Hubpages vs Panda

Has Hubpages found the answer?

When Google launched its major algorithm update known as 'Panda', its goal was to remove low quality content from the upper levels of the search engine results.

They publicly stated that they were looking to devalue "content farms" - sites that flood the net with large volumes of low volume writing.

Overnight, my content there was hammered in terms of both page views and eCPM. Hubpages went from being a tidy little earner (as well as an easy source of PR 2 backlinks) to a waste of time.

I had used Hubpages on a semi-regular basis to build backlinks and get new sites indexed quickly and was able to earn over five times my hosting and domain costs each year. Following the Panda update, page views plumetted and the motivation to add more content to the site was removed.

Thankfully all improved just as quickly as it deteriorated. The decision by Hubpages management to move all authors to subdomains meant that your work was rated on its own merits and not brought down by the hundreds of others publishing content that was residing firmly in the spam end of town.

The result was a restoration in the rankings of original, quality content and no benefit to rubbish and spam.

I will wait to fully evaluate the change when a full calendar month has passed but the initial results show a return to pre-Panda levels and if the trend continues, Adsense revenue should be at record levels for me within the next month.

Things are looking up.

If you are yet to try hubpages, click here.

Time to start your own website

The recent algorithm updates by google have simplified the often asked question: "When is it time to start my own site?"

Years ago is the preferred answer but if you are yet to get started, the time is now.

Why?

In the past, the easiest way for a beginner to get traffic was to join one of the many revenue sharing websites such as Squidoo and Hubpages. These sites give you the chance to earn online without spending any money at all. They publish your content and take care of many of the technical aspects in return for a percentage of the advertising revenue earned from your writing. They were seen as high authority sites by the search engines and features such as their internal linking structure made it easier to get your writing onto the first page of the search results.
The advantage was so significant that paying 40 -50% of your potential earnings was a very good deal for you.

50% of a lot was much better than 100% of nothing.

Over time, google noticed that a high percentage of the top results for many search queries came from this type of website and they were not entirely happy with the quality of the content, much of which was only written to rank highly and produce advertising revenue. They publicly declared war on "Content Farms" in early 2011 with the Panda Update.

So, what now?

Firstly, absolute beginners should still use these "content farms" to gain an introduction to writing online and to learn basic SEO techniques. They can also be use by more experienced people as a free way of testing a niche before investing in your own site. I still recommend Hubpages for this purpose.

Secondly, as soon as you have identified a niche with potential, start your own site.

Why?

Domains and hosting are both cheap and getting cheaper. Using a bit of common sense, it is not hard to break even with a single site. Making a little money is easy. Making a lot becomes much harder.

EXAMPLES:

Looking back over my last year of domain name registrations I find I bought 7 domains:

2 x .com
3 x .net
2 x .org

Assuming these domains were bought for one years registration only they would average out at $10 / year.
Hosting for an unlimited number of sites cost me just under $8 / month. The same plan can now be had for less than $6.50 - (see the Baby Plan here.)

The total expendture to run 7 different sites for one year is $166 ($13.83 / month)

That actually sounds like a fair bit of money, but as even the weak sites contribute to the total it is easy to recoup.

Ignoring affiliate sales and only looking at Adsense revenue:

In the last 3 months:

The best performing site made $41.84 ($13.94 / month)

The worst performing site made $0.00 (only 3 posts - forgot about that one!)

The average monthly adsense return from all sites combined is $22.16

This is a profit of $8.33 / month.

As my goal from Adsense is to cover costs this is a good result - especially considering that 4 of the seven have less than 5 posts. I have been lazy but chose keyword rich domain names in a niche I understood in terms of both content and competition.

There is a lot of room for development of these sites to increase their current affiliate sales of around $110 / month.

Every since the google Panda Algorithm change, these self hosted domains have been doing particularly well. As an added bonus, these sites build value over time and can be sold in the future.

My Summary:

• I use Market Samurai to identify niches, domains and assess competition (see this post)


• I use Wordpress.org to run my sites.


• I monetize with Adsense to cover costs and affiliate sales to earn the bulk of my profits.

If you haven't made the leap yet the time is now. For those not sure how to build a site using Wordpress, see Basic Steps To Make A Wordpress Site.

Backlinking Post Panda - My Results

The latest google algorithm change was designed to weed out "low quality content" and as such should have decreased the value of many manual backlinking sites.
Whenever plans like this rely on mathematical equations the desired effects are always variable.
I like to review my own data and so I had a quick look at my last 30,000 adsense impressions and had a look at which revenue sharing sites had performed the best.
I don't mind using these sites as a way to get my latests posts quickly indexed and my goal is for them to pay both my monthly hosting costs plus my domain name registration fees.

Note: I am including only basic, short length bookmarking sites used for backlinking. I am excluding article length sites that also backlink such as Hubpages.

The results:

#1: Best-reviewer.com : Accounted for 4.1% of revenue. Surprisingly strong performance, particularly from a site that is relatively new. Clicks tend to be of good value.

#2 Shetoldme.com : Made 0.75% of revenue. I haven't added anything new here for a while but existing posts are still sneaking into search results and bringing income.

#3: Excerptz.com : Accounted for 0.1% of income. Not a bad return considering I have only made 3 posts there. Probably worth more effort. Again a new site. Is there a bias against recognized 'content farms' by google?

No revenue:

Snipsly.com - Still good value for backlinking as it lets you choose your anchor text, lack of revenue not a real concern.
Xomba.com - no longer used as backlinks become no-follow after a short period of time.

Reference Score:

To put this in perspective, Hubpages accounted for 19.3% of revenue with around 100 hubs contributing. It took a massive hit initially with the Panda update but is beginning to bounce back.

My thoughts? - Like any change in the algorithm, some sites are more affected than others. Future changes are difficult to predict so diversification is important.

Backlinks - Relative Value

Google uses PageRank to assign relative value to backlinks - the higher the PageRank, the greater weighting the backlinks have. That's SEO 101.

Manually created backlinks are generally on low PR sites. This makes them of much less value than a single backlink from a site with serious authority.

Of course, there are many more factors that go into Google's algorithm, but if you are going to be creating backlinks to your site it is good to know the advantages and disadvantages of each. Given the recent Google algorithm change, every little bit of optimization will help.

Here are my views on a number of the more common backlinking sites:

SheToldMe.com: I still use this site especially to get new work indexed quickly. The residual revenue from shetoldme pays for around half of my monthly expenditure on domains and hosting etc, making it a handy part of the overall picture.

Xomba: I used this a lot initially but basic bookmark-style entries become no-follow after a short period seriously limiting their value. I may consider it again in the future for article length content but it is on the backburner for now.

Best-Reviewer.com: Time is money so I use this site more than most. You get to choose the number of links per entry so it is great if you are focusing your writing in a niche. For example, by doing a "Top 3 Reasons Justin Bieber Kicks Ass" entry you can link to three different Justin Bieber sites.

Snipsly.com: The biggest advantage of this site is that it is Do-follow and lets you choose your own anchor text (unlike all of the above). Wordpress users will recognize the user interface and find it simple to backlink. If you know the link itself has little weight, maximizing the anchor text adds value. Anchor text is going to hold value and likely increase its weight in future google revisions.

Excerptz.com: This site started by a prominent Hubpages user gives you the same wordpress interface and ability to choose your own anchor text making it a better than average use of time for manual backlinking.

For a new site I would backlink from SheToldMe and Xomba to aid indexing as well as using the next three sites to add more links including my anchor text.
For each new post I use Snipsly, Best-Reviewer and Excerptz and also take the opportunity to add links to my other sites in the same niche. If I don't have any, I link to some of my articles that also link to my primary site such as Hubpages or Squidoo.

With a bit of practice each of these sites takes only 5 minutes to create links to two or three locations.

Remember that if you are going to both with manual backlinking, choosing the anchor text is the way to get the most out of your work.

Backlinking Site Taking Off.

About 4 months ago I wrote a brief post about a new backlinking site from the team that developed SheToldMe.com (see here). 

Because of their good track record, I was happy to get in at the ground floor and and submit a couple of test posts to see what happened.

Like all new sites it took a while to get indexed and start generating a regular stream of organic traffic. The teething period is now over and my backlinks submitted to the site have all been indexed, get regular views, and are also generating income through the adsense sharing arrangement. Some clicks have been worth more than $2 so I have been happy with the quality as well.

As I tend to write on a limited number of niches the 'Top 3' or 'Top 10' format suits me well as I can backlink a whole group of my articles or sites in one brief submission. 

After 4 months of testing I can now give best-reviewer the thumbs up as a good use of 5  minutes for backlinking and as a source of residual income.

Missing the Point

I have been looking back at my referrals to various sites and one thing quickly becomes clear. The vast majority of beginners using self-backlinking sites are not doing it correctly.

Referrals are good for two reasons:

1) You gain a chance of earning additional revenue from a referral user without costing them anything. Your "cut" comes from the hosting sites share, not theirs. As this is the industry standard, it lets you promote good sites honestly and ignore the rest.

2) You learn about internet behaviour.

As an example I will look at my referrals from SheToldMe.com

SheToldMe is a simple Adsense revenue sharing site that offers DoFollow links. It only takes 30 seconds to submit a link, so (as far as manual link submission goes) it is as easy as it gets.

The site is very user friendly so I was surprised when I looked back at my referral stats.

More than 70% of sign ups had not submitted a single bookmark. All they had done was to complete their user profile and include their websites URL in this. This is a waste of time as a DoFollow link to the site listed in the profile is only included next to a bookmarking entry you make. Zero bookmarks = zero links.

Obviously the more links you submit the more exposure your site gets but if you don't submit any the exercise is pointless.

I would never expect 100% of referrals to work out any system but a failure rate greater than 70% was surprising.

If you have yet to use SheToldMe for backlinking or to help get a new site indexed, do us both a favor and click here, but do it right!

Basic Steps to Make A Wordpress Site

When I decided to make my first site using my own domain and paid hosting, I quickly settled on Wordpress as the way to go. Everywhere I looked Wordpress was recommended but when it came down to working out the steps to actually getting a site up and running, I found clear information more difficult to find.

There were plenty of sites that had individual steps in minute detail but as I didn't understand the point of each step it was difficult to comprehend.

The following is my summary of what you need to do to publish a site. The specific details may change between different Domain Registrars and Hosting companies but if you understand where you are in the overall process it will help make it easier.

The Steps:

1) Buy a domain name. I now use Namecheap.

2) Buy a hosting plan. I use the Baby Plan by Hostgator that gives me unlimited domains, disk space and bandwidth. This means I can start as many new sites as I want with the only expenditure being domain name registration.

3) Link your domain to your hosting. To do this, log on to your Domain Registrars site and change the DNS server details to those provided by your hosting account. This step essentially ensures that anyone who types in your domain name will be directed to where your content is situated. If your domain registration and hosting is from the same company they will simplify this step or do it for you. I choose to use different companies as my research indicated that in the unlikely event of a dispute between you and the companies you deal with, you lack bargaining power if one company has all of your eggs in their basket.

4) Install Wordpress on your site. To do this, log on to your hosting account - you want access to the "c-panel" and once there you look for a program called Fantastico. Fantastico is an application that does all the hard work loading other programs onto your site. Find Wordpress from the available list and load it to your site. Any detail you enter such as User name and Password keep a record of as you are going to need them.

5) You can now begin to add content to your site. Log on to the Wordpress interface by entering the following into your web browser:

http://www.yourregistereddomain.com/wp-admin

Enter the User name and Password you chose during the Fantastico set up process and you are now able to add content to your new site.

How to make the most of Wordpress is a much bigger topic but it is a forgiving platform and I recommend diving in and experimenting.

Note: Using wordpress with your own domain and hosting (wordpress.org) is different to using the free blog hosting at wordpress.com (similar to Google's Blogger that is hosting this site) where your options are limited and you cannot use Adsense to monetize your site.