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…
Top 10 Search Terms:
• hubpages vs squidoo • squidoo vs hubpages
This is a wonderful post. I am sure you know about SEO, since you are on the first page of Google with this blog. I will try both sites now. Thanks.
I usually prefer squidoo, however this blog regarding hpage is very interesting. Is the squidoo lens ranking higher today? I do believe so…
Scott
How can anyone compare Squidoo and HubPages? Squidoo is light years ahead of HubPages
That’s really interesting about the first 24 hours. I just created some new lenses and a hubpage about my chosen topics, so they jury is still out on those. Thanks!
Thanks for running these comparisons. I read that Google reformulated their SEO algorithm early this year. Did you do your test after that point?
I’ve done some light work on Squidoo, wrote quite a few Hubs, and have started building Squidoo lenses again.
To me, it seems easier to get a Hub ranked than a Squidoo lens. With that said, I do like the flexibility that Squidoo offers (post Panda) to monetize via affiliate marketing functionality (Amazon, eBay, etc.).
Thank you for the post!
Cool thanks. I am currently doing some reading about both squidoo and hubpages.
Seems hubpages ranks better but takes a while to get your links to be dofollow (you need 75 hubpoints which you accumulate by writing articles and participating in forums) but the rewards might be well worth the effort!
Both of these sites encourage uniqueness and quality so if you have lens at squidoo or hubpage at hubpages it still is very useful as a backlink. These links are very strong in nature.
Seems hubpages ranks better but takes a while to get your links to be dofollow (you need 75 hubpoints which you accumulate by writing articles and participating in forums) but the rewards might be well worth the effort!
I tried squidoo and I got a link but nothing else. I must say that I probably could have put in more effort. I have seen many hubpages in search results and I put up my first one today. My own experiment begins now.