Waiting for the Axe to Fall on Hubpages

Today at noon ended the 4-month grace period on Hubpages for the content transferred over from Squidoo. I’ve checked a few times this afternoon but so far no status changes that I can see.

Already about half of my 595 hubs have been unfeatured for either quality or lack of engagement. Of the remaining topics, I count 46 with red skulls. Early on, I diligently applied myself to updating to clear those away. When the updated hubs went through quality review and appeared with the white dot the next day, I abandoned my self-improvement plan.

Apparently my idea of what improved a hub did not match what Hubpages wanted. I, like other refugees from Squidoo, lost heart and said “why bother?” Now and then in an idle moment, I would try once again but more often than not missed getting rewarded for my efforts.

What will happen today? I expect my 46 red skull hubs to join the unfeatured ones and to be cut off from Google traffic. Since that traffic is almost non-existent, probably no great loss.

For hubs with my family history or Civil War information, I’ll either move the information to my blogs or make one last effort to bring them up to par. Hiding or removing all Amazon, eBay and Zazzle might suffice, though it also removes most chances for any earnings as well.

Hubpages keyboard created using GlassGiant

Getting Discouraged with Hubpages

Four months ago, my 595 web pages transferred over from Squidoo to Hubpages. Within a few weeks, the site was slapped by a Penguin update with Google suppressing Hubpages in its searches. This resulted in very low traffic for everyone there. Long-time hubbers quickly blamed the Squidoo content for the attack. I think it was just poor timing and not necessarily directed at former Squidoo pages.

Being used to ranking in the top 20 lensmasters on the Squidoo site, I had expectations for doing well on Hubpages too. I figured that after learning the ropes and making required adjustments to my pages, that I’d steadily regain traffic and sales.

Alas, this is not to be. Hubpages only seems to like my stodgiest pages and has hidden about 50% of the ones it considers low quality or lacking in engagement. Many of the low traffic ones are holiday topics, but it will require much work to get those back in service. Given the shunning from Google, hardly any traffic is finding its way to hubs.

It seems lately that any featured hubs with red skulls that I correct the issues, immediately go to unfeatured for quality. When the ones lacking engagement get updated, they do the same. I’m not sure what guidelines the reviewers are using but I’m not on the right track with my fixes.

Enough is enough. It appear from the forum discussions that a batch of old-time hubbers are brandishing flaming torches and vowing to report all sub-standard hubs. They needn’t come around trying to burn down my barn, I seem to be doing a fine job on my own getting my hubs out-of-commission.

On the brighter side, I’m just about finished with the prep work on my first ebook. It contains the content from 5 former lenses, now hubs that I’m deleting. Onward and upward.

Red Skull & Crossbones Sticker by yarddawg