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
Both hubpages and Squidoo have good information base and you can get articles on almost everything. Both sites rock! Well, in comparison though, Hubpages is easy to read and most of it has good lanuguage.
Both sites are good when information base is considered. But when the alignment of the page is compared, Hubpages are better than Squidoo.
I am glad you posted this. I will definitely try out the hubpages. If all goes well, I will drop my squidoo page and put my eggs in that basket, my squidoo page is going nowhere 🙁
I have recently done some similar testing and my conclusion is that Hubpages ranks very well and is a lot more effective than Squidoo. I have though seen a 7-10% higher conversion rate from the traffic originating from my Squido Lenses. Anyone tested to linkbuild towards their Hubpages on generic keywords and have some secrets to share? 🙂
Hub pages are always a better choice than squidoo.
I would always opt for Hub pages.
Thanks for the post
Prateek
Very good experiment. I have just learned more about these two popular sites. I see Hubpages is scoring better than Squidoo. I have never published an article on them, guess I’ll want to try Hubpages for better indexing.
I have been building Squidoo Lens and Hubpages for years now. And I have some good insight.
Concerning making money off the ads…forget it. I have seen close to nothing from either site.
But you can make some money via affiliate sales through Amazon.
Where SEO is concerned, Squidoo is much much better. Your lens can gain some page rank if you interlinks some lens’ together and/or build some backlinks to the lens.
With Hubpages sometimes the links are dofollow then your author score can dip and they become nofollow. Its a real pain to have to keep current with Hubpages just to get dofollow on your links.
I am a member of Squidoo, but I have never tried Hubpages. I have made lenses that currently rank on the first and second pages of Google for certain keywords. I really like Squidoo and it seems as though Google likes them as well, because I see many other lenses pop up during searches. I see Hubpages quite often as well during searches. In the future I plan on using them as well.
I seem to earn better from Squidoo than with Hubpages. Of course, my Squidoo lenses have been up for a year.
This is extremely interesting. I’ve known about Squidoo for quite some time but never really took it seriously. I’ve only heard of Hubpages recently (like yesterday!). I suppose it seems one of those things that works better in tandem than using just one or the other.
I’ll be hanging around in hopes to see if you come back and post about your findings in the first 24 hours!
Delena