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Hubpages

Oh, Hubpages (or: How to Make Google Shun You)

Sep 25th, 2012
by Ellen.
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[Update Sept 29: the first problem mentioned in this post is now fixed. Unfortunately, the second one isn’t: it’s been over a week now since I published a new hub, and Google still hasn’t crawled it.]

Two months ago, Glen Stok, I, and others reported that the new Hubpages Profile redesign failed to work with Google Authorship. A few posts from HubStaff assured us that these kinks would be worked out.

Today, the changeover became mandatory. Sure enough, when I went in to correct my profile settings, the same bug showed up that we reported two months ago:

So let’s review this week’s Hubpages news, shall we?

  • Hubpages’ new “Pending Status” kludge means new hubs can’t be indexed by Google for days, perhaps weeks, resulting in lost traffic.
  • Hubpages’ new Profile pages mean that OLD hubs lose traffic, too, as soon as Google drops the author info and icon that was attracting traffic to many of our hubs.

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I assume Hubpages will fix both these problems. I hope.

 

[And before anyone asks, no, I am not willing to upgrade to Google plus just because Hubpages doesn’t like my old Google profile URL.  That profile works with Google authorship. This blog, my Squidoo lenses, and my Hubpages hubs still cached by Google are proof.]

New Hub vs. New Lens: an Experiment

Sep 24th, 2012
by Ellen.
5 comments

Query: How fast can new content on Hubpages and Squidoo start getting significant traffic and earning income? Which platform is best for publishing on trending, buzzworthy news and events?

When Hubpages introduced Idle Status, I wrote a hub about how Idle Status worked and possible ramifications. I drew comparisons with Squidoo’s WIP status.

A debate came up in that article’s comments about new hubs vs. new lenses. Squid∩ forum discussions helped me understand how the two sites deal with a newly-published article. This is important, because it determines whether a new article can get any search traffic or catch the wave of a traffic spike from a trending topic.

What happens to a newly-published article on Squidoo:

  1. A newly-published lens is visible to visitors who are sent to it via a link
  2. Search engines will index it if  they see a link to it and crawl it
  3. So it’s possible (and not difficult) to get search traffic coming in, before…
  4. Around midnight, Squidoo turns the lens red on the dashboard and marks it as WIP, but does NOT put a noindex tag on it.
  5. And about 6-8 hours later, Squidoo runs the lensranking algorithm, features the lens, removes the WIP status, plugs the lens into Squidoo’s directory, at which point search engines will find it if they haven’t already

What happens to a newly-published article on Hubpages:

  1. A newly-published hub is visible to visitors, but has a NOINDEX tag
  2. A search engine may find it if you share the link, but will NOT index it because of the NOINDEX TAG
  3. This will remain true until Hubpages removes Pending status AND search bots return to the page and recrawl it.
  4. Also, if you edit the hub after it’s been published, it will reset the Pending clock, and it could be another day before Hubpages moves it out of Pending status.
I believe that once a searchbot sees a new hub with a NOINDEX tag, that search engine may not return or recrawl the article for several days, but it could be a few weeks. (Recrawls happen more often on pages that searchbots expect to be updated frequently). This makes it dangerous to share a link to a new hub anywhere, even on Twitter, where searchbots may see the link.

My experiment: new lens vs. new hub

Thursday at midnight, I created a hub about the Friday morning shuttle flyover of California. The next day, when I realized it wasn’t getting search traffic, I created a lens about the same topic on Friday afternoon after I got home from watching it (written from scratch, so there’s no duplicate text.)

Publicity: On first publish for both hub and lens, I tweeted the URL using the event’s official hashtags and shared a link to it in a Squid∩ forum post. I retweeted the hub on Friday after I edited the hub and added my photos.

Results

Remember, the hub is one day older than the lens. Also, the hub was published the night before the event, whereas the lens was published after it. Nevertheless, three days after the event:

  • Hub traffic from GA as of Monday 8:30AM - 130 pageviews, 79 unique, from sources: 49 Squid∩, 40 hubpages, 21 Twitter, 10 from Twitter widgets on online newspapers set to display latest Tweets from #spottheshuttle hashtag, 10 direct (probably me reloading).
  • Lens traffic from GA as of Monday 8:30AM – 163 pageviews, 114 unique, from sources: 104 Google search, 29 Squid∩, 6 direct (I emailed it to relatives), 15 Twitter (including Scoop.it), 8 other search engines.
  • The hub finally came out of Pending Mode on Sunday, over 48 hours after first publish.
  • As of Monday 8:30 am, 56 hours after publish, the hub is still not in Google’s cache, although a Google search shows that Google indexed Tweets pointing to the hub AND a link to the new hub on my profile page:

Observations

Obviously, this is a very small sample size. We can’t extrapolate much from the actual numbers of visitors from different sources, but they can tell us what’s possible for a new hub or a new lens:

  • A new hub won’t get search traffic. However, a new hub gets internal traffic (visits from other hubbers), due to the fact that Hubpages has a “followers/activity stream” inviting other hubbers to come by.
  • If you promote a new lens immediately after first publish, it will be indexed by Google and has the potential for instant search traffic.
  • By using official hashtags related to the event, I not only received direct Twitter traffic during the height of the buzz, but also, traffic from automated Twitter widgets displayed on various websites — newspapers, Scoop.it — displaying the latest Tweets for a topic they were covering.

Conclusions

To recap:

This whole experiment is basically addressing, “Can you make money publishing on a trending/buzzworthy topic that gets an initial traffic spike which peters out later?”

PRIOR to Hubpages implementing Idle status, the answer was “Yes, but only on Hubpages, not Squidoo.” I had hit upon this as a great Hubpages strategy, sucking in thousands of visitors during the height of an event (e.g. the Mars rover landing) which petered off to 5-20 visits a day longterm.  Hubpages pays for ad impressions and ad clicks, so a traffic spike like that could result in a crunchy payout. Whereas on Squidoo, the answer was “not unless you can drive affiliate sales,” because a new lens isn’t eligible for advertising revenue until the first of the month AFTER it’s published.

Pending status changes this. On Squidoo, you might at least get some sales from a big, trending-topic traffic spike, especially because most of the traffic will be search traffic which came specifically out of an interest in that topic. Whereas on Hubpages, you’ll get social traffic and a lot of hubfollower traffic, who may be coming because they like your writing rather than because they are really interested in the topic.  Ad clicks and sales are less likely with this audience. (Also, in practice, I’ve only gotten one sale EVER from a Hubpages Amazon capsule, as opposed to dozens per week on Squidoo.)

Basically, now neither site is an effective platform for publishing fresh, new, buzzworthy content on a trending event. Either you get zero search traffic for the first week or so (Hubpages) or zero advertising revenue (Squidoo).

My hunch is that Hubpages will respond to member concerns about Pending Status = NOINDEX and fix this problem. However, as long as “Pending” status means no search traffic for days or weeks after first publish, I am disinclined to publish new hubs.

Which is good news for Christene, my Zujava referrer: it’s time for me to start learning what kind of content works best on Zujava.  :)

 

[UPDATE: It occurs to me that once “Pending” status is removed from a Hubpages hub – a day or two after first publish — you can probably force Googlebot to recrawl the hub by submitting its URL to Webmaster Tools.  But it may take another day for recrawl, and it won’t help with other search engines.]

 

Update2: I just tested: what about a new lens from a non-Giant Squidoo account? Same result…

  1. I published J.R.R. Tolkien’s Artwork  at 8:10 PM Tuesday night.
  2. On first publish,  sourcecode shows no sign of “noindex,” and lens is blue, not WIP, on dashboard (Screencap at 9:26PM)
  3. To get Googlebot’s attention, I Tweeted, cross-linked with related lenses, and link dropped on Squid∩ and Dreamwidth.
  4. Googlebot crawled at 9:08 PM (Screencap).
  5. As of 9:47 PST, lens was still blue, still NO noindex tag.
  6. At 10:40 PM, lens turned red on dashboard (screencap)
  7. BUT a search of the sourcecode at 10:40 revealed no sign of noindex (screencap).  I checked again at midnight; ditto. Compare with sourcecode (screencap) of this old, fallen-into-WIP lens whose sourcecode includes noindex/nofollow meta-tags.
  8. First search traffic from Bing at 1AM. (Which shows why we shouldn’t only consider Google).

Hubpages vs. Squidoo Traffic: Sept 2012

Sep 20th, 2012
by Ellen.
2 comments

Hubpages’ new Idle Status should’ve removed a lot of low-quality hubs from Hubpages around Aug 29-30, giving Googlebot a little time to crawl the website and reevaluate it with some low-quality content cleared out.

A Googler reported a Panda reset on Sept. 18. This is the standard Panda update where Google reevaluates all websites based on their overall spam to useful/unique content and assigns that domain a Panda rating, which then becomes a strong factor (a boost or a dampener) which it uses to rank individual webpages on that site.

Our guess was that Hubpages’ “Idle Status” would give Hubpages a better overall Panda rating, and help it draw more traffic. This is dependent on whether Hubpages guessed correctly— idling the sorts of pages that Panda tends to downrank— and whether Googlebot has re-crawled and removed Idle hubs from Google’s index. Googlebot re-crawls stale pages less frequently than ones that are updated often, so it’s possible that Panda is still judging Hubpages based on what it looked like before a lot of those pages were idled.

What does Quantcast show? Unfortunately, the last date on the chart today is Sept 19, so we’ll have to wait a week to see for sure:

What I still can’t figure out is why Squidoo took off like a shot this August, although it parallels the June sag. Take a look at Hubpages vs. Squidoo traffic on Quantcast:

 

I mentioned in my last Hubpages vs. Squidoo post one hypothesis: Squidoo appears to me to be oriented much more towards family and kids products, so its traffic may go in lockstep with the parents-and-kids demographic. In the comments of that post, Simon of Hubpages asked me to clarify why I believed Squidoo had a greater lock on that demographic than Hubpages. I answered her at length, explaining the ways I think Squidoo has visibly and officially catered to that segment, but I’d add one more datum: Quantcast rates Squidoo as slightly above average in the “parents with kids” demographic, Hubpages as slightly under. However, the difference between them isn’t all that much.

I’m not sure how Quantcast is able to measure demographics like that. Raw traffic I can believe — embedding a 1×1 image on each page and counting pageloads is a straightforward visitor counter — but I wonder how Quantcast is able to determine details of who is tripping the turnstyle.

Hubpages vs. Squidoo Traffic: August 2012

Aug 22nd, 2012
by Ellen.
8 comments

Riddle me ree, riddle me roo, why is Hubpages traffic different than Squidoo?

And what the heck happened around August 4/5?

Dates of Recent Google Updates:

Hubpages traffic vs. Squidoo’s on Quantcast, from Aug 22, 2012 (click image for larger-size)

Which just goes to remind us that big, publicly-announced Google updates are only one small factor, and that Google is CONSTANTLY tweaking its algorithm. (In fact, there were about 85 minor algo tweaks announced for June-July. Here’s a good discussion of some of them on Searchengineland.)

At first, my hunch was that this was due to one of the other algo tweaks. But I don’t think it’s that. With past algorithm tweaks, we’ve often seen Hubpages dip afterwards. But this isn’t a dip. Squidoo is climbing. What’s up?

Hubpages has a lot more writerly writers, whereas Squidoo has a HUGE chunk of Rocketmoms, work-at-home moms…. see a pattern? They create a ton of lenses based around kid-related and family-related products. I suspect we’re seeing a back-to-school climb, corresponding to the dip in traffic starting at the end of May .

What’s odd is that Hubpages writers also have mentioned a summer slump, but they’re not seeing a climb yet. I suspect there are more “informational” hubs and fewer sales hubs, or at least fewer sales hubs catering to the Soccer Mom demographic. Squidoo seems to have a lock on those. But that’s just a guess.

Why do I care? Partly, raw curiosity, but mainly, here we have a lab experiment: two sites with very similar models and similar ratios of spam to content. When their traffic diverges, that means there’s some small difference causing the change. If we can understand that difference, then we may begin to get a better grasp of factors that impact search traffic. (I would love for Wizzly and Zujava to grow enough to get directly-measured traffic for Quantcast; then we’d have  four sites with basically similar models to compare and contrast.)

Hubpages vs. Squidoo: Short-Term vs. Long-Term Traffic

May 25th, 2012
by Ellen.
1 comment

I’ve been exploring Hubpages vs. Squidoo ever since Panda smacked Hubpages and left Squidoo alone. (The longterm fallout from that is that Hubpages’ traffic has fallen roughly to be the same as Squidoo’s, but Squidoo’s distribution of more money to top-performing lenses means one can make more money with fewer visitors.)

 

One thing has come home to me forcefully in my recent experiments on Hubpages. It’s obvious, yet I don’t think many people are taking advantage of it.

Articles on Hubpages start earning ad revenue immediately. Articles on Squidoo can earn sales commissions immediately, but they only become eligible for ad revenue on the first of the month, not for their first partial month. Also, Hubpages revenue is tied directly to impressions, whereas Squidoo’s ad revenue is paid indirectly via the tier payout system.

What this means is that if you create a lens on a current, trending topic, you may not earn anything from the initial burst of traffic, and the later trickle of traffic after the main buzz is over may be too low to sustain the lens in a payout tier (or, at best, tier three). Whereas if you create a hub capitalizing on a current topic, you’ll get all the ad revenue from the initial traffic spike, then a modest trickle of revenue from the modest trickle of visitors that come later.

I discovered this by accident when one of my hubs went viral and earned more in a week than all my hubs combined in the previous six months. I confess that I had that episode somewhat in mind when, on May 18, I rushed to get up a page about how and when to watch the May 20th solar eclipse. (The article is now rewritten to reflect what people want after an eclipse: cool pictures.)  The 3500 visitor spike on May 20th easily doubled my earnings for the rest of the month. Post-eclipse, it’s getting 20-25 visits a day, not enough to pull in much ad revenue, but the pennies will become part of my overall daily income.

After some thought, partly because I think it will get more visitors on Squidoo, and partly because I really was excited about this event, I created a different article sharing my solar eclipse photos on Squidoo. That’s tailored to the more community-minded, slightly less informational style of Squidoo lenses; also, significantly, I host the pictures on my own website and link to them so they get clickouts, capitalizing on Squidoo’s lensrank factors and greater ability to drive traffic by letting me name images. It will be an interesting experiment to see how these two articles compare in earnings over the longterm. I predict that the Squidoo lens will earn more.

So, anyway, the point is: if you’re leaping on a trending topic, consider Hubpages for that initial traffic spike. If it’s a topic that’s likely to get longterm traffic and clickouts, Squidoo is the better option.

Beyond Squidoo: Getting My Eggs in Multiple Baskets

Apr 19th, 2012
by Ellen.
11 comments

It’s wise to get eggs in multiple baskets — that is, income streams from multiple online sources — to protect oneself against Google penalties or policy changes on any one site. Whereas last year I decided to make a go of treating Squidoo as a full-time job, this year I’m trying to diversify.

So far, I’m having a hard time getting traction anywhere else, but then, it takes a while to discover what works best with each service and website. Here’s my breakdown for January-April 2012:

 

My Earnings Breakdown: Squidoo, Hubpages, etc

Here’s what I’ve been doing lately.

(more…)

Panda 2.3, Hubpages, and a Suggestion for Zazzle Members

Sep 9th, 2011
by Ellen.
3 comments

By the way, Google reran the Panda algorithm again on about July 25.

What this means is that every month or so, someone at Google pushes the “Panda button.” Panda then reassesses the quality of content on each domain versus the amount of junk/spam on it, and gives that site, shall we say, a Panda Rating. That Panda Rating then becomes one of the factors Google’s everyday search algorithm uses to decide how well to list a page in search engine results. Panda’s rating is apparently a fairly strong factor, as traffic on each domain tends to rise or fall together, unless individual pages on that site have acquired enough other factors (say, backlinks from highly-respected sites) to offset the Panda factor.

Good news for Hubpages members: reorganizing Hubpages along subdomains has helped many of you, by partitioning off your content from spammy members’ content. That helps convince Panda to judge your content on its own merits versus that by other authors on the Hubpages domain. So Hubpages is now slightly outperforming Squidoo, ezinearticles, suite101, and other open publishing sites (as opposed to those vetting content with an editorial board, which Panda is going to like better). We can clearly see Hubpages getting an uptick from Panda 2.3 at the end of July:

Now, wait, why did I put DeviantArt on there? A hunch. Just look at all that traffic! I think Zazzle members should have a DeviantArt account where you showcase some of your work and link to your Zazzle gallery and/or accounts on Squidoo and HP where you showcase more of your work.

DeviantArt has an advantage over sites like HP and Squidoo, as you see.   A social community that appeals to a large niche market (share your art! writing! photography!) gets tons of traffic if search engines didn’t care diddly squat for it. Members market it by pointing friends, relatvies, and peers to their stuff. Search engine traffic, for DeviantArt, is a bonus on top of the social buzz it generates.

Now, don’t all run out and create DeviantArt accounts for the purpose of spamming DA with backlinks. That won’t help much for SEO purposes. DeviantArt does not let you link directly out to some other website. Instead, when you enter links on a DeviantArt page like your profile, it’s stored in in a special in-house format, which is deciphered by a script only when a user clicks that link.

For instance, here’s our friend Flynn the Cat on DeviantArt. Hover over that link in Flynn’s sidebar and see what the URL is:

http://www.deviantart.com/users/outgoing?http://www.squidoo.com/flynn_the_cat

I bet that Google, at least, is clever enough to detect the hidden URL in there and crawl it for indexing purposes: “Aha, there’s a webpage at http://www.squidoo.com/flynn_the_cat.” But indexing is not the same as ranking. This link probably doesn’t count as a backlink, when Google is checking backlinks as one of the factors it uses to decide how high up to list a page in search engine results.

So why bother with backlinks on DeviantArt, if they don’t count for SEO? Pages on Hubpages, Squidoo, etc get indexed / crawled pretty quickly anyway.

Because links have two audiences: (a) search engines, which may use that link to rank your page better in search engine results and (b) humans, who will click on links that look interesting or useful to them.

In this case, your target audience is (b), people.

When writing backlinks for people, you have to give something they’ll be interested in. On DeviantArt, if they see an excellent portfolio of art, photos, or other kinds of creativity, some visitors will follow your link to see more of your creative work hosted elsewhere. Note that just because DeviantArt itself has a huge amount of traffic doesn’t mean your account will. As with Twitter, Facebook, or other social sites, you’ll only get traffic if you participate in and/or post really good stuff that attracts a following.

But if you are an artistic person like Flynn here, and upload stuff regularly, you will attract a following. You could then direct some of that following to a Zazzle store, Squidoo gallery, or blog where you showcase your stuff.

By the way, Digg, StumbleUpon, and many social media sites create outlinks the same way as DeviantArt: they are stored in a non-standard, in-house format, and then a script untangles them and sends the user to the real link. So everyone measuring links from those social sites as backlinks is missing the boat. Those may help Google index a page, but they probably don’t count much as far as helping a page rank better. As with DeviantArt, those links won’t help much for traffic unless you’re an active, contributing member of those communities who has gained a following by frequently posting good stuff of the kind that community tends to like.

Hubpages’ subdomains approach is forward-thinking

Aug 31st, 2011
by Ellen.
No comments yet

This is another of my off-the-cuff observations not backed up by evidence, but I really like one approach Hubpages has taken to recover from Panda: establishing author-based subdomains.

On the one hand, this means backlink churn. They’ve got redirects in place, but any time you shift the URLs of part of a website, there are bound to be problems. They’ll iron out over time.

But on the other hand, this makes it much, much clearer who’s written what. Is everything in one subdomain scraped garbage? Fine, penalize it. But if another subdomain has unique, well-written content with sound links to related content, don’t give it a penalty because of Jane Q. Scraper/Spammer in the next domain over. It’s the same principle as web hosting from the last decade. There’s quite a mix of websites on the hosting service where I’m posting this blog, and search engines don’t judge us the same way.

There’s one other piece of the puzzle that Hubpages and Squidoo are getting half right.

Both Hubpages and Squidoo have added a hidden rel=author link from individual articles (lenses, hubs) to the member’s profile page. Good. That makes clear that the member is the author of all those pages.

But as Marisa Wright of the HP forums reminded me, there’s something more to do. There needs to be a rel=”me” field on our Squidoo and Hubpages profiles to link to our Google profile, or Google won’t count the authorship, and our suite of articles, as our own work separate from the rest of the site, because the authorship won’t be confirmed.

Update: Squidoo has now implemented this field. (And it didn’t matter anyway, since we could add a rel=”me” link manually, but still, the field makes it easier.)

My Hubpages Articles

Aug 31st, 2011
by Ellen.
No comments yet

This is a backlink post because I just claimed my Hubpages domain and broke the miniscule bit of link juice my articles had accrued through Tweets (which Google follows to find new content, although it doesn’t consider them worth anything for ranking purposes unless you’re an “authority”).

Right now, I’m not really targeting keywords on Hubpages; I’m just writing on topics that interest me. Some may interest you. Here they be:

SEO and Web Strategies

Science and History

Creativity

Hubpages is so much easier…

Aug 27th, 2011
by Ellen.
4 comments

Wow. My goal to make 500 lenses by the end of the year may be hijacked by the fact that I can write 2 good hubs in a day. HP’s interface is smoother, faster, and less buggy.

Of course, it’s much more limited, lacking many of Squidoo’s features, and I chafe at not being able to link to anything else I’ve written, educational or otherwise, without fear of being put on probation as a spammer is vexing. (Yes, me. A spammer. Snort.)  I also hate not being able to put a small image credit on my photos due the ‘watermark’ issue. And without Amazon affiliates (not in my state), earning avenues are limited to advertising.

But gosh, it’s so nice to start getting money as soon as one has published, instead of watching all the blessings, likes, comments and feedback during the first few weeks of a lens’ existence wear off by the time it’s eligible for tier payouts.

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