Hubpages Changes in Writing and Publishing

There have been many websites that have made comments about content and writing content on Hubpages. Since the early spring, Hubpages has made many changes to their writing site. I understand that this is a business, but it should be important for any business to answer questions about their product or service.

I’ll make my statements clear: While it is still possible to make money with Hubpages, there are a few considerations which a writer needs to make. In this case, I’m not concerned with making a lot of money, but rather with what to do with copyright and protection of our writing on one site or any other. I’ve given this some thought, and I believe there are some things that writers need to be aware of while writing on this writing site.

1) Hubpages offers a program called Hubpages Ads Program.  This began in the Spring of 2011.  Some people have made some money with it and received payments. There has been one other significant result: AdSense earning dropped sharply and for most people they were unable to earn much on AdSense — if at all. The other thing many noticed was that they needed to get a lot of traffic to make the program worth while. I tried it out but found that I spent more time setting up my page to draw traffic than improving my own writing or, better still, improving what I already published.

2) Another change was a move to put sub-domains on Hubpages. (A subdomain is denoted by a word in front of the domain name. In my case, the subdomain for my hubpages profile is rebeccae.hubpages.com — the domain is hubpages.com)  This worked for some time, but for writers who do not understand the basics of keyword tools and search engine optimization (SEO) and anything like this, it meant extra hours of work. This is not to suggest that a writer shouldn’t improve on their writing, but rather a suggestion that, as a writer, you stand alone. Hubpages, as a domain will not help your hubs.  Technical support is provided by the community of writers and not Hubpages staff.

3) I noticed that when there a sub-domain switch, some of the links you had on your hubs were “dropped.”  I noticed this more on this hub, than any of the other hubs I wrote. The point is that I am not complaining but it is important to note this when you intend to publish your hubs there — or any other writing site.

Yes the rules have changed, but some of the major rules such as do follow and no follow links are still the same. It is much easier to spot spam on the site, but it is much harder for hubpages to get around to ridding it from the site. This is the effect of the sub domain switch. In many ways it is like publishing on blogger. Changes: no duplicate content, no pixilated picture or watermarked pictures, and they are harder on word count to amazon capsules (50:1)

If you are writing I think one of the best ways to go is to plan your business.  If you are true to making a living publishing your work, then you have to consider what you want to do with your writing life.