What are Hubpages?

For the past month I have heard people mention HubPages fairly frequently and thought it was about time I acquainted myself with them. My understanding is that these pages could be used as another means of obtaining coveted backlinks and better yet - for free.

As some of you know I am an avid Golfer and one day I noticed a link pointing to my site from a blog called "Lost Ball in High Weeds" which immediately got my attention as I regularly lose golf balls in high weeds. Now I have no idea if the author of the site is a golfer but his name is "Splork" which is exactly the sound my golf balls make when they hit the water hazards. Needless to say - he had me hooked if for no other reason than the golf innuendos. As it turns out he is a very entertaining writer and I enjoy his blog even though, as it further turns out, he doesn't have much to say about golf. A shame but he is forgiven.

The other day Splork was ranting on about hubpages and I thought what better way to avoid doing any work myself than to ask him to write a post about hubpages for this site. I tried to convince him that this was a good idea as it would give him a chance to win over my readers with his charm and even get a link from me but it wasn't until I threatened to sick Vic on him that he relented and agreed.

With out further ado, my first guest poster and possibly a fellow golfer...

HubPages by Splork (The first link will take you to hubpages.com)


I dig Hubpages. I also dig chicks, snowboarding and chocolate chip cookies, but Griz didn't ask me to write a post about those things. He asked me to write about Hubpages. See, recently I have discovered the joys of Hubpages. These little one page wonders are doing very well for me in ranking for targeted keywords in Google. I am also a fan of Squidoo lens. Griz didn't ask me to write about those either, but I thought I'd mention them to give you a frame of reference of what Hubpages are. Squidoo and Hubpages are very similar. Both services allow you to create one-page sites on your topic of interest. You drag and drop modules to make them pretty and interesting. And you make money with both by sharing in the generated revenue.

Yea, I know, enough of the intro. You don't read Griz for fluff. The reason that I like Hubpages is that Google really likes them. They are liked more than Squidoo lens. They are liked more than Blogger blogs. Do I know all this to be fact? Not at all. What I do know is that when I build a keyword targeted hubpage, it is indexed in Google usually within 24 hours. You say, "So what? I can get my site indexed in record time by linking it to my PR 7 site, submitting an article to the 7 million article directories and social bookmarking with the demon.” To that I say, realize I did nothing to achieve this greatness. Nothing. I built a hub. And then moved on and built another. Look, it would be foolish for me to say that you will get instant indexing for every hubpage you build. You won't. But the vast majority of the hubpages I've built have been indexed the next day. I've had people write in to my blog saying they have been experiencing the same thing. It's just a good time to be using Hubpages. Much like it was using Squidoo before they were slapped around by Google.

Now before you start surfing over to Clickbank to arm yourself with codes for building dog training, pc security and ipod accessory hubpages, let me warn you that the service frowns greatly on affiliate links. Moreover, the hubbers are voracious at reporting spammy hubs. Whereas Squidoo encourages you to use their lens for marketing, Hubpages is not playing that game. They do not want to see more than a couple of outbound links going to your site(s) either. You can point to CNN, Yahoo and ESPN all day long. They just don't want you to use Hubpages for blatant promotion of your stuff.

So is it still worth it to build hubpages? I say yes. They are so quick and easy to build. Here is exactly what I do: I have a ton of PLR. I look through and find a topic I'm interested in building a hubpage on. I then take that topic keyword and do my keyword research. Just like Griz teaches here and Court does over there. I take that keyword and build the hupage with it. The URL and title will have that keyword in it. Think about how Griz taught you about building Blogger blogs. It's the same thing. I rip apart a couple PLR articles and highly modify them. The thing with Hubpages is you want to go for originality and length. You know how Griz is always talking about writing long posts? The longer your hubpage the better. You are rewarded with a higher hubpage score for original content and length. By the way, don't go posting unmodified PLR. The militant hubbers have nothing better to do than surf around reading hubs and flagging those that they think are unoriginal or spammy. After the text has been inserted to a few modules, I start adding modules like relevant videos, news, RSS Feeds, Amazon and photos. I wish I could sound more technical, more authoritative, more impressive, like some sort of hubber savant, but that is all there really is to it.

Yes, I'm sure it all sounds like a pain. But it's not. I know you don't want to write and re-write content. That's the game you have to play these days. I can get through a hubpage from keyword research to publish in no more than 30 minutes. The only reason that it takes a little longer is because I am going for a higher hubpage score. I have no idea what that ultimately means but having a hubpage score of 90 seems better than 50. Maybe I'm just competitive. So I spend time making the articles and content sound more like me and less like outsourced material.

Ultimately my goal is to have hundreds of these hubpages. All laser targeted to a specific keyword. I have seen some hubbers with hundreds of hubpages. One guy I came across has over 600. I bet there are folks with over a thousand. But the funny thing is they aren't keyword targeted for anything. I want to create a farm of laser-targeted, keyword-phrase hubpages. I want to cultivate solid pagerank that I can use to my benefit for my so-called "money sites." (Don’t you hate IM speak?) If you search using a medium to long tail keyword I want you to find my hubpage in Google. Simple as that.

The one downside to Hubpages may be this: They may take potential money away from the site you ultimately want to promote. How? If you have a hubpage and niche blog both laser targeted to the same keyword, most likely the hubpage is going to rank higher in the SERPs, all things being equal. In the hubpage you have a link or two pointing to your site. That's groovy. However, the way hubpages are designed, a visitor may be more likely to click on the Adsense than your link. Hubpages are almost perfect for Adsense.

That isn't bad but you aren't getting a full Adsense payout. It's rev sharing. In case you were wondering, Hubpages payout is more than Squidoo. I doubt anyone believes they will get rich with either hubpages or lens but the extra cash is kind of nice. I've found for Squidoo, the more lens you build the more money you generate overall. Seems obvious, I know, but when people find your lens and like it they tend to keep surfing through your other lens. I have no reason to doubt it won't be the same with Hubpages. But I'd still rather some dude click to my site and buy my affiliate product any day over an Adsense click.

One nice benefit of building hubpages, or even lens, is it gives you a quick and easy way to determine if the niche you are focused on is actually worth your time. If I build a hubpage and can't get ranked, or get ranked but receive no visitors, then I'm not going to bother building a blog or website. Some people use PPC to determine the value of a niche. Too rich for me. I prefer to use organic search and hubpages and lens.

So you want proof of the goodness of Hubpages? Sorry. Can't help you there. It's too easy for people to flag hubpages, lens and Blogger blogs. I don't need the hassle. Anyway, it's free. There is nothing to buy. If it works for you, great. If it doesn't, then you've lost a few hours giving something new a try. I bet you wasted more time figuring out the garbage that is iTunes than you will on Hubpages. But my guess is you will like building hubpages.

The bottom line is this: Hubpages are too easy to build and too valuable to Google for you to ignore them right now. Hard to say how long Hubpages will be a Google darling, but it seems like they are taking the necessary precautions to stay on big G's good side. Time is precious. Court has you keyword sniping. Griz has you building blogs. Vic has you building BANS. I think you need to carve out enough time to build a couple hubpages every day. Again, they are easy and simple. I think the value of having numerous Hubpages could be worth it. I take notice if Google likes something. Google likes Hubpages.

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Thanks Splork and folks please stop in and visit him at Lost Ball in High Weeds even if he isn't a golfer.

Griz


Note:

Another Hubber has come to my attention and she has an excellent article on how to use hubpages. You can read Lissie's article on her Hubpage; "HubPages for Internet Marketing"


Update: A little word about SEO

One of the nice things about having PR is that Google tends to crawl your site fairly often and I usually get new posts indexed quickly. Todays post showed up in the serp's about 10 minutes after I posted it. Within the first half hour I have already had visitors to the site who were searching for info on hubpages. See the screenshots below...

Click to enlarge







I am showing you this to remind you of a few things - if you write long articles and use lots of terms there is no telling what type of term someone will find you with in the search engines (make hubpages with blogger - ??) and if we forget that I am already ranking high for these terms I would now write a follow up post targeting the term "How to build a Hubpage" and concentrate on getting links for it. This term is likely to bring in some traffic in future as Hubpages become more widely known.

This is what I mean by paying attention to the long tails in your stats. They will tell you what type of keywords you might want to target in relation to your main terms.

Also note that there is little competition in the serp's but 2 queries in half an hour tells me that there may be interest in this topic. This is how you can inadvertently come across a niche that others aren't targeting and perhaps make a few bucks from it. Anyone care to outrank me? Maybe use a hubpage to do it...