Many Hubpages members are anxious about Hubscores. I feel almost the same way about them as I did about Squidoo points and levels: they’re in-house metrics that have no bearing on my success as an online writer. From time to time, I’ll glance at my dash to see which of my articles Hubpages scores as the best, partly to feel a tingle of self-satisfaction, and partly to get a general sense of the kinds of articles Hubpages prioritizes. (In that case, I’m judging Hubpages— never mind how it arrives at those scores, are the articles it’s giving 90s to good articles? If Hubpages starts ranking junk above what I consider quality, then I’ll worry.)
As I mentioned in my previous post, my recent Hub of the Day had a Hubscore of 83. That shows just how futile it is to chase Hubscores. Looking at all my Hubs with better scores, a quick glance showed no obvious patterns. Some had more comments, some more traffic, some more user interaction, some more or fewer words, some more or fewer photos. Maybe I could figure out why they outrank my HotD if I analyzed them all carefully, but it’s just not important. (Especially since I agree that, while it’s a successful article, it’s not my very best work.)
The only reason Hubscore matters is that it’s Hubpages’ requirement for DoFollow links. If your overall Hubberscore drops below 85, or an individual Hub’s score drops below 40, then links in your article are set to NoFollow. That means Google won’t count them when assessing the value of the sites they point to. Many people actively plant DoFollow links as a way to make their own websites rank better on Google— or so they hope.
Personally, I’ve stopped caring whether links on my hubs are DoFollow. My websites, blogs and good articles attract plenty of dofollow links on their own from other people linking to them. That spares me from worrying about Google cracking down on various kinds of spammy backlinks. What Google wants to see (and use as a ranking factor) is links from other people who genuinely find your content valuable. To that end, Google’s Penguin algorithm is designed to filter out self-promotional links which tell it nothing about how good the content actually is.
Many years ago, I decided that the best thing to do is not to build my own backlinks, but to try to build content that’s worth linking to. As long as I do that, my Hubscore generally stays above 85 anyway. (I just checked, and all my Hubpages accounts are 85 or better except one, which is an old test account.)
I absolutely agree with you about the fact it’s best to build content which people like and want to link to rather than trying to build links per se.
Initially there seemed to me to be no rhyme nor reason to HubScores
The conclusion I eventually came to re HubScores was that the really high ones were where they had been manually moderated, that it passed all quality assessment hub hurdles and the assessor actually liked the hub.
However that particular theory rather fell apart after I heard about how many people have had really high scoring (e.g. perfect score) hubs unpublished.
It strikes me that HubPages has some serious problems in terms of quality assessment that it very much needs to address.