I occasionally publish a page or “hub” on the free content publishing platform called HubPages. There is no editor to submit to for approval. On the other hand, there is no payment, although you can collect a revenue share from Google Ads via an existing Google AdSense account. Also, HubPages now has an in-house advertising platform that allows offers a revenue share.
Essentially, I use HubPages as the place where I publish stuff that doesn’t fit on any of the other websites I write for, or occasionally, to post something that links to content I want to provide a little boost to.
In other words, despite a HubPage Author Rank consistently over 90, I am not a big HubPages users, nor would anyone consider me a power publisher there. You can check out my HubPage Profile if you are so inclined.
HubPages Rise in Google Search Rankings?
What is interesting is not how I do or do not use the HubPages platform, but rather what has happened to the traffic there over the last few months. It seems as if HubPages may be recovering in Google’s rankings.
Like most other content mills, HubPages got hit hard by Google’s Panda algorithm update. One of the interesting things about writing for HubPages is that they allow you to include your Google Analytics information, and thus, get similar analytics to those that you get from your own websites. I noticed a substantial decline in my HubPages traffic when the Google update hit earlier this year. Traffic to my hubs dropped about 50 percent.
Keep in mind that I don’t get a ton of page views at HubPages so this is hardly definitive, but it does match up with what was reported. Lately, however, things have picked back up.
I haven’t published a new hub in a quite a while, so there has been little or no change made by me on my end. Whatever HubPages is doing, however, might be working.
On July 24th, my traffic was at the same reduced level it has been since early this year after the Panda update. On July 25th, traffic increased substantially and has stayed at the new higher level ever since. Traffic has doubled, back to where it was originally. The former high peaks on my analytics graph from March to July are now the low points on the graph since July 25th.
Again, I don’t have enough traffic or hubs to say anything definitive, and it is entirely possible that HubPages overall is still down while my own content has been judged worthy, but the most likely explanation is that whatever HubPages did to “fix” things after the Google search update is working. Either that, or Google changed the algorithm again and HubPages is out of the dog house.
Anyone else have any experience with this? Is there a domain-wide HubPages recovery going on?
Update: Thanks to the reader that pointed out that there was a confirmed update to the Google Panda search algorithm at about the time of my HubPage traffic improvement. Have other HubPages users seen the same improvements in their overall traffic?