I am still a journeyman in SEO, but after further investigation into Hubpages vs. Squidoo, I wound up making a more in-depth Squidoo lens about Panda’s impact on Hubpages vs. Squidoo, covering things like bounce rate, user behavior, spam filtering, the incentives/payout system, outbound link policies, affiliate marketing policies, duplicate content, and site navigation which I think put Hubpages on the losing side of things.

As for eHow, it survived the FIRST Panda update, but the second one cut it down to size. Which is a warning to Squidoo: Google isn’t finished tweaking, and it’s still gunning for low quality and content farms, so we’d better make sure we have enough excellent quality not to get dinged!

Squidoo, however, has performed very well. I find it interesting that Squidoo held its ground with this update, whereas HubPages, viewed by many as a very similar site, took a very hard hit.

What are the main differences between HubPages and Squidoo? I would not point to the spam control…it is true that Squidoo has somewhat better spam control but it also has, like you remark, quite a few spammy lenses left. The main difference that I saw between these two sites, before the update, is that Squidoo is very generous with its external linking policy, whereas HubPages has a rather draconian policy about links.

I’ve found that google weighs what you link to much more heavily than most people realize. HubPages is stingy with its links, in an attempt to hoard web traffic. It tries to be as much of a “sink” as possible. I think this is hurting it.

I also think HubPages suffers from more negativity and a generally more competitive attitude in its community, whereas squidoo is extraordinarily positive and supportive–the whole site seems to be designed to favor this. This can’t hurt Squidoo and I suspect it may be a driving force for people contributing better content, and specifically, attracting people who are not just self-promoting…which would then help it out immensely.