How do hubs get found by search engines with no tags?

1. 83

   lrc7815posted 12 years ago

   How do hubs get found by search engines with no tags?
   
   I am Internet "dumb" so forgive my question.  Since HP stripped our hubs of tags, what does google look for?  Will this affect traffic?

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2. 67

   bumbershootposted 12 years ago

   I think Google (and other search engines) are only using the words in the title of your hub and in the hub summary - the 2-4 sentence summary of your topic.  You can add the summary to the right of your hub, where the ad level and group categories live.

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3. 75

   chef-de-jourposted 12 years ago

   It's a good question. It seems tags were an issue because many people were overdoing it, being repetitive and not helping the site as a whole? Also RSS was being abused in some way, perhaps by those who didn't really know how to create relevant links.
   HubPages in their wisdom will automatically generate tags for each hub? so I've heard - how I do not know.
   Tags gave us some creative input - to help get traffic to our hubs using the keywords. This has now gone!
   As for RSS - didn't it guarantee fresh/updated content, which is what Google prefers? Now we'll have to update manually? Or can you leave a decent hub for ages and ages without any updates or fresh content?
   I'm confused.

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      bravewarriorposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Are RSS feeds automatically configured or are we supposed to configure them?  If so, I don't know how to do that.  :-(

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   2. 83

      lrc7815posted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Shauna, RSS feeds have been disabled.  You can't use them anymore.

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4. 69

   safiq ali patelposted 12 years ago

   As far As I know as far as hub page goes Hub Pages will use software to Automatically tag our hubs and posts and questions. The software will then inform the search engines of tags to each hub here on facebook. The tags were removed because they were being used too often by spammers.

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5. 59

   thephoenixlivesposted 12 years ago

   The feed page on hubpages carries each new hub, it is a PR 6 page and is in constant change. The Google bots are on this page every few mins or so, so as your new hub sits on the feed page, google spiders it and finds new hubs. Simple.  Once the hub is found, the spider will return to the page every so often to look for changes.
   
   If it comes back to your hub 3 days later and there are more changes, it may come back 2 days later, if it does that and there are no changes, it may not come back for 5 days. The spiders develop a patter based on the amount of changes to the hub in question. The Feed page is constantly changing and has a lot of authority, so new hubs are found and indexed fairly quick. no tags required.

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   1. 83

      lrc7815posted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Than you soooo much for the wonderfully simple explanation that even I can understand.  It is much appreciated.

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6. 61

   nicompposted 12 years ago

   Tags were always a red herring anyway. No search engine takes them seriously these days. All you can do is "Write good" and hope that Google agrees.

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7. 88

   Everyday Miraclesposted 12 years ago

   The search engines find your hub through external links coming to your hub. So if you post a comment on a blog entry that is related to your hub and you leave the link to your hub (or your hubpages profile) in the link field, then Google will follow that link when its spiders crawl over the blog post on which you've just commented, covering your hub and crawling out across the links that you have posted on your page.
   
   A lot of what we used to think we knew about SEO is red herrings. The tags were always meaningless and only helped to connect related pages to one another. Your best bet with attracting search engine traffic is to write a high quality and engaging hub that your readers enjoy enough to pass on to other people via Twitter, Facebook and other social networks, and which people feel are good enough to link to from their web pages (or other hubs), thus giving you a boost with search engine traffic.
   
   It has to be above board; Google does punish black hat techniques as much as possible, and the most recent updates have really penalized some of the bigger sites (HP included).

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