Hubpages Ban
So the “Hubpage Experiment” which launched this blog several years ago officially ended last month when they unceremoniously deleted most of my hubpages and banned my accounts. The Panda Updates freaked them out big time and they pretty much went on a rampage, banning/unpublishing any hubpage with a whiff of internet marketing to them. Hubpages (for a while) pretty much lost like 90% of their traffic with the Feb panda update. They will (now) aggressively go after what they term low quality hubs. It’s a definition they are pretty loose with.
Some reasons for account termination: linking out to too many domains from hubpages (they like to call these doorway pages now. This wasn’t an issue as of 6 months ago), including affiliate links in your hubpages, writing about too many of the same topics, not having 2000 word articles full of pictures and videos and other bullshit, writing about certain topics, being too promotional with your hubs, or simply because one of the staffers got dumped by his girlfriend that day and they’re pissed as hell the day they review your hubs.
Basically, if you do anything with a marketing bent to your hubs, you might lose your account — especially if you have a lot of hubs.
Word is the hubpages has been able to restore their traffic to pre-panda levels by using subdomains. My feeling though is that the subdomain “fix” is just a short term solution. Google seems to change what they say every six months and no doubt when everyone tries to copy the subdomain solution to Panda (in the case of UGC), google will smash that fix too.
Here’s my final take on parasite hosts like hubpages: if you want to use them to write legit articles to promote yourself as a brand/author, that’s fine. Some people have made that work for them. They write high quality articles about various topics (especially about topics they know about), they participate in the forums, answer questions, that sort of thing. This is useful if you want to make a name for yourself and funnel traffic to a single site (some people have done this well). Personally, I’m not in the business of becoming part of a community to brand myself. I want to make fucking money, not to spend time chitty chat.
IF you want to just flat out make money via adsense or sell products, hubpages and the ilk are not the best way to do it. Don’t wast your fucking time. My feeling is that putting work into someone else’s property where you have no control is crazyness. You are too much at risk for getting the boot and losing all that effort. Put the time into your OWN sites and your own network.
My Other Blog
I’ve had quite a few people ask my about my other blog and a few of my landscape photography stuff. Yes, out of boredom I created another Internet Marketing blog last year. It’s called Backlink Reviews and the whole purpose of that blog is to review backlink software that I use/have used. This blog is more of my general make money online/ Internet Marketing. Though, there is quite a bit of cross pollination between the two blogs. So if you want to read MORE of my ramblings about IM/MMO/backlink software topics (and I don’t know why you would want to, I’m a rather boring writer), then check out that blog. I go under the Pseudo-name “Spider” since you know, I like hiding in the shadows and all!
Photography Site?
I’ve also had a few people ask me about links to my photography site. I’m currently working on putting up a landscape photography one. I only have the domain right now and nothing else, and I haven’t posted any photos on it. I will let you guys know WHEN it’s up so you can take a look at my pictures. Right now I’m still in vacation mode over in South East asia, but it’s back to biz next week, regardless of how enjoyable it is living on a comfortable beach drinking coconut water and getting foot massages. Ok, that’s just mean! But if anyone hasn’t been to Thailand yet, I suggest you get your ass over here. It’s like heaven, but without all the holy stuff.
Anyways,
Best
Ben
Yeah I had about $400/mth wiped out when hubpages went on their little rampage against low quality hubs. Lucky for some of us hubpages were only a small portion of our income, but it still hurts pretty bad to lose rent every month on the sites I personally considered some of my “safest” assest. Oh well.
Yea, it sucks. These days, it’s just best to stick with your own stuff: Big sites that have some real value to the search world. Might not make money right away, but in a couple years, you’re laughing.
Many thanks for the update.
All the experiments that you have done have always been very educational.
When you were carrying out these experiments, you were putting in a lot of hours pumping out hundreds of hubs, barrels, niche websites etc. Have you been able to dramatically decrease the time you spend doing this and has your passive income maintained a good level?
I look forward to seeing your photograpy site.
Keep living the dream
Tiptopcat 🙂
I spent a fair amount of time on all those. Overall, I’d say I pumped about 4-6 months “full time” creating all those. I had close to 500 or so. My peak income was close to 140 bucks a day with adsense, but eventually they ended around 60 bucks a day. With all the Panda updates happened, hubs ended up about 25- 30 bucks a day. They then started unpublishing hubs (my best ones in fact) because of affiliate links which took hubs down to about 10-15 bucks a day. Then I got a blanket ban a month later. Oh well — part of the game. I told people a long time ago not to put your eggs into the Hubpage basket. I pretty much had stopped anything to do with hubpages for a year and a half anyways and was just costing on previous work done.
Sucks loosing that type of work, but Hubpages are not well run and they are NOT a stable source of income, no matter what anyone says. They change their definitions of “quality” and implement no blanket rules on a hatdrop these days. Google also has a hardon for rubbing out UGC these days too, so I wouldn’t expect long term earnings to stay high with hubpages over the next year anyways as the updates flush UGC sites down the toilet.
Funny you should say you write BLR, i read that blog as I like th style of writing. Now I see why.
Hi. I recently lost my 150 dollar per day web site. Can you help me out? I just need some direction where to go from here. Could you please send me out an e-mail? Thank you so much in advance.
How did you lose your website? Was it deindexed?
I am really sorry. what i meant to say was i lost my adsense account. Just one site was generating all the income. The e-mail i got from adsense was ” poses a risk of generating invalid activity”. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you so much in advance.
You were likely too aggressive with your ad layout. Putting ads in deceiving locations (just as above the fold, making ads look like navigation bars, etc) can mean that you get a lot of non converting clicks. Lots of those type of clicks and adsense may boot you from their program. The other way is that you had a bot clicking on your ads, someone who hates you, or you clicked on your ads.
There may also be the issue that your site was pretty low quality. I see a lot of people throw on some copied or thin content, get aggressive with ads, and end up getting in trouble with Adsense Team or Search Team. This may have been the case.
You can submit an appeal, but Adsense Team has a very bad rep for actually working with you on this. There are some reports that people have been reinstated, but a lot of those were when adsense was newer.
You can try putting another adsense ID (apply through one via a business). BUT there is a good chance (if that was the only site) that the other ID may be get banned as well. You can do a 301 redirect to a new site, which keeps (some) of the ranking. But I know one guy personally who did this after getting his adsense removed from a site, and his adsense ended up getting banned.
Basically, you might be out of luck with that site. Chitka is another option but they pay crap compared to adsense. You could turn your sit into an affiliate site or lead generation site which may make some money a lot of money or barely any money. Another option might be to just try and sell the site to a competitor, take your loss, and start something else. But adsense on that site probably wont be possible — at least with you as the current owner and maybe for other people too.
Sorry mate, not much you can do other that find another way to make money or start a new site.
Thanks a lot for replying. Feel free to send me an e-mail if you would like to see my site and give me your review on it. I do not mind if you use my niche and build a site [ but i hope the niche will stay between us 🙂 ]. But then again, the help you have already offered is very much appreciated. If you are not comfortable with reviewing my site personally, please feel free to ignore this message. Thanks a lot.
Yeah – HubPages might have initially had traffic recovery for 2-3 weeks but if they’re still saying that, they’re lying. Many people there experienced an initial three or four week jump in income (my hubs included – although nowhere near pre-panda levels) but then after that the traffic just became desolate. It’s by far and away even worse than right after Panda. Currently I’m doing the smart thing and backing up all the text to move to my own blogs and sites. It would be one thing if they had decent management at the top, but their handling of every situation has been atrocious, IMO.
I never used hubpages as such but it seems that everyone of them is tightening their rules. Squidoo has some stricter policies which does not allows you to post unless you are working to their rules. Infobarrel has pretty strong filters. I stopped using EZA a long time back, since they don’t even allow you to have long anchors.
RIP Hubpages; The problem with a lot of these web 2.0 properties is Google will change around whatever terms it has to in order to weed out what it perceives as “lower quality pages”. There’s plenty of innocent and not so innocent people caught in the crossfire. As stated by the Author of this article just build quality articles on your own domain and over time you will gain a lot more.
Oddly they’ve not unpublished my spammy hubs -but they might as well have as the new ad layouts result in a crappy CLR anyways!
I think sometimes you have to hold your hands up and say fair enough. Hubpages is what it is and have always made it clear they promote “quality” informative pages.
And if we were honest most of the pages on there were totally useless, speaking for myself hubpages would be the last place to look if I wanted to actually find some information!
So really I don’t blame them for their actions – sure, it’s not nice (I lost an account) but I don’t feel bitter, I think they did the right thing and I’m surprised so many people got away with uploading so much dross in the first place!
Time to move on 🙂
I have had all of my hub pages deleted too. The problem is they were popular along with squidoo and we all foolishly followed like sheep, I am now concentrating on building my own blog on my own hosting because as you say the big G will no doubt come up with another load of BS and it will all chnage again.
Great image BTW
dAVID
Ken, this is an old post but i found it interesting. Quick quiseton or two: When you say things like find phrases with less than 40,000 competing pages you mean less than 40,000 results in the SERPs? If so, are these numbers best measured if people do a search in quotes?Second quiseton: Its November 2011, have you kept up with Hubpages? Should i make an effort given the big Panda slap? Have you experienced a big negative result these past 6 months?
My HP income and traffic go down. And now they are very strict now with unpublish many long time hubs. I dont think this is the best move.
Alansm
Yep, Squidoo did it to me in March. Just over 5,000 monthly with Xmas at 12k. They decided that my 240,000 monthly uniques just wasn’t what they wanted for their website anymore. I was on the phone call with Seth Godin – he is a joke and a huckster.
I am finally pulling my hubs and putting them on my blog. I have held on and held on but I should have done this a long time ago. Some of them are going to lose their juice but the traffic is so bad there that the hits will surely rise. They have now rolled out 4 new publishing features. One makes it impossible for a ghostwriter to use a copywrite notice without using their legal name.
I wouldn’t invest any time into Hubpages or any platform that’s not owned by you at this point.