Did Squidoo Lenses get checked for quality before publishing on HP?

1. 89

   Georgie Loweryposted 9 years ago

   I'm not knocking anybody (or maybe I am) but I have seen several "Hubs" that transferred from Squidoo that are composed of nothing more than very thin content and a whole bunch of merchandising links (and even one lady who pimped her own Etsy page multiple times in her "Hub"). The reason I know these came from Squidoo is that the comments all referred to the "Hubs" as "great Lenses."
   
   So the question is, does anybody know if the content that got transferred here from Squidoo had to go through the same process our new Hubs do, or were they just dumped here en masse with no checking for quality content?

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   1. 90

      Millionaire Tipsposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      HubPages only transferred lenses of people who had featured lenses, but they transferred all of their lenses.  They had 4 months to bring them up to HubPages' guidelines, so they don't go through the QAP until they are edited, or until these four months are up.  They can be unfeatured for traffic though.

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      1. 91

         Ramkitten2000posted 9 years agoin reply to this

         Hi Georgie,
         
         I believe the 4-month grace period goes through the end of the year, or sometime around then.
         
         Squidoo folks had very little advance notice about the content "migration" and many of us had hundreds of pages ("lenses"). Some folks also have limited time to work on their online content, so it's taking a while to go through all of their lenses-turned-hubs.
         
         Squidoo encouraged some things that aren't so acceptable--or at all acceptable--here on HubPages, so you're likely to find some of what you described, either until the lensmaster-turned-hubber gets around to editing or moving the content elsewhere, or the grace period runs out and the hub is unfeatured.

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   2. 79

      Sharlee01posted 9 years agoin reply to this

      I know, my articles went through the transfer process.
      
      I transferred about 200 lenses from Squidoo. I found that all transferred without problem. In my first week at Hubpages I was notified with the broken link icon on four of my articles, which I fixed. In regards to lenses with over optimized revenue modules. I noted on a few of my lenses that there was a message that I had to many Amazon lenses. I actually as a rule put one or two amazon items for sale. I went through and dumped most down to one . The larger majority of my Hubs have nothing for sale. At Squidoo, I earned the better part of revenue via traffic from Google ads. I was a "Giant" at Squidoo, and I think  Giants were the better part of users that were transferred.  I had many friends at Squidoo that did not make it through the Hubpages regulations. I don't care for Hubpages functionality. I have to say there are a ton of glitches in there program. However, I will give them props how they handled the Squidoo transfer. In my opinion Hubpages went over lenses from Squidoo carefully. They may want to check out some of the pages that were built here. Let's face it a good percent of Hubs are not of quality, just as Squidoo had a good percent  of poor quality lenses. I will mention one more fact of importance. On my worst days at Squidoo I had four times the traffic that I have here at Hubpages.

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   3. 0

      calculus-geometryposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      Hi Georgie, been a while since I've seen you on the forums.  Lenses transferred from Squidoo simply  have a delayed quality check, but they'll all be QAPed when the grace period is up (about another month I think.)
      
      Low quality hubs that are unfeatured can still be published and viewable to the public.  It's just that they won't show up in Google searches.  So maybe some of the thin affiliate pages you've seen actually are unfeatured.

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   4. 86

      Marisa Wrightposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      Squidoo had a Featured/unFeatured process too, and only Lenses which were Featured were published on HubPages.  Unfeatured lenses were transferred over but in an unpublished state, so they had to go through QAP before publication like a normal Hub.

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2. 78

   Lionrhodposted 9 years ago

   No offense to the OP, but I am getting rather tired of threads such as this.
   
   I'm sure you mean well and care about the quality of HP hubs.
   
   At the time of the transfer, I unpublished one of my lens/hubs basically because I felt it was garbage that I had been forced into writing to make Squidoo powers that be happy.
   
   Every other of my hubs has since been fixed and has gone through QAP with flying colors and my newest hubs published since the transfer have even higher hub scores than the originals.
   
   One of my hubs is now unfeatured for lack of involvement. I can partially chalk this up to the fact that I don't have a following and also to the fact that Squidoo led me to create an article that had a rather nebulous title which is unlikely to be searched for. If it dies, I don't really care.
   
   I was "fortunate" to have under two dozen hubs to deal with. Some of the former Squidoo members had 2-500 and counting. That is a bucketload of work to fix, and we were given little to no time to do so, based on our number of hubs and the day that we happened to discover we'd been transferred. (For myself it was into September.)
   
   Within 4 months of the transfer. every transferred page WILL go through QAP.
   
   So enough already. We're going through QAP, we're getting ready for QAP, we're working with QAP and most of all we WANT our former lenses to excell through QAP.
   
   There are numerous thin or otherwise lousy hubs both from those which have been transferred from Squidoo and those which were here already when we moved in.
   
   Threads like this only contribute to divisions between the former Squidoo community and the established HP one.

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3. 0

   Snakesmumposted 9 years ago

   Lionrhod is right - all of our lenses turned hubs will have to go through QAP sooner or later.
   
   All of mine have now gone through QAP, since they have all been edited, or even written here for HP.
   
   We were given four months grace to bring our articles up to scratch, and I think this runs out at the end of December.
   
   We would all like to see only quality hubs, I'm sure, but given the amount of work the HP staff have to do, some of lower quality are bound to slip through.

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4. 92

   Titiaposted 9 years ago

   What the others said.
   
   I'm not finished updating my former lenses yet. In my case it takes a lot of time because I use a lot of my own photos and due to HP's way too large fixed size for 'portrait' photos, I have to redo all of them. If I don't do that they will look pixelated because of the enlargement.
   
   I have to go over all the text to change the word 'lens(es)' into hub(s), I have to alter links, sometimes rewrite stuff or even rearrange the capsules. All that takes a lot of time.
   
   I wish everybody would stop pointing fingers to former lensmasters, because as the others already said, I too have seen a lot of low quality hubs from original hubbers passing my screen and I've seen original hubs consisting of nothing else but Amazon capsules with 50 word text next to them.
   
   Everybody is welcome to judge our hubs when they've all gone through QAP, but judging them now is a bit unfair.

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5. 69

   makingamarkposted 9 years ago

   Ditto to what everybody else said.
   
   There's masses of work involved in updating lenses to hubs and most are working away at them - while getting on with life" and their other commitments.
   
   I must agree with Titia - the fixed size ("far too big IMO) for photos is a major problem and makes for a lot of work.
   
   My personal feeling is that far too many lenses came over.
   It seems as though rather than drawing a line and identifying those which could come over - as at a specific date - what actually happened is that the threshold for transfer (ie featured lenses in the top 180,000 lenses) kept dropping and dropping as lensmasters deleted featured lenses and transferred featured content to other sites PRIOR to the transfer occurring. Hence a huge number of "featured lenses" disappeared BEFORE the transfer. The way I know this is I ended up with some 100 lenses in the top  two tiers and that means that there was a major shift of content away from Squidoo and Hubpages.
   
   Hence it's entirely possible that some low level lenses came over that were never originally intended to be part of the package. However you can't blame lensmasters for this if indeed this is what happened.

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   1. 78

      Lionrhodposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      The photo problem is certainly a challenge and I feel for everyone who has to deal with this. Personally I find that HP's suggestions on photo size is way too large. As I understand it, large photos slow the DL process and may be contributing to viewers hitting the back button (not to mention the photo slideshow which might be another potential problem.
      
      I hadn't considered how lenses were chosen for the move. I only know that one day I was a Squid and the next I was a Hubber. I wasn't given a choice. If I wanted to access my own content I had to agree.
      
      So it's possible that "lesser" lenses got moved here. It's also possible that a majority of lenses that got deleted weren't great in the first place. I did also find a good number of excellent lenses (which I'd at one point linked to) which for one reason or other did not make the move. I'm sad for their loss and can only hope the authors have gone on to better things.
      
      Just yesterday I came across a hub that was obviously a former lens that had not yet been edited. (It had the term "lens" all over it.) Despite that, it was a well written article, wasn't excessive with Amazon ads and will hopefully stay and become a great hub.
      
      As for myself, with 9 brand new hubs thus far published since the move (almost half what I'd done on Squidoo) I now consider myself a Hubber. Had I discovered this site separate from the transfer, it's my hope that I'd be treated like one.
      
      It's making me heartsick to see former lenses and lensmasters attacked again and again. Can we please cease and desist? We're all one community now. Let's learn to get along.
      
      No disrespect meant to the majority of original Hubbers who have welcomed the ex-Squids with open arms, but there are a rather loud minority who seem to blame us for a change that was not our desire nor our choice. Get over it folks, please.

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   2. 86

      Marisa Wrightposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks for explaining that - I saw some comments about it elsewhere but didn't understand it.   It does explain why some of the more questionable stuff came over.

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6. 67

   Dressage Husbandposted 9 years ago

   I agree with most of what is being said here. We were not given any notice to speak of before the transfer, and there is even debate over its legality. Since Seth Godin and Squidoo did not own the content authors did. Many of the top Lensmasters chose to go elsewhere and there may even be a class action suit over what happened. However there is no point in trying to discuss this all as it happened and there is nothing we can do about it now.
   
   As a former Giant Squid I just got on with editing my lenses into Hubs and they are doing OK here now. I have actually seen a slight increase in traffic overall, and all of my lenses have been through QAP, some several times. I do not see a great fluctuation in my Hubber score or Hub scores. I am assuming my quality is OK. I have had a couple of Hubs fall off due to engagement and Quality issues, but in general I have found that the rules are not dissimilar and overall I am happy here.
   
   Let's give it time and I think everything will be fine. By the way in Hub hopping there are many more bad Hubs than we had bad lenses, just what I am experiencing. However the top people here are really excellent so it cuts both ways!

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