Hubpages has lost favor with Google
I read a comment earlier today on one of my blog posts and it made me think. The bit that I am going to deal with here is
What do you think will change with your strategy now that Hubpages has lost favor with Google?
Ben (Seaworthee from WPGM forum)
One of the problems with IM is that people like to jump around. I remember when some Guru or another pronounced that “adsense is dead”, “affiliate marketing is dead” or “my grandmother is dead”..Ok the last one can be true but the other two were just rubbish.
I can see why after the latest google algo change people would be thinking they should give up on Hubpages (or one of the other sites that got a bloody nose). Rather than doing another blog posts worth of typing I decided to do a video.. Please do leave a comment below
p.s While I think Hubpages is alive well and will be going from strength to strength, I am not sure what to say about ezinearticles. If it was a person I would think they either slipped off their meds or onto the booze. I can feel a blog post coming on from my buddy Mark Thompson so I shall leave it to him to share his thoughts on ezines latest errm decisions?
Hey Paul,
Thanks for the video:) I have been monitoring the WPG all day waiting for more info on EZ articles. I have used Hub Pages and Squidoo to link to my WP blog page. I guess Ezine has always been tempting because of how easy it was to write the short articles and often get on page one of Google. I’m still inexperienced and am learning. So your saying create lot’s of Hubs and Lenses that are related to your main site and use these guys as a means to get visitors to your site and to help your site in the search engine rankings?
Thanks again
Scott:)
Hi Scott
ezine articles is a whole nother blog post! I am trying to find a video of a headless chicken and see if i can get their logo on it. That is what I think they are experiencing right now. I imagine they are running around shouting “do something” , no one cares what as long as they can be seen doing something.
What I actually always say is create QUALITY hubs, not lots of junky ones. This hasn’t changed just because of the goog update. You get a share of the adsense so it is worth taking some time to create something worthwhile. The links are good value, but I would not suggest you do 100 hubs all on the same subject all pointing at the same page. If you have five pages on your site and can do five decent hubs then do that and link to one of your pages from each.
Throwing up piles of poop is not going to win, unless you are very good at producing the poop quickly. You are better off treating hubpages right, don’t look to just pile in any old poop and then walk away.
Paul
Thanks for this great insight. I know a lot of folks wondering what the heck to do next. Should they drop EZA, HP and jump like a horn’-dog onto Squidoo and Blogger. I like the logic about the links being used for Squidoo lens and not so much for Hub Pages and Ezinearticles. When I first started building links to my stuff, I actually was linking back to some of my EZA articles. After all, this is supposed to be a web, so I was linking everything to everything. Probably too much work, but now I’m glad I went through the effort. I haven’t used Hub Pages that much, but when I did, I linked to them too.
Thanks for the insight, Kater
Hi Paul,
Great video, thanks for taking the time to post this.
I have had one site drop in rankings by about 30 pages, I will work on this to correct this.
Your out take on ‘the farmers change’ is spot on, I will still post on hubpages flatout!
Dave.
Not sure about hub pages since I didn’t use those, but I’ve done some googling on some keywords that I tend to use alot and none of the article directories are showing on the front page. Looks like they all got slapped.
I would say they will be back Dan. There is too much money involved for them not to work it out.
I am actually looking through some of my sites that were affected. I am seeing a trend and I will share it once I get my head round it all
Paul
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this, Paul, and I agree with you re: Hubpages being okay in the future and EZA’s crazy reaction to the change. (They need to CHILL.) What I still can’t fathom, though, is how did ehow not get slapped? Someone should do an ehow page on *that* question!
Re: your Hubpages founder being a former Google employee thought, not so. From Techcrunch:
“…The Hubpages team is founded by three guys out of Microsoft that were part of the successful startup MongoMusic. The team includes Paul Edmondson, Jay Reitz, and Paul Deeds. Most recently, Paul Edmondson was the Group Product Manager for MSN Entertainment, Jay Reitz was the Development Manager, and Paul Deeds was a developer in Windows Media Internet Services….”
http://techcrunch.com/tag/hubpages/
They’re smart cookies, though, so I doubt this missing Google connection will affect the site’s future.
Cheers!
Mia
You spotted my intentional mistake to see if any one was listening..ok ok you caught me!
I should have checked what I was saying before I posted.. I hope they won’t be insulted by me saying they worked at the Goog rather than at MS..I am also intrigued on how I got the two mixed up!
I do not know how come ehow are not seeing any harm, although I expected Squidoo to suffer more than it has.
At the end of the day, a lot of it is guessing games.
Paul
Paul,
Her’s a link to a good article on this:
http://inside.offervault.com/2011/02/google-farming-update-quest-for-quality/
Thanks for the video.
Doug
Squidoo was saved by us evil marketers, how ironic. Squidoo was slapped back in 2007 or thereabouts and made a comeback. So maybe the massive lens purges and the other changes they did to counter the slap helped with the farmer update.
The headless chicken is the perfect description for ezinearticles right now. One commenter on their blog bad mouthed a perfectly good 600 word article. When I followed his link to the article I found that it was removed and had to view a cached version of it. It seemed useful to me so I guess the staff deleted it because it got fingered by the commenter. They are acting like they’re shell shocked.
I never thought of it like that but you may have a point..lol
So ezinearticles deleted a article because someone else moaned, cool so all we have to do moan about the ones above us and they get booted and we rule!
Paul, thanks for clearing this up, appreciate it mate.
I did want to clarify though that I never though Hubpages was dead, just out of favor. The reason I ask is because there is a blog I read from a guy who is getting good results from firing lots of links at Hubs that are pointed at new sites.
The theory behind it is that some of the juice will eventually flown down to his money site from the Hub and you can also earn money at the same time (as you mentioned). There is also the advantage of not having to risk throwing so many links at a new site.
Thanks again
The Hubpages is dead thing was a bit of a play on all the “adsense is dead” “Affiliate marketing is dead” .
What do you mean you read other peoples blogs!
Anyway…Links to a hub will always help, I am sure they will help now as much as they did before the update.
My big thing is that people should take some time to make sure their blogs are half decent and not just throw in one huge page of content and call it good.
Paul
Hahaha, I am a sucker for too much reading and not enough doing!
Anyway, it is plainly obvious now that unique helpful content is the way to go. Now thats not a problem for me as I have been doing that from the start (I couldnt sleep at night using autoposters) but if the recent algo change isn’t enough of a wakeup call for all of us then there is something wrong.
Have a good one Paul!
i think the “farmer update” thing is just an indirect way that google wants to employ inorder to kick potential competitors out of business. Most ot these so called content farms have acquired a lot of pages that could pose a threat to the advertising revenue of Google. For instance, ehow.com, hubpages.com and others have over 1 million pages properly indexed and ranking well in Google. i think google has foreseen that if they let these content farms to keep acquiring more pages and getting indexed, they could divert a large chunk of adwords advertisers to their own network.
Imagine in the future(i.e if there was nothing like the farmer update), these content networks decide to merge into one huge advertising company(and it is possible), they could give Google a run for their money. Facebook is already doing this and it was only possible for facebook because of the millions of users on their network. Millions of users equals Millions of pages. The end result being huge advertising revenue that could have gone to google. In my own opinion, Google is just taking a preventive measure and that’s a display of cowardice and a brute way of doing online business.
Yes Paul, I believe you are bang on with your thinking regarding HP and Squidoo. Squidoo lenses are far more user friendly for marketing purposes. For example Squidoo will allow more outbound links pointing to blogs and product pages than HP (only two I believe).
Google play the game of keeping us confused and enjoy all the free publicity when something is changed.
BTW is Yahoo site explorer “DEAD” as they don’t show my Squidoo and HP links back to my sites anymore.
Ah well, it will give you another cliff hanger to postmortem about!!!
Is that a good thing for the net though? (playing devils advocate here)
From a seo point of view is that good or bad, I mean is it better to have 10 diluted links or 1 strong one from a page.
I don’t know if Yahoo site explorer is totally dead yet, but I imagine it will be soon if it isn’t yet.
Paul
I would rather not say that Hubpages is dead but they have an opportunity to comb the entire site and remove all the garbage they were reluctant to remove, many websites have been affected and this just call for a change of strategy in this approach of doing business and over reliant on one search engine is a quite a mistake. Hubpages should come up with a more professional writing platform rather than where people just write for the sake of earning money from affiliates.
Thanks for popping in to comment
Like what though? I mean would you spend time writing unique content for a site where there was no return at all?
I agree that they could do with removing some of the content, I see plenty on pages with no images, all one big block of text and a link at the bottom. What is worst is when they are using a really good page url so i can’t have it.
I do not think any of the article sites is perfect but I really do like hubpages.