Keeping Your HubPages Account In Good Health

I accidentally discovered what's important to help keep your Hubber Score high, as well as your individual Hub Scores.

Several family related issues kept me away from writing for several months. I found it interesting that my HubPages account remained in excellent condition with a Hub Score around 95.

I originally wrote this as a one-year progress report and later updated it to focus on the discussion of keeping your HubPages account in good health.

The main trick... I was remaining active despite the fact that I didn't have time to be creative and to write anything new.

There are a lot of tasks involved with remaining active on HubPages and it doesn't really take a lot of time.

I was always watching my HubPages account during that time period even though I wasn't publishing anything new. I was replying to comments, answering questions, fixing problems that cropped up, etc. So let's begin and I'll tell you all about it...

Fixing Broken Links

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Looking over the listing of my hubs on my account page, I sometimes notice a "broken link" reported in one of my hubs. When you link to other Hubs you have to keep an eye on this. Hubbers sometimes remove their Hubs, or HubPages removed Hubs that don’t meet the Terms of Service. This causes a broken link. So you have to edit your affected hub and remove the reference and the link.

I also watch my hub listing to see how the hits are doing. When I see a problem with a hub getting few hits, I examine it to figure out what might be wrong.

In the process I have found and removed eBay links that no longer were listed and YouTube videos that had been removed. We need to watch for that as YouTube videos are sometimes removed by YouTube or by the author.

Fixing References To Low-Quality Hubs

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I also keep an eye on the Hub Score of other Hubber’s hubs that I link to, and remove the link if the score is very low. I decided to make that a policy for myself. It benefits the reader and adds value to your Hub when your reference other useful Hubs. But if they have low Hub Scores after a while, it might mean that they are not as good as your thought.

Fixing Useless Tags

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I also modify the “tags” when I notice some that are too vague. I watch the “Search Term Data” under the Stats/Keywords Tab of each hub and I use that to add useful tags. I also include those search terms in the Hub if I see that they are meaningful and relate well with the subject. While I'm at it, I sometimes modify parts of hubs if I discover an area that can be improved for clarity. Reviewing tags and search terms from time to time helps maintain Hubs as time goes on.

Multi-word tags can be more meaningful since single words will match too many queries and bring you unrelated traffic. That's something you want to avoid because those readers will click away real fast and that lowers your ranking with Google as I am sure it effects your Hub Score too. When people stay on the page long enough to be reading it... that shows that you have value in your Hub.

Another thing I do, I click the tags after I create them to be sure they bring up a listing of related Hubs. If none match at all, or I see hubs that discuss completely different subjects, then it's probably not a good tag to use. Using tags that are also used on other Hubs written about the same subject can bring in more traffic.

These changes seem to help over time. I know because I keep a record of every change I make and I watch how the stats change on my modified hubs.

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When a Hub has almost no hits after a length of time, it's important to investigate. Once my Google Analytics report had shown that the people were not reading one of my hubs. How did I know? They just left pretty quickly. The report shows you how long they stay on each hub.

With some analysis I can easily find some problems. There was one hub I had that really needed attention for improvement. The first thing that was clear to me was that I had used single-word tags.

Single wowrds are too vague. That is really bad because it causes too many matches in a search that may not relate sufficiently to the article. So people hit the page for a search they are doing on an unrelated topic. When they see my hub has nothing to do with their inquiry, they leave. Google monitors that short length of time and they stop sending other people to the Hub. The assumption is that it has no value.

There is not way Google can tell if it is off topic. It's up to us to use the proper tags and keywords. Sometimes it's better to use multi-word keywords known as long-tail keywords. So when I find those problems in my Google Analytics report, I remove all the single-word tags and replace them with just a couple of more descriptive multi-word tags.

There is more to do when we find people leaving without reading. Analyzing another hub of mine that had short view durations, I realized the title needed to be clearer and better tuned to the keywords that people were using who DID stay longer. And the summary needed to reflect the nature of the hub better than I had done the first time. Google Analytics shows us the keywords people use to find our hubs. So we can use that information improve our Hubs to bring in more traffic and hopefully more revenue in the process.

When done right, Google will send traffic that is actually looking for the information related to our topic. You definitely don't want random traffic just to get hits. You are wasting the time of those readers and I am sure you are also lowering your HubScore. HubPages also monitors the View Duration. It's reported in your Hub Metrics under the Stats Tab of each Hub.

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It takes a good year of hard work and dedication to start making money writing. Even if life gets in the way and you have no time to write, keeping your eye on the ball and not ignoring your dedicated readers is important.

I've also written quite a few hubs related to other things such as ideas for business success, tips on daily living, personal inspiration, and other guidelines for writing hubs.

I see I have a growing following and I am sure each one of you have chosen to follow me because of one or more of these topics. I wouldn’t expect that you follow me for all of them as they are somewhat unrelated. So I thank you all. For the success I am achieving would not be happening if it were not for you. But I also have not lost sight of the fact that my own knowledge has not only come from my research and constant testing, but has also come from all the many intelligent Hubbers who care to share their knowledge as well.

Copyright (c) 2010 Glenn Stok

My HubPages Support Topics Table Of Contents

Table of Contents listing of all Tutorial Hubs by Glenn Stok