Improving Your HubScore

The first thing that any Hub author needs to learn (and accept) is that HubScores go up AND down.

Read that first sentence again, or even a few times if you wish. The HubPages website re-calculates statistics throughout the day and many new authors immediately freak out and go running to the forum to post a message with a headline screaming "help, my HubScore is going down...!"

Just take a few deep breaths and let yourself know that you can stop panicking. There's nothing that's happening to you that doesn't happen to the rest of us. HubScores are based on a variety of factors and, as these fluctuate, so does the score. Over time, you might even notice that your Hub has peak and off-peak times. I've got Hubs that regularly move up and down across a ten or fifteen point range during the course of a single day. And, as a result of these changes, your Author Score will also go up and down. It's all perfectly normal and is precisely how the system here was designed to work. You can't make a HubScore stick at any certain level or score.

The HubPages FAQ can tell you how HubScore is computed. No, it won't give you an exact formula. That would make it too easy for spammers and bad players to game the system. However if you're looking to build a strong Hub or want to improve the score of one you've published already, here are some suggestions that can help you based on my own experience here at HubPages.

A lot of new and potential Hub author find themselves contemplating just what it is that makes a great Hub

When a post in the forums asked about lenses being flagged as spam, HubPages' Director of Marketing Jason Menayan answered with the following:

Are all of your Hubs being flagged as spam? If not, are there differences between those that are being flagged, and those that are not

• # of links to a single domain
• length & genuine utility of content
• originality of content

His question make it really clear as to what criteria HubPages are using to weight and judge Hubs and their content. To make a great Hub, write your own original content, make it genuinely useful/helpful/informative and include a variety of resources (video, links, pics, feeds) from a variety of web sites.

Paul Deeds, the General Manager and Co-Founder of HubPages, posted some really interesting info about HubScores and traffic in January 2010 when the algorithms got updated:

96-100 - 99.9 percentile (3000 page views a month)
91-95 - 99.3 percentile (2200 page views a month)
86-90 - 97.7 percentile (1300 page views a month)
81-85 - 94th percentile (900 page views a month)
76-80 - 88th percentile (90 page views a month)
71-75 - 78th percentile (30 page views a month)

Have a good title and summary.

• Really good titles are three to five words, and are a statement, NOT a question. (That only really works on the TV show Jeopardy) Jokes or clever phrases might seem fun, but something that really says what the Hub is about works much better. Make sure you've written your own summary text too. You want a few short and to-the-point sentences that say what the Hub is about and includes some good keyword phrases.

Have effective and relevant Hub tags.

• The tags you use on a Hub should relate directly to the Hub topic and content. Most people do not search by single words anymore, so make sure to use "keyword phrases." These two and three word combinations work best when also happen to be found in your actual Hub content. Do not try include every phrase in the world that you can think of as this too can hurt your Hub.

Have a good variety of content.

• Do you have a mix of content capsules as part of your Hub content? Having a few pictures, a video that goes with what you wrote about and links to other resources help provide a really good mix of info for your Hub visitors. There are nine different types of content capsules. Having five or six of them is a good way to ensure you have diversified your content sufficiently.

Review your Hub occasionally.

• This not only refers to checking your content periodically to make sure it's still relevant and updated, but also your links. Whereas HubPages has a built-in checker that will find broken links, I've found that sometimes websites rearrange or reorganize their content and what HubPages reads as a valid link is now a redirect on the other end, taking you to a front page of the linked website and not the specific page you originally selected. This can be especially true of large sites with big archives. It also is a good idea to revisit the products you are recommending for purchase and offer something new in those areas as well.

Time

• A just-published Hub is going to have a low score. They tend to start out somewhere in the 40s. During the first few days, this slowly climbs until the Hub finally develops it's natural HubScore range. It takes a bit for the HubPages system to study and learn the new Hub, and it's proably not even been recognized by the major search engines yet. I let new Hubs grow on their own for anywhere from two weeks to a month before I consider what their score is and if I want to try and boost it. This also allows for a useful amount of statistics to gather so that I have good information and feedback. If your Hub starts out in the low 20s range, there's a good chance that too much of the content is duplicated elsewhere on the web, and most likely, that HubScore isn't going to go up very much until you add lots of original writing.

Traffic

• The biggest factor many people overlook when it comes to Hub performance is traffic. If your Hub is getting a few visits per day, it will easily be outranked by Hubs on the same topic that are getting hundreds or thousands of visits. If people who are interested in your topic aren't finding your Hub, you're not getting meaningful traffic. Getting fellow Hub authors to visit is NOT meaningful traffic. You really want to attract people from outside of HubPages. If you write about things you truly enjoy and like, you probably have friends who share your interests or other websites where you talk about the same thing. Tell those folks. And if you are building backlinks, make sure they come from a quality site or they won't actually help your Hub.

Linking multiple times to the same resources.

• HubPages doesn't want you to just promote some other website. That's their #1 definition of spam. If that's all you're trying to do, there are plenty of other places that will let you build landing pages (that's what those sorts of pages are called). Once you have more than one or two links to the same web domain on a Hub, you start to negatively impact your score. Also note that HubPages defines spam as being when all links on a Hub point to the same site. That means you might get a Hub flagged as spam if it's only got two links and they are pointing to the same site. Linking to the same domains repeatedly across all your Hubs will also have a negative impace on your HubScores.

Linking to poor resources.

• You're going to get the most benefit out of your links by making them go to other great resources on your topic. Linking to a site that search engines consider a "bad neighborhood" can also lower your score. Using cloaking in your links turns them into "wildcards" that add to the domains you are showing and tends to trigger Hubs into being considered "overly-promotional.

Duplicate content.

• HubPages runs a filter to see if your text appears somewhere else on the web. If it does, that too will cause you to have a lower score or even get your Hub unpublished. Some peole complain they can't help but use quotes or other prevalent content to make their hubs, but it's just a matter of keeping the quoted stuff down to a very small percentage of your page. And if you stole the copy from someone else (plagiarizing), that person can contact HubPages and have your Hubs outright deleted and your account might even be banned

Being a soapbox and not an informed opinion.

• Hubs are not blogs. (Repeat that to yourself a few times) If all you've done is post a personal rant, it's not going to be as attractive to a reader as an informed argument that includes links to facts and other information, or a helpful guide to something. You'll get more comments and better reader interaction from something that resembles an intelligent discussion more than a one-side monologue. Hubs can get flagged as "substandard" if they are just an chunk of opinion and not a well-informed and researched article that's of genuine interest and use to everyone else.

HubPages provides some in-house stats and feedback about Hubs. These are just some quick estimates and possibilities but they offer a quick way to do a check-up on the state of your Hubs.

These stats are found via a link that only the author can see at the top of the Hub, right after the edit and delete buttons. Five tabs open when you click to view the stats. Most of it is basic traffic, showing daily, weekly, monthly and total page views for the Hub. These shows the main domains that are referring traffic to your Hub.

The last tab reads "Hub Metrics" and displays four values. The first is "word count" and it refers to how many words are in the Text capsules and Photo capsule captions. Essentially, it's the content that's been originally created by the author. It's suggested that you have 400-500 words to start, but if you really want a better performing Hub, it's best to get that count up to the 800-1,000 word range.

The second value shown is "revenue potential." This is showing you the potential for Hub earnings using a graphic of dollar signs ranging from one to five signs. The more dollar signs you see here, the better your content is hitting keywords that carry higher-earning ad potential. If you think you'd like your Hub to show more dollar signs than it shows, you'll want to rethink what you are talking about or what words you are using.

The third value is "incoming links" and shows between one and five asterisks. Less asterisks means your Hub has very few other places on the web that are linking back to it. Lots of asterisks means your Hub is well-linked. It can take several weeks for new links to have an effect on a Hub so if a Hub is new, you'll have to be patient. If a Hub is older and only has one or two asterisks, you'll want to get out there and do some promotion for your Hub.

The fourth metric is "view duration." This gives you an idea of how long a visitor stays on your Hub. Only one asterisk and it means your visitors are quickly clicking away from your Hub to somewhere else. Five asterisks mean they are hanging around to actually read, and hopefully interact with, your content. If you don't have many asterisks, it means you're not giving your visitors the type of information they are expecting or looking for when they come to the page. If that's the case, you probably want to rethink and rewrite your content, or it means you need to get a different audience for the content that you do have.