My Account Got Banned from HubPages

With less than a month since I started writing, my account got banned from HubPages. The obvious thing to do is to move on. But before I jump into that, I’d like to scribble about the reason behind the drama. It’s actually simple, I repeatedly violated the TOS (terms of service).

IN & OUT by Salvatore Vuono

I couldn’t blame myself although I am indeed to blame. I never really paid attention to the terms and conditions and jumped right into posting HubPages articles because I was too excited. I was able to post the first 10 without any problems. There is no moderation whatsoever for articles submitted by first time users. After their patrol radar started to work though (including an automated software system which detects violations), my dilemma began too.

FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The initial problems were manageable so I was able to get past the first blow with ease. Apparently, watermarked or pixilated photos are not allowed due to copyright issues. Fortunately, the search for images brought me to www.freedigitalphotos.net where I found amazing photos for free. You just have to publish a credit for the artist who owns the images in order for you to use them for free.

Amazon links

Another issue has something to do with unrelated Amazon links. What I did was simply type in keywords and let Amazon products related to the keywords be displayed in random. I didn’t notice but they were right. So I edited again. I had to manually copy URLs of related Amazon products one by one instead of assigning a random set. I had to thoroughly search for specific products through Amazon as well.

Substandard articles

Substandard HubPages articles were the next drama. They have a specified minimum number of words required. Also, some of the pieces I wrote were awkward to read. I realized there were indeed grammar lapses. I was too sleepy when I submitted most of them although they were written in the past. I don’t want the whole HubPages thing to consume too much of my freelance time as I consider freelance writing as a full time job. If so, then HubPages.com was supposed to be a part time job only. Fast forward, and so I edited the hubs as they are called in HubPages again.

Duplicate content

Now the worst case was about duplicate content. I did say the hubs were written in the past but not a remote past. In fact, it was only less than a month since they were written for a Freelancer.com employer. The articles were never paid and I simply quit because of unbelievable terms from the employer. I thought of posting the articles to HubPages to make use of them. Would you believe the Freelancer.com employer I was talking about posted the articles that he did not pay for online? Anyway, I’d like to talk about that at a different time. I set the hubs aside and planned on rewriting them at a later time so I could still resubmit them.

RSS feeds

The last piece of straw was because of the RSS feeds. I included a module for RSS feeds of all my hubs for the last set of articles. Although the modules were situated at the bottom, they still deemed that it is a violation. They were also considered as unrelated links in the same manner as the Amazon products I mentioned earlier were. I removed the RSS feeds module and waited for the hubs to be republished. Unfortunately, my account was already banned at that time. I didn’t know at first and even emailed them before I understood that it was due to repeated violations of the TOS and that the verdict was irrevocable.

At that point, I just started to participate actively in the forums and I even added writers as friends. Some of which were the sisters who inspired me to join HubPages. I came across the blog of one of them through a forum thread in PinoyExchange. Both cheerfulnuts and seriousnuts are still doing well in HubPages as of the moment although they have issues with their Adsense accounts being banned in relation to the Web Answers community. Members from blacklisted countries were banned from Adsense. I’d like to write about this in a different post.

As for my HubPages account, I deleted the Blogger widget which used to be found on the right side of this page. There’s obviously no need for it anymore. I also deleted all 22 hubs I submitted in HubPages. When they were completely removed, I also sent notification to have my account deleted too. There’s no option to delete it manually. The irony is that they were too quick to delete my account but were always too slow to moderate the hubs I submitted. Contrary to their statement saying that the URLs of the deleted hubs go back to the pool afterwards, they didn’t. I can still search and find them within the site. So what I did is to block them from showing up in Google instead. The cached pages are still indexed so I sent requests to have them removed. If you have similar requests, you may send them here.

There are billions and billions of pages, removing dead pages will help lessen such a huge number right? :D

Other writing sites

With the cache pages removed through Google’s Removal, I was ready to move on. Being banned after this was less wearisome. I learned about other writing sites too. I actually have accounts in Squidoo and Wizzley because I signed up for them at the same time I did for HubPages. I wanted to distribute all articles evenly. But after encountering issues with the first two early on, I was discouraged. Both sites have word length requirements that I don’t want to work on. The articles were done so I don’t want to add fluff just to lengthen them. I concentrated on HubPages instead since the first set of articles were approved right away. I did not know that issues with it are going to happen later.

What's great about HubPages

I also learned about earnings of veteran writers. They were earning hundreds of dollars in residual income. Compared to Squidoo wherein payments are based on ranking, HubPages earnings were based on ads. The HubPages ad program was also incredible. The pay is not based on clicked ads but on impressions. I actually earned about $.12 cents in a few days with just a few hubs. Other new writers would earn something like this in a month or two. I could imagine how much more HubPages earnings I could have been earned had it not ended sadly as it did.

I did learn a lot most especially from the writing community though so even if my account is now banned, I learned valuable information which I could apply to other writing sites and other writing endeavors in general. Based on testimonies of some of the most successful writers, their Hubpages ad program earnings and Adsense earnings increase as they write more articles and apply techniques such as keyword research and back linking. Well, I am familiar with both having been able to write with SEO for more than a year now. But I’ve never realized their true potential until HubPages writers were writing about it.

InfoBarrel Writing Site

But all is done, my account was banned so I have to move as I mentioned earlier. I searched for other writing sites and stumbled upon InfoBarrel. I compared it with other writing sites and chose it against the rest. I got a good start again through them but it wasn’t as monumental as it was in HubPages. I do hope it works for me at InfoBarrel nonetheless.

HubPages is of course more successful than InfoBarrel but I’ve read about successful writers out there too when I recently joined a few days ago. The veteran members with hundreds of articles have earnings amounting to hundreds of dollars. Also, the site was the one of the few places which were only affected minimally by Google’s Panda algorithm update. What is this about? You can read more about it here.

During the Panda algorithm update on April 23rd of this year, Alexa records that only InfoBarrel was least affected among similar sites. Check this out. See the portion about the Google Panda update. With that, the whole HubPages vs InfoBarrel drama is over. InfoBarrel is a runaway winner. It’s just too bad HubPages appear to dominate more.

I actually created another HubPages username but I don’t plan on writing for HubPages anytime soon. I’ve read about another Hubber who was also banned and came back stronger when he came back to the site. Maybe I would do the same someday but not now. Instead, it's hello InfoBarrel and goodbye from being banned from Hubpages!