This is a guest post by Ryan who writes on his personal finance blog – PlantingDollars. Through this post, he is contributing a case study that he did with his articles on two sites – Squidoo and Hubpages, to see which got ranked better on Google in first 24 hrs. It will be interesting to see whether Google “really” loves Squidoo over other sites or it is just a little mythical thing. Let’s get started reading this case study…
I’ve been building websites and blogging for a few years now and somehow had managed not to wander over to squidoo or hubpages. Both sites are easy to set up, offer the possibility to make money, and admittedly get a bit addictive. However, I wanted to see which one ranked better, and caught the eye of Google.
Before I talk about what happened when I used both hubpages and squidoo I’d like to explain…
The Three Reasons I Signed up for Squidoo and Hubpages
1. Backlinks – Squidoo offers dofollow links right off the bat, and hubpages offers dofollow after you build up some notoriety on their site. Either way, you can build links to your blogs and websites with ease every time you create a lens or hub. Backlinks are the key to ranking well so either way, you should probably consider signing up to get some linkage.
2. Unique Topics to Write About – I run several blogs, but what do I do if I want to write a post about “where to find boric acid“? Why would I want to write something like that? Because I see an underutilized niche, however I don’t want to build a whole niche website about this. Creating a lens or a hub is a perfect option that allows me to write pages for the search engines without setting up completely new websites.
3. Income – Your posts have ads which squidoo and hubpages will share with you if someone clicks on them. Pretty neat considering you don’t have to set up any contracts. All you have to do is have a paypal account with squidoo, but with hubpages you’ll need to set up adsense, amazon, kontera, and other types of accounts in order to make some moola.
Comparing the Two
I wrote a post on my personal finance blog about a credit card documentary I watched, called “In debt we trust.” I wanted to do a bit of promoting so I then created a squidoo lens and a hub on hubpages about “credit card documentaries”, both linking back to my main site about the documentary.
They’re very similar posts and talks about practically the same thing, but the difference in results in the first 24 hours really surprised me.
After 24 hours What Did I have?
Hubpages was number 11 for credit card documentaries.
Squidoo was nowhere to be found for the term credit card documentaries.
This is just my first test run to see which site performs better in rankings for similar posts, but I’m already leaning towards hubpages since I’ve seen it rank well already for my other hubs like where to buy boric acid.
This is by no means a complete analysis, just some observations. I’ll be watching over the next few weeks to see which article service is ranking higher to determine where I’ll focus most of my efforts.
Do you use squidoo or hubpages?
Do you like one more than the other, or have seen one rank significantly better than the other? Let us know that by using the comment form below…
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• hubpages vs squidoo • squidoo vs hubpages
It IS a well-known fact that hubpages will rank higher than Squidoo right off the bat. The latter has recovered yet since it was penalized by Google in the early 2010.
Jamie
Hey Jamie,
Thanks for the comment… apparently it wasn’t well-known to me! Hopefully this will help someone who isn’t aware of that as well.
Cheers,
Ryan
No worry, Ryan. You’ll find out soon enough that HP has more credibility in the eyes of Google than Squidoo.
With Internet Marketing which one is better between the two is not a question but how do you utilize BOTH?
Personally I have had real problems trying to get my squidoo lens rank in google, but my hub pages seem to get on the first page no problem!
I agree. I plan on continuing to use both mostly for linking and using link wheels to niche sites. They’re probably one of the easiest ways to get links from higher ranking websites.
It is prctically found that ranking of Squidoo has declined but I have never compared it with hub pages. This issue is also discussed on many blogs and websites that ranking of Squidoo is declining.
Hey Ryan,
I never knew Squidoo and Hubpages share the ad revenue with users.
I tried squidoo but not hubpages.
Thanks for sharing.
Great experiment. As far as authority and ranking, I lean towards hubpages, however, the dofollow factor is a strong reason for me to use squidoo more often.
I think in the long run, hub pages will be much more useful, certainly in terms of seo, however, it takes more work to get those benefits from hubpages. Thanks for sharing your experience.
Hi Ryan,
Squidoo is still great for building backlinks into your website since it has a high PR. And the reason why hubpages was on the first page about the topic you created is that, Hubpages got more credibility than squidoo because they are more strict in terms of publishing a content than squidoo. Sometimes, hubpages also don’t give a dofollow links into post that’s why you also don’t get link juice from them.
I also experienced this before that’s why I created most of my product reviews using hubpages rather than squidoo.
Thank you for sharing this.
– Felix
Interesting case study Ryan! It was some days ago when I was wondering which of these two is the better choice when it comes to article marketing. I was actually leaning towards Squidoo, after reading an article from an author who aside from promoting his website, was earning something like 2000$ a month from ad-sharing.
In your case Google has indexed the Hubpages article faster but I doubt that this is what happens with all the articles. With its countless of different algorithms, you can never be sure how exactly does Google operate. No matter what, Squidoo’s concept seems better to me.
I do use Hubpages, but not extensively. Just have a couple of hugs only… I guess this will be good for bloggers or marketers who loves to write. 🙂
Oh, your number 11 position after just 24 hours, is amazing! Looks like I need to revisit Hubpages. Haha… thanks for sharing with us your findings.
Hubpages should also start supporting Paypal.Thats the reason why many people stick to squidoo
Thanks for sharing your case study, Ryan.
This is the first time I’ve heard about the Hubpages and Squidoo. Could you tell me their advantages? Why do we need to write articles on these sites instead of on our sites?