Squidoo, HubPages and Knol have all burst onto the scene within the past few years, promising to change much for readers and offering a new exciting avenue to help improve natural rankings, for SEO practitioners. But is it really useful for SEO? What are Hub Pages?
There are a few better known brands of hubs, including Squidoo, HubPages and Knoll. The concept of hub pages is for the online public as a whole to write expert pieces about topics that they are knowledgeable about. So, for example, if you are an expert in travel insurance, you could create a profile in one of the hubs and write useful, specialist content about travel insurance and upload it for the general benefit of the hub’s members and the online population as a whole. The idea is to create a community website brimming with expert information, together with a community chat functionality where members of the hub can engage with each other on their respective areas of expertise.
Why could Hub Pages be useful for SEO?
Well, in theory, they provide a good source of key phrase rich links to client sites. Using the same example above, by creating and uploading an expert piece about travel insurance, one could make the article key phrase rich and have key phrase rich links pointing to your own website.
But do they really work?
The theory sounds good but there have been some problems with hub pages.
Squidoo was probably the first type of hub page site that came to prominence. Created in 2005, it soon fell foul of search engines because users (experts) were rewarded with a pay-per-article business model, which meant that it quickly became plagued with useless, spammy content. This led Google to penalise it and remove it from high ranking positions.
Enter another brand – HubPages. They seemed to have addressed many of the concerns that Google had with Squidoo and began to be populated with better quality content. This was partly solved by offering writers revenue based on Google’s AdSense program. As a result, their pages were rewarded with better rankings and the links were considered by Google to be of better quality.
But getting the full SEO benefit of links from HubPages comes at a price.
How to Benefit from HubPages
HubPages has introduced some filters of its own to help keep the content as honest as possible and at a good quality for its readership, and it is important to be aware of these in order to gain good links for your website.
It all comes down to score.
What many people do not realise is that all links in these expert articles are “no follow”, which means that search engines do not see them. Therefore, for SEO purposes, these links have no value to you at all. However, as you get more active with your HubPages account, you can begin to earn points and, once you achieve a score of 75 points, the status of your links will be changed to “follow”. And this is when it could become a good SEO tool for your site.
In order to earn points, you need to post articles regularly, your articles need to contain modules (I won’t go into this now), you need to participate in conversation with other members (offering comments and advice), you need to develop a fan base of other hubbers, you need to have a full and complete profile, and you need to log in on a regular basis. I came across a story of a hubber who earned plenty of points but then went on holiday and, when he returned after three weeks, his score had dropped considerably and was again below the 75 mark.
But is it worth all this work?
The “follow” link created by HubPages is rated extremely highly by Google and this can certainly be of benefit to your site but, all-in-all, it represents a lot of time that could possibly be better spent on other SEO activities. As we are an agency, this question is less of an issue for us. We have a profile that we use for all our clients, so our account is regularly refreshed and in constant use, making it easier to maintain a high score. So for us, it makes perfect sense. However, if you are an individual company, trying to carry out a small SEO program for your website, unless you are an avid hubber for the sake of it, we would probably suggest investing time more effectively elsewhere.
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Are Hubpages Useful For SEO?
