HubPages.com?
-
Hi All,
Does anyone have any info/opinions/scoop on HubPages.com? A client is considering using the service and I don't know much about it. Having a hard time figuring out the SEO value it would provide. It doesn't nofollow the links you create, which is nice, but not sure if the pages you create on this site provide any real link juice.
Client isn't interested really in generating revenue, but rather just wants to help increase exposure for his brand. He already has a blog going, so I'm trying to determine if putting in effort to creating articles on this site would be worthwhile, or if we should focus efforts more on other backlink methods, such as guest posting on blogs.
Anyone have thoughts?
-
Not sure if back links from sites like hub pages carry the same weight anymore. IMO Google has gotten wise to article spamming to generate back links. Personally I would concentrate on producing great content and articles on your own site. Give people a reason to link to the site
-
Hi Diane.
I did notice hubpages offered an ad revenue sharing program but I did not review the details.
With respect to adding additional links, there are many factors involved and Google does not publicize their algorithm so we are left to made educated guesses and report on various test results.
My recommendation when working with external article publishing sites is they offer the two benefits mentioned above. They allow you to expose your site to an established audience which you may otherwise not reach. Also they provide a link to your site. The primary value I seek from the link is to broaden my site's backlink profile. The actual value of the link, and of multiple links from the same site, is highly debatable. We do know the value of most sitewide links is very low, so the theory "the more links the better" is not necessary true.
If you offer a second article on the same site, that second link would likely offer some value to your site. The link's value would likely be increased if it was from a comparable site where you have not previously published an article.
Forget about Google for a moment and think of it from a pure exposure perspective. If site A offered to publish your article and expose it to their 10k readers, that is great. When it is time to publish a second article, you can either share it with site B and their 10k readers or site A. The advantage site B offers is you can raise your brand awareness and gain traffic from a potentially new group of users.
-
This is very interesting ryan. If you have a number of articles on one article site, would this not increase your link juice to your site.
With reference to earning money on hub pages i and friends of mine have submitted lots of articles on the site and have never earned a single penny.
-
I have never used HubPages but it appears to be one of many forms of article publishing sites. You write an article, publish it on their site, and the benefit is the site has it's own group of readers who will see your article.
The benefits your client would receive is exposing his brand and a link back to his site from the article. The challenge is the article will need to be very good in order for others to read it. If the article is great, then your client is missing the opportunities of having the article on his own site.
This struggle is the constant issue with deciding whether to publish content on other sites. If you take this approach, I would suggest 1 article per year on these sites is enough to expose your brand and earn a unique domain link. Spread your content amongst other similar sites rather then offer one site multiple articles. Ultimately your goal should be to publish the content on your own site.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
.com or .me for freelance business?
Hey there, Which domain do you think is better and why? (1) surnamename.com or (2) surname.me? Since Google treats both the same in terms of the rankings, my biggest concern is about the branding. (1) is longer but is .com (people usually see .com as more trusted one). (2) is shorter, easier to remember, but less tech savvy people might be confused with .me. Purpose of the site is personal/freelance profile. Other domain versions are already taken. Shoot the ideas! Cheers, Martin
Branding | | benesmartin2 -
Moving .com to .co.uk without compromising .com
Hey guys, I have spent a little time searching for a suitable solution, but I feel like maybe directly asking my specific question is the best way to go about this: We have a site www.mywebsite.com and it serves all UK customers (right now, the site is useless for US customers). We would like to move those customers to www.mywebsite.co.uk and carry all the google points we have accrued with it but unfortunately, I feel like a 301 redirect would cause a big issue because in January, we want to launch a new site which will have very similar if not the same urls but the content will target our new US customers. I don't want to end up in a position where our customers end up with redirect loops or where we end up confusing customers. For now, our solution is this: make our site available on both .com and .co.uk canonical tags on both sites will be set to the UK version of the site. if the user enters the homepage on .com, we show a page saying: "hey, we are launching a US site soon, click here to read more and sign up, or click here to go to the UK site." - this page will not have a UK canonical tag because it has no equivalent on the UK site. If the user clicks on the "goto uk site" button, they have acknowledged that we have 2 sites now and we can 302 redirect them to the equivalent .co.uk page every time they go to .com until we get .com live (powered by a cookie). -- we hope that bots won't be affected by this. It would be good to know if it will affect bots or have any negative SEO side effects. at this point, we have 2 types of users, informed and uninformed users. Informed if they clicked the button described above. if the user enters any other page on .com, we don't redirect uninformed users, we just let them use the site as normal because we don't know if 302 redirects will cause issues for our ranking. if the user enters any other page on .com, we redirect informed users to the .co.uk site... this includes the .com homepage If the user goes to .co.uk, the site is normal. No special landing pages, no redirects, no extra cookies. We want to start changing external .com links to .co.uk and new content we write about our site will start going to .co.uk When .com goes live, we will remove the redirects and people using .com will start seeing US content instead of UK content. People using co.uk will be unaffected. Hopefully, google is directing most of our customers to .co.uk by now. Ideally, we want to transfer our google ranking from .com to .co.uk since it is technically a move, but I need to be sure there will be no side effects from using 301 redirects when we put the US site live... Both SEO wise and UX wise. Anyways, does anyone see any potential problems with our current plan? are 302's problematic for our SEO goals (moving .com points to .co.uk)? will changing canonical from .com to .co.uk have positive or negative effects? Can we safely apply 301's and is it necessary... esp. considering the short timeline (releasing US in Janurary). Are there any extra steps we can take to maximise our efforts and/or speed up the site transfer. Is it a bad idea to allow .com to serve the same content as .co.uk except the homepage? Any gotchas you can think of? Thanks in advance, Dipun
Branding | | dipunm0 -
Am I better off buying a .com with a stopword or a .net / .org without?
I'm trying to decide between three domains:
Branding | | Andrew_Mac
mydomain.com
domain.net
domain.org What's the latest word on if there is an actual SEO impact to the stopword or whether it is just ignored entirely? Further, does anyone have any insight into whether any of these domains are seen as more credible (from a searcher's standpoint)? Thanks so much!0 -
Should I remove our videos from DotSub.com to try & boost our Wistia videos?
Okay all you video SEO lovers, I had a thought today that I thought would make an interesting question. I have been using the tools at DotSub.com to transcribe our videos. The tools are great, and even better, free. We have about 80 videos on DotSub and all of these videos are also on our YouTube channel. Once I've completed the transcription, I've been exporting the .srt file and uploading them to YouTube to replace the God-awful machine transcriptions (sorry Google, but they are baaaadddd). Anyway, sometimes our DotSub video will outrank the same YouTube video, sometimes not. The 80 videos on DotSub have amassed about 10,000 views and a couple of translations...which is nice, I guess? Recently, we've begun experimenting with Wistia. Here is a search term for which our YouTube and DotSub video results pretty much flood page 1: "studiolive webinar" All of the DotSub videos also exist as Wistia videos on our Website and blog. For obvious reasons, we would rather have our Wistia videos rank in those three positions which right now are dominated by the DotSub versions. Should I remove the content from DotSub in order to try to get the Wistia videos to rank instead? Or should I leave them all there? I should probably add that we do have Wistia videos that are outranking both Dotsub and Youtube versions of the exact same videos...so I know that's possible. I'm just wondering if by leaving all of these videos up at DotSub if we are cannibalizing our potential at ranking for videos that link back to our site? What do you think?
Branding | | danatanseo0 -
Moving Blog from www.topic.domain.com to www.domain.com/blog
Hi Fellow Mozzers, Just started off here on seomoz.org and am super happy to have joined the community! I've recently started a new job as web optimization manager for an education company. There is a lot to do and one of my first tasks is to figure a better strategy for our current blog. I've convinced our management to move our blog from topic.domain.com to domain.com/blog. My research has shown that this is a better strategy so that our blog can receive the DA of our root domain, get more people to click through our site, and even receive more natural searches (PLEASE, someone correct me if I'm wrong on this). Anyway, our blog is currently hosted as a Wordpress blog and we're wondering if it's more worthwhile to build a blog platform ourselves or continue using Wordpress. I am not a technical guy and don't know the backend stuff to make it happen, but my concern is primarily for the optimum search capacity. Also, our bloggers frequently put links to different portions of our website - does this hold any negative SEO value in terms of too much internal linking? I personally wouldn't assume so, but then again I could be wrong. Finally, we also track our main website using Google Analytics- currently, the only tracking we have installed on our blogs is the default provided by Wordpress (yes yes I know, but that's why i'm here -- to fix these weaknesses). I'm assuming we will be able to better track using GA when the switch is made. So, I guess my questions are: (1) Is my research correct in that it's better to have our blog hosted as domain.com/blog over topic.domain.com (2) Are there any best practices in making this switch and/or any negative implications with continuing to use Wordpress or should we build our own platform (we have the internal resources to do so, but would prefer to take the easiest and best route in terms of SEO and community building). (3) Will it still be just as easy to track using GA. Thank you!! Pedram
Branding | | CSawatzky0 -
.com or .co.uk
We're lunching a new site and we've managed to secure desired domain name with .com and .co.uk The business in question is UK based and is catering for UK customers. We're not interested in foreign traffic. Should we go with .com or .co.uk? .com sounds much better and I think it will be easier to build a brand using .com
Branding | | Thommas0 -
.com vs .ca
I have a domain name in mind for my web development company, but unforunatly the .com is already taken. Fortunatly for me though I live in Canada, and the .ca is available. What I want to know is should I go ahead and register my desired .ca or should I continue to look and find a domain name that I can aquire the .ca and the .com ?
Branding | | VebianWebandMobileDevelopment0