In a recent initiative, HubPages has begun to de-index all those hubs that do not get much traffic. One way, they say, is to edit those hubs and refresh the content so that they generate traffic. While this may be a solution for articles, it does not make any sense to poetry. I am sure all fellow poets will agree that you cannot edit/add anything to a poem once you have written it. However, you still want people to read your poems, and find them on search engines, for the sole reason that you want to share what you write about with the world. Are there any thoughts from fellow hubbers about the best solution to this issue? Poets or non-poets, any suggestion/thought is welcome.
HubPages is all about traffic. While poems may last forever, public interest in them comes and goes. It has been a longstanding idea that one of the best thing one can do for their HP garden is weeding - weeding out those hubs that get little or no traffic. I am behind in this myself because I have never been a big fan of weeding However I have known for some time that I should move my un-visited poetry over to WordPress or Blogger where we can all care less if it gets traffic or not.
I know almost none of us would want to change the body of our poems, but as several of you have suggested, REWORK your Title (I have had success with this) and think in terms of using a colon or dash. What do I mean? You don't have to give up the title that you love...add to it an mad make the poem crop up in more searches. No offense to anyone, but I just wandered through the lyrical poem category and there were 35 "Love Poem" -- most of the titles were very tired and overused. Here are some examples:
Splendor in the Grass - A Summer Love
Two Lovers: The Distance Between
The End of Springtime - A Love Poem
Sleep Well My Dear: A Poem for Night
With the Wrong One - Hiding from Love
Another way to generate a unique and compelling title is to base it directly on one of the kines within the poem itself:
Dressing the Bones: A Quiet Poem
Coming into Womanhood - Lavender and Lace
Drowning in Sorrow: The Loss of a Child
The Sphinx Watches Quietly - A Poem of Egypt
Along with all the other good suggestions I suggest you consider revamping your titles. Good luck everyone.
I have been thinking about this subject also. Perhaps adding a new image or capsule will help, at least for a while. It seems new Z's are popping up every day so I think it is a lost cause. sigh
The problem is that the reason they get Zzzzzed is no one is finding them anyway. So although they may be great pieces they are already invisible, or rather, not looked for by the outside world.
You can 'cheat' and refresh a piece by adding or subtracting words, perhaps putting an explanatory paragraph or a fresh picture.
In the end though, it won't make any difference to the traffic conundrum.
I am in the same position. Lots of writing with no attention to keywords and net traffic. It is an interesting problem.
It might be better to start your own web site/blog for your poetry.
That way, you will not need to keep thinking how to refresh it or be forced to add superfluous words/capsules you don't really want.
If a number of HP poets set up a Facebook group to communicate with each other and then started their own sites instead, these could be linked together in a webring or given mutual promotion in other ways.
What a marvellous idea! I'll join a HP Poets Group on Facebook.
I think that I shall never see, as fine a poetry from you to me..enough said?
Thanks all for your inputs. I think a common suggestion here is that poetry should be moved to a different site where traffic is not a concern. Your own page or a common platform like Bloggers or Wordpress seem to be good options so far.
@whonunuwho: You couldn't have said it better.
I write poetry, but thankfully none of my poems are in idle status ( at least not yet). The five hubs that I do have in idle are definitely hubs that don't get traffic anyway, but also I think that they do not have much potential for future traffic because they are not very search friendly. They were mostly hubs that I wrote when I first joined, not my best writing, and I'm just going to leave them.
I had two other hubs in idle that I was less pleased about and I made a couple of very small changes and now they are featured again.
I don't think there is necessarily any reason to assume that all poems are particularly at risk of being idled. I think that the reason many poems don't get traffic is because writers don't think about how the poem is going to be found online - i.e. the titles are too obscure.
I have a lot of poetry on HP in idle status. I also have a poetry blog that I write on regularly. I have enjoyed HP in some large measure because of the sense of community and I am loath to just going back to my poetry blog--it feels much more solitary to me. I am all for an HP poetry group on Facebook---
Polly, it is lucky you don't have poems de-indexed yet. Maybe you are right, maybe its the topic of the poems. I agree with Audrey. Even if I go ahead and publish all those de-indexed poems on a blog site, it won't be the same without the immense support from fellow poets in the HP community.
I say do what I did and self-publish your poetry on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords and Kobo. You will make a lot more money off of it than you do here or putting it up on a WordPress or Blogger website. Once I clear out my idle hubs, I will be self-publishing some more creative writing. It's not hard to do at all and pretty rewarding.
This is what I did for the few poems I have published on HP. In the title capsule, I added a descriptive word or phrase relative to the poem's meaning, placed a colon after it, then enclosed the title of the poem in quotation marks after that word/phrase.
Here's an example: rather than "Dilemma: a poem about the senses", this poem is now listed as The Human Senses: "Dilemma", a poem. The traffic has increased somewhat, though it's never garnered a lot of readings.
I've changed/improved titles for most of my hubs and updated/edited content as well. I no longer have any idle hubs. (Knock on wood!)
I like the idea of reworking the titles as opposed to the body--and it is something that I did not think we could do--so I will try it and that you everyone!
Cardisa wrote a hub about getting more traffic for poems. I read it, and it is excellent She mentioned making titles more searchable and expanding the hub and discussing the inspiration for the poem. She may have mentioned putting several poems on same page on same subject. Some of these ideas may not be from her hub anyway - for what it's worth, these are some ideas.
I was planning to rehash a poem that I wasn't completely happy prior to this initiative was put into place. It was a long poem with several verses so for that one it was easy to do and bring back from the ‘zzz’ zone. But I am wondering how long it will stay there.
I have another poem which includes an explanation and thoughts written 7 months ago and still gets double figure views daily, so perhaps adding a paragraph will make all the difference.
Making changes to the titles is a great idea so thank you JayeWisdom and phdast7 for your help tips. I will certainly be trying this
by Audrey Hunt 12 years ago
I noticed that the zzz'z have been removed from idle hubs. Is there a reason for this?
by Shasta Matova 12 years ago
I know that you can choose to display your idle hubs on your profile page, but I don't, because I don't want Google to see them at all and get confused by all those "do not follow." What this means is that my idle hubs are not available for anyone to see, and I have to actively...
by Paul Edmondson 12 years ago
We really appreciated the feedback from the community and want to continue to incorporate feedback into this feature that will be released in informational mode today so people can see it in their my account.The blog post announcing the feature is here...
by Amy Gillie 12 years ago
One of my best performing hubs is marked as idle. It has had 31 views just this week - better than many of my other hubs that are not idle. I believe this is a mistake.Here is the hub: <link snipped>
by Ben G 12 years ago
So far, thanks to the Idle hubs "feature", I have had my second month in a row where I haven't earned $50 through the HP Ad program... and these are the only 2 times, out of the history of me using HP Ads, that I haven't reached the $50 mark.Weren't the idle hubs supposed to help...
by Don Bobbitt 4 years ago
We all know that we must keep our Articles fresh and up to date, right? Well, I'm sitting here staring at one of mine with the subject, "Idle Hubs". My problem is that for a while it managed to gather several thousand Views. But now, the whole Idle Hub scenario has been eliminated. SO, my...
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