The HubPages IDLE HUB System, Was it a Good function at the Time?

I was reading through some of my older artiles, and I came across this one. At the time I wrote it, this "IDLE HUB" function was something HP used to control the growing load of articles that were not getting ny reads at all.

AIt helped back then, but I now see it as a tool that finally had its fay and was eliminated by HP. I do believe that it was a good example of the ends some writer's sites need to go to as they try to manage the products that require their management.

Read on for a little history lesson.

Bu now, everyone has noticed the new IDLE HUB Management system that Hub Pages has implemented.

After using this new criteria for a while, I find that I think that it really is a good tthing for us now that we have our own HubPages Sub-Domain.

Since the implementation of Sub-Domains with Hubpages, we all have lived or died with Search engines as a result of our Total ranking of everything that we have written and placed onto HP.

That, for some of us was a good thing as some of us write Hubs that are almost exclusively designed for the dissemination of information on subjects of general interest to the majority of the population out there..

One of the problems I had and still have is the fact that, even though I also write a number of "informational Hubs", at the same time, I am a writer of such things as Short Stories, Poetry, and Political Commentary.

And, as all of you know, these types of hubs rarely do well over time, either in the general searches of people or as a long term driver of; the number of readers or comments you receive.

Oh, our creative works have their moments. We get decent interest when we release a short story, a poem, even photographic collections. We wallow in the compliments and the fantastic feedback on our creativity and writing.

And. later, often just a few weeks later, when our new creative Hub has "run its course" so to speak and someone is flipping through the lists of Hubber's and their works, you might get a read and a positive comment that is shared with someone else's followers.

Then you might get a momentary resurgence in readership. But, as I said, it is usually a momentary thing and your Hubs readership will slowly slip back into oblivion.

.Has this hurt me and my ranking over time? Absolutely!

Let me give you an example. One of my first Hubs was a story about my handing my Grandmothers dining table over to my son.

It was a pretty good, and it was also a true story.

I wrote of my Dad and his siblings using that table as they grew into adults, And I wrote about my Dad salvaging the old tables remnants and re-building it for me and my family to use.

At that time, over three years ago, it got decent readership and I got some very nice comments on the subject overall as well as my writing.

Over time, it was resurrected by other Hubbers who share it with their audiences and the hub rose and fell in rating with these spurts of interest.

So, is it a bad story? I say NO!. But is it a bad Hub? They now say yes, because this and other similar ones have been IDLED.

I stubbornly keep these writing of mine, that are sitting out there in my personal library on HubPages. I keep them there, at the bottom of my table of my Hubs; rankings. Lonely writings waiting for attention.

And I occasionally SHARE them for a limited surge in readers and comments, but HP doesn't consider heavy sharing as a good thing for us Hubbers to do anymore, either, so I do this less and less these days.

You see, I am writer!

I am not just a commercial writer of informational Hubs, but, I am also a writer of what I shall call ART.

By ART, I mean that these creative Hubs of mine are my artful presentation of stories that I share from my heart, with you, the readers.

They are a reflection of ME, the writer, and are written for personal enjoyment and their entertainment value.

So, I have and will continue to keep these special Hubs of mine out there. even though they have consistently pulled my ranking on Search Engines and with HP down.

So, on to the new IDLE HUB categorization of my Hubs.

According to HP and their FAQ Hub about this subject, they have done people like myself a great service.

They now have set up a system that uses a set of algorithms which sort through our existing Hubs.

And, if we have a Hub that is not being accessed and read regularly, or is just relatively Old and hasn't been changed or updated in a long period of time, then they do what Ithey consider a great new thing for us all;

They Un-Index these selected Hubs.

What does this mean?

Well, now, if we have a Hub that is sitting out there, in our Sub-domain then it is indexed along with all of my other Hubs in my sub-domain. You see this "old or poor quality Hub" it is just sitting out there affecting each of our overall Search Engine rankings as a Hubber.

And invariably, these "Idle" Hubs, will pull our overall ranking down every time our sub-domain is scanned by these search engines.

So, they are doing us a service by placing our Hubs into this mysteriousl IDLE state.

In my opinion, I have to agree with them prrom the perspective of our sub-domains ranking for commercial pueposes.

Those of us that want to make more money, now have a tool that we can all use to our advantage.

Is this bad for our less-profitable, creative writings. Of course it is. But, it can be used as a new tool for us all to use in managing our weaker works, even the creative ones.

You see, rather than having to take the inordinate amount of extra time necessary to occasionally research and evaluate our total library of writings, we now have a tool that saves all of us a lot of that time.

Now, we not only know which Hubs are idled, immediately, but we have a tool that tells us which measurement is important to HubPages.

Now, if you want to have your writings Indexed again and thus available for the search engines just look at one of your Idled Hubs.

Then try to figure how to improve it so that you will have at least; 1-several reads a day, 2- a respectible number reads over the past week, and 3- your Hub should repeat that last weeks numbers every week for 30 days.

What the actual limits are, only HP knows, but you should be able to figure this out after you go through your re-evaluation of each Hub that you want to be out there, generating contacts for the great search engines and their "crawly spiders".

Here are what I consider to be the advantages to me, as a multi-faceted writer;

1. Regardless of my individual Hub Score for each of my writing, I can now look at my Account listing and immediately see which of my Hubs are the actual "Money-Makers"
2. I can review this newly marked list of un-indexed Hubs and quickly decide which are the ones that I wrote for popularity or to make money and selectively work on improving just those for the world to see more of and use.
3. I can manage my more commercial informative Hubs in less time and keep my overall ranking higher and make more money on these, more popular writings.
4. I can quickly identify my more "stale" writing and evaluate whether I want to give the appropriate ones a "face-lift" before they begin to pull my overall tanking down.
5. I can keep my intentionally more personal, yet less commercial hubs for what they are. And I can selectively Share them on HP or other sites that are designed for the more Creative writings, there to be found and enjoyed by the appropriate audience.
6. And, most importantly, to me, my Search Engine ranking will now be based on my most popular Hubs and will not be pulled down by ones that are not as popular, for whatever reason.

THANK YOU HUBPAGES!