Greekgeek's Online Odyssey - Hubpages and Online Article Writing Tips

Quick Check-in: Year Stats

Sep 21st, 2015
by Ellen.
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I’ve been enjoying writing for my own sake, being active on social media, and not worrying about traffic. From time to time I stop by Hubpages and add a new article or edit some old ones. I’ve started a new blog recently, vhswhovian, which is probably of interest to exactly one of you who knows what a Whovian is. And I converted an old, early 2000 website into a WordPress format, to make it better for mobile. (And for anyone who cares, my mythphile blog is on hold while I concentrate on other projects, although I still update it once in a blue moon.)

It’s been a year since Squidoo folded and transferred my Squidoo articles across to Hubpages, so I thought I’d check analytics and see what’s happened.

Total Traffic for the year across my hubs and blogs where I’ve installed analytics (which doesn’t include this one, oddly enough):

649,600: Pageviews Sep 14, 2014 through Sep 19, 2015

Surprisingly, that’s nearly all Hubpages.

And I’ve got about 2000 followers between Tumblr and Twitter.

Below is the weekly pageview breakdown. The Squidoo imports (marked with S) perform better on average than my native Hubpages accounts, because I jettisoned about half my articles when they came across so I’d have breathing room to edit the rest. There’s something to be said for a really thorough spring cleaning.

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Posted in: Hubpages.
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My Thoughts About Hubscore on Hubpages

Jan 6th, 2015
by Ellen.
1 comment

Many Hubpages members are anxious about Hubscores. I feel almost the same way about them as I did about Squidoo points and levels: they’re in-house metrics that have no bearing on my success as an online writer. From time to time, I’ll glance at my dash to see which of my articles Hubpages scores as the best, partly to feel a tingle of self-satisfaction, and partly to get a general sense of the kinds of articles Hubpages prioritizes. (In that case, I’m judging Hubpages— never mind how it arrives at those scores, are the articles it’s giving 90s to good articles? If  Hubpages starts ranking junk above what I consider quality, then I’ll worry.)

As I mentioned in my previous post, my recent Hub of the Day had a Hubscore of 83. That shows just how futile it is to chase Hubscores. Looking at all my Hubs with better scores, a quick glance showed no obvious patterns. Some had more comments, some more traffic, some more user interaction, some more or fewer words, some more or fewer photos. Maybe I could figure out why they outrank my HotD if I analyzed them all carefully, but it’s just not important. (Especially since I agree that, while it’s a successful article, it’s not my very best work.)

The only reason Hubscore matters is that it’s Hubpages’ requirement for DoFollow links. If your overall Hubberscore drops below 85, or an individual Hub’s score drops below 40, then links in your article are set to NoFollow. That means Google won’t count them when assessing the value of the sites they point to. Many people actively plant DoFollow links as a way to make their own websites rank better on Google— or so they hope.

Personally, I’ve stopped caring whether links on my hubs are DoFollow. My websites, blogs and good articles attract plenty of dofollow links on their own from other people linking to them.  That spares me from worrying about Google cracking down on various kinds of spammy backlinks. What Google wants to see (and use as a ranking factor) is links from other people who genuinely find your content valuable. To that end, Google’s Penguin algorithm is designed to filter out self-promotional links which tell it nothing about how good the content actually is.

Many years ago, I decided that the best thing to do is not to build my own backlinks, but to try to build content that’s worth linking to. As long as I do that, my Hubscore generally stays above 85 anyway. (I just checked, and all my Hubpages accounts are 85 or better except one, which is an old test account.)

Posted in: Hubpages.
Tagged: · ·

Check-In Jan 2015: Where Is Greekgeek?

Jan 6th, 2015
by Ellen.
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Personal Chatter

‘Lo, folks. Back from adventures.

The good: I managed to make a solo trip to the UK, including Scotland, Ireland, and northern England, which I haven’t visited before. I had a ball at a classic Who convention, indulged in geology and mythology geeking at the Giant’s Causeway, poked around old castles and ruins, and rambled around in the British Museum saying hello to all the bits of Greece that aren’t in Greece. (Sooner or later I need to post about the Elgin Marbles controversy.) Also, Flynn the Cat and I hung out. Thank you, Flynn, for putting up with my being so ragged!

The bad: Bleeding ulcer. I was too stubborn to cancel my trip, but boy howdy do I never want to travel again while feeling that awful. I’m now on the mend, and finally able to sit at the computer for enough time to work.

Also good: My Buzzfeed-style listicle, 25 Funny Things on Google Maps, picked up Hub of the Day on Jan 4.  Mind you, I’ve always mixed feelings about that article. In 2012-2013, it was my top-ranked Squidoo page, thanks to high traffic and clickouts. I’d like to think that my educational articles are better quality. On the other hand, I did go the extra mile (so to speak) to hunt down interesting information about each item on the list. So thanks, HP. I hope someday one of my meatier articles earns an HotD nod.

For what it’s worth, even when it was Hub of the Day, its hubscore still hovered around 83. [See my thoughts about Hubscores.]

My Hubpages To-Do checklist

I gather that transferred Squidoo articles were given a two week extension before they undergo the full Hubpages Quality Assessment Process? At least, when I was working on revisions last week, the warning messages on those flagged with “overly promotional links” said that I had two weeks to bring them up to snuff.

Here’s my checklist.

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Posted in: My Stuff.
Tagged: · ·

Useful Advice from Hubstaff

Sep 26th, 2014
by Ellen.
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So, the transfer from Squidoo to Hubpages has been a mixed bag. While some lensmasters are reporting good results (including me, so far), others are watching their traffic dry up and wither away. On top of which, a major Panda update just rolled out.

Paul Edmondson has some really, really good advice on affiliate links. Read the top post, then scroll down slightly to find the gold-colored post where he responded to questions. His advice is based on (a) Google Webmaster Guidelines and (b) “example[s] where google applied manual spam action on the account…”

Robin (of Hubpages, not Squidoo) had some pointers which I think are well worth trying to follow, even though we may kick at them.

Again, thinking we know better than Google may result in our not getting traffic than Google. It’s irksome, but if we’re losing traffic anyway, we may have to give in and play the game.

I am certainly ripping out Amazon products left and right as I update hubs. I did not get rid of my Greek mythology books hub, but…we’ll see. Going forward, I will definitely be focusing on my informational articles and not writing any more product reviews  unless I really, really hit something that I love enough that I want to share it with my RL friends and family and online friends.

Posted in: Hubpages.
Tagged: · ·

Looking Back at Squidoo’s Mistakes

Sep 19th, 2014
by Ellen.
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Drat. I’ve been trying so hard to focus on the transition to Hubpages and getting on with it, rather than rehashing what’s done and past.

However, I keep see more and more posts by people throwing all the blame on members and absolving SquidHQ of the policies that led it into a death spiral.

Sorry, no. That’s not what happened. I’ve been on Squidoo since 2007. I watched the site change its focus and its approach. HQ erratically tried to backpedal, but even as late as the end of 2013 they were forcing us to create low-content sales-generating pages or lose Giant Squid status.

Here’s my full rebuttal, with more details on what I saw go down when.

And now I’m going to try to get back to looking ahead and slowly getting my transferred articles up to snuff under Hubpages’ QAP standards which, honest to gosh, I want to hug. They’re a nuisance, but it’s the first time since early 2013 that I’ve revamped all my Squidoo articles and have some hope that this will help them.

Posted in: Squidoo.
Tagged: · · ·

Squidoo to Hubpages Transfer: Traffic Increase

Sep 15th, 2014
by Ellen.
1 comment

I just checked Google Analytics to see how my Squidoo lenses are faring after transfer.

Here’s their daily traffic stats according to Google Analytics. (Scroll down for a visual chart of the boring data).

To create this table, I combined all their Google Analytics daily traffic data. Squidoo or Hubpages, wherever they were, it was the same batch of articles.*

First Week of Squidoo to Hubpages Traffic

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Posted in: Squidoo.
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Squidoo Lens Transfer To Hubpages Has Begun

Sep 2nd, 2014
by Ellen.
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Hubpages has set up a new help forum for Squidoo members making the transition to HP.

As expected, HP is transferring accounts a bit at a time, with early opt-ins getting early transfers.

Relache reports on how her lenses looked after import and what happened to modules that work rather differently on HP.

Still waiting for your lenses to transfer? Here’s what I’m doing.

  • One final Traffic Stats compilation. My weekly traffic for all my Squidoo accounts dropped below 9000 this week. Partly because I deleted over a hundred of lenses (Squidoo-related tutorials and community lenses, lensographies, and some product review niches that I’m moving to my own site), but that’s still sad for 259 pages.
  • KEYWORD DATA DEEP DIVE. Last chance! Whatever else one can say for it, Squidoo gave us good data on keywords tucked away in the depths of the dashboard. Really tucked away, since they hid the 90 day data.

You can get it by creating a random bookmark (be sure to add it to your browser toolbar), then editing the bookmark in your browser’s bookmark editor and changing the URL to the following mini script (scroll right in the code box below to make sure you copy all of it):

javascript:Qr=prompt('Enter%20lensname%20(minus%20http://www.squidoo.com/)','');if(Qr)location.href='http://www.squidoo.com/stats/traffic/'+escape(Qr)+'?range=3month'

Click that bookmarklet while you’re logged into Squidoo, and it’ll ask for a lens URL  — just the stuff after http://www.squidoo.com/ — and then it takes you to the 90-day traffic pane for that lens. Be sure to click the “see more” toggle at the bottom of the keywords list to grab ‘em all. Save ‘em to a text document with all the keywords for one niche, and they may give you some ideas about the sorts of things your primary audience is looking for.

I’m trying to collect the keyword data for my favorite niches and top hubs. That’s not something HP is going to preserve.

Posted in: Hubpages.
Tagged: · · · ·

Hubpages Dashboard: Sorting Hubs to Help You Batch Edit

Aug 31st, 2014
by Ellen.
6 comments

SPIRITUALITY WROTE [on the hubpages forum]

GreekGeek – any idea how hubs are organised on our profiles? What determines their order?

Yep! By default, they’re sorted according to [Hub]Score, but there’s lots of other ways to sort & filter. Pardon my scribbles…

Hubpages Dashboard

Click the top of any column to sort by that column. “Published” is original publish date (Hubpages will keep our lens creation dates). “Changed” is the most recent update. Or sort by traffic to tackle popular articles first.

“Export as csv” creates a tidy list you can import into a spreadsheet and use as a to-do list.

Hubs > Groups  Create new groups. Scroll down on that pane for “orphaned hubs” which you can add to groups. You can also add a hub you’re editing to groups in the “Display Options” pane in the workshop sidebar.

Warning: Hubpages asks us to limit groups to hubs that are relevant to one another. Each grouped hub gets a “Next” and “Previous” link at the bottom, passing traffic to the adjacent hubs in the group like a webring. Therefore, we can’t set up groups for our own organizational purposes. (i.e. no “hubs I need to work on” group.)

The filter pane  (beige box) has some useful sorting functions for finding hubs that need work. For example…

designation > Not Featured – Engagement 
…lists all hubs that have fallen out of “Featured” status because not enough traffic or reader engagement

designation > Not Featured – Quality
… lists all hubs that need more work to pass QAP.

capsule > Amazon
…lists all hubs with an Amazon capsule. Or look for hubs with eBay capsules, or hubs with Photo capsules (although that’s probably all of them).

 

As we revamp our imported lenses, the sort by “Changed” (last edit) is going to be the most helpful option, and I also highly recommend “export as csv” and plugging the result into a spreadsheet, which you can then use to cross off those you’ve updated.

 

 

EDIT: AND I TOTALLY FAILED TO ANSWER SPIRITUALITY’S QUESTION. Hubs on our profile are displayed to the public according to creation date, newest to oldest. I have found no way to sort them.

Posted in: Hubpages.
Tagged: · ·

Hubpages Dashboard: Icons Explained

Aug 28th, 2014
by Ellen.
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Hovering over the dashboard icons gives you tooltips explaining them, but for those Squids waiting for their lenses to transfer, a quick overview:

Hubpages Dashboard

  • Blue/red arrows: significant decrease/increase in typical traffic
  • Black alert triangle with !: One or more links on this hub appears to have broken. Edit hub; the workshop will highlight broken links in pink.
  • Hub title is red and there’s no icon in the “Featured” Column: either you haven’t published it yet, or you’ve chosen to unpublish it because it’s out of date and desperately needs an overhaul ;), or (I think?) if a hub is unpublished because Hubpages’ editing team / moderators have flagged it, it looks like this. Edit and fix problems, them publish again!
  • Red © symbol: Hubpages has a detected a duplicate of this hub’s content elsewhere on the web. Edit the hub and look at the top. It’ll give you a link to the copied content. It also provides a link to file a DMCA notice if Hubpages has figured out where to report that particular site.
  • Black circle with white H: A featured hub. It’s live, it’s indexed, it’s visible.
  • Half circle: Unfeatured hub. It’s still live, it’s visible to your Hubpages followers (I think?), and it’s visible if you send someone to it with the link, but it’s no longer crawlable by search engines. Review the suggestions at the upper right in the Hub workshop, edit and publish, and it’ll be featured again after going through another Quality Assessment (takes a day or two). See my guide on keeping Hubs featured for more tips.

Not shown:

  • White circle: Failed Hubpages’ Quality Assessment Process. See Hubpages’ guide to Featured hubs and the QAP.
  • A gray circle of two arrows chasing each other: Hub is newly published, and it’s pending the Quality Assessment Process before it’s added to Hubpages’ index. The hub is visible if you send someone a link, just noindexed. Nowadays the QAP usually takes less than 24 hours. You’ll know it’s passed when the gray circle turns into the black circle with the white “H” indicating it’s Featured.

I have a few “unfeatured due to lack of engagement” hubs. I may massage them to try and drive more traffic to them. Or I may just ignore them. Once you’ve published many hundreds of articles, having a few that have fallen out of circulation is no biggie. In fact, it may be useful to learn from: why didn’t it draw traffic or engage readers?

Also notice the “last edit” date. Hubpages doesn’t care when you last updated. All it cares about is that the article is still drawing readers who are interacting with (or at least reading) it.

Posted in: Hubpages.
Tagged: ·

Hubpages – A Grab Bag of Tips and Observations

Aug 27th, 2014
by Ellen.
9 comments

I became active on Hubpages again in 2011 and churned out a little over a hundred hubs in two years. I have been next to useless on that site for the past year. So take anything I say about Hubpages with a grain of salt. That said, I may have learned a few useful things.

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Posted in: Hubpages.
Tagged: · ·

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