policy) |
Akismet | This is used to detect comment spam. (Privacy Policy) |
HubPages Google Analytics | This is used to provide data on traffic to our website, all personally identifyable data is anonymized. (Privacy Policy) |
HubPages Traffic Pixel | This is used to collect data on traffic to articles and other pages on our site. Unless you are signed in to a HubPages account, all personally identifiable information is anonymized. |
Amazon Web Services | This is a cloud services platform that we used to host our service. (Privacy Policy) |
Cloudflare | This is a cloud CDN service that we use to efficiently deliver files required for our service to operate such as javascript, cascading style sheets, images, and videos. (Privacy Policy) |
Google Hosted Libraries | Javascript software libraries such as jQuery are loaded at endpoints on the googleapis.com or gstatic.com domains, for performance and efficiency reasons. (Privacy Policy) |
Features | |
---|---|
Google Custom Search | This is feature allows you to search the site. (Privacy Policy) |
Google Maps | Some articles have Google Maps embedded in them. (Privacy Policy) |
Google Charts | This is used to display charts and graphs on articles and the author center. (Privacy Policy) |
Google AdSense Host API | This service allows you to sign up for or associate a Google AdSense account with HubPages, so that you can earn money from ads on your articles. No data is shared unless you engage with this feature. (Privacy Policy) |
Google YouTube | Some articles have YouTube videos embedded in them. (Privacy Policy) |
Vimeo | Some articles have Vimeo videos embedded in them. (Privacy Policy) |
Paypal | This is used for a registered author who enrolls in the HubPages Earnings program and requests to be paid via PayPal. No data is shared with Paypal unless you engage with this feature. (Privacy Policy) |
Facebook Login | You can use this to streamline signing up for, or signing in to your Hubpages account. No data is shared with Facebook unless you engage with this feature. (Privacy Policy) |
Maven | This supports the Maven widget and search functionality. (Privacy Policy) |
Marketing | |
---|---|
Google AdSense | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Google DoubleClick | Google provides ad serving technology and runs an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Index Exchange | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Sovrn | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Facebook Ads | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Amazon Unified Ad Marketplace | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
AppNexus | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Openx | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Rubicon Project | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
TripleLift | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Say Media | We partner with Say Media to deliver ad campaigns on our sites. (Privacy Policy) |
Remarketing Pixels | We may use remarketing pixels from advertising networks such as Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and Facebook in order to advertise the HubPages Service to people that have visited our sites. |
Conversion Tracking Pixels | We may use conversion tracking pixels from advertising networks such as Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and Facebook in order to identify when an advertisement has successfully resulted in the desired action, such as signing up for the HubPages Service or publishing an article on the HubPages Service. |
Statistics | |
---|---|
Author Google Analytics | This is used to provide traffic data and reports to the authors of articles on the HubPages Service. (Privacy Policy) |
Comscore | ComScore is a media measurement and analytics company providing marketing data and analytics to enterprises, media and advertising agencies, and publishers. Non-consent will result in ComScore only processing obfuscated personal data. (Privacy Policy) |
Amazon Tracking Pixel | Some articles display amazon products as part of the Amazon Affiliate program, this pixel provides traffic statistics for those products (Privacy Policy) |
Clicksco | This is a data management platform studying reader behavior (Privacy Policy) |