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
Hi Ryan,
Great article. I have only dabbled with Squidoo on one occasion and haven’t ever seen any real results from it. I will be interested to hear how both articles perform after a few weeks. Are you planning on marketing the articles via incoming links etc. or are you going to leave them to their own devices and see how they perform?
I found the tip about using hubpages or squidoo for creating particular topics that I don’t necessarily have to put up in my site particularly useful. I’ll be considering making accounts for those.
squidoo and hubpages are great source to make a link wheel to you site. hubpages are better indexed in searh engine so, it better source to get quality backlink.
I personally found Squidoo to have a much liver community. People participate in discussions more and the natural links I get from my Squidoo page is much higher but that’s an interesting comparison
good case study :).I need to try hubpages.never tried although i created an account.
i think squide lens is best as compare to hub pages.
I greatly appreciate this experiment! I tried Squidoo a while back and got zero traffic to the lens I made and zero (or maybe negative!) effect from the link to my web site. I guess I could solicit links to the lens, but why bother doing that vs. soliciting links to my main site directly.
You have inspired me to give Hub Pages a try.
I have only dabbled with Squidoo on one occasion and haven’t ever seen any real results from it. I will be interested to hear how both articles perform after a few weeks. Thanks..
I’ve heard about squidoo and I’ve been on its page. But I don’t get the chance to explore it and have an account. Anyway, this post of your really make me more interested to squidoo and hubpages as well.
hubpages faring better than squidoo .. nice find . will share with othere who are targeting sqidoo …