I'm planning a marketing strategy to drive traffic to a squeeze page for an affiliate product. One of the avenues I want to try is the creation of pages with one of these sites. (Or both is smarter?) Has anyone tried both or really love one or the other? Are they pretty much the same so it doesn't matter which I pick? I can't tell from reading their fluff...
I would do both, that's what I do. Why not double the potential traffic? As far as which works better, I think hubpages is better. I found that I get ranked in google faster than squidoo. For instance, one of my recent campaigns I got to the second page of google within an hour or two for my desired keyword. While squidoo didn't show up at all. I think I could have got a higher ranking, but I didn't do that great a job of creating the hubpage. It was just hastily thrown together.
Definitely do both. I like Squidoo more, personally. Nice community and overall, that site is not as communistic about what your content is like (you can be as self promotional as you want). I find Hubs to be very difficult to rank, with the opposite for Squidoo lenses. They're also not as good looking.
I personally like Squidoo better. It has a lot of different module options and it's easier to keep it high in the search engine ranks. You just have to update it frequently to keep your place in the serps. One way to do this is to add tags and republish it.
Thats exactly the way I feel. Try to get traffic in as many different ways as possible and when experimenting with these different "ways", for example, like this one, submit to every site you can so you can fully understand what works and what does not for your site.
One more comment - if you want to make adsense revenue, go with Hubpages...it has shared revenue for your Adsense account. That's why I hardly ever make "article-only" pages for Squidoo.
One thing that needs to be considered is that hubpages has nofollow tags. Squidoo if you actually make a quality lense can rank well and pull in lots of traffic. The quality lense can be picked to be featured in groups etc. giving it more backlinks. Better to work on making something that is quality rather than just building a so-so lense and thinking you can just get the backlinks yourself. You can, but it's easier if you actually have a quality lense because then people will build the backlinks for you all the time. Backlinks just start showing up out of nowhere because the lense becomes a suggested lense in the sidebar of other lenses.
Since you're asking to pick one, I won't tell you to go both. My pick between the two: Squidoo. Why Squidoo? Here's the major reason: 1. Google PR (Squidoo homepage PR7; HubPages PR5) Yes, I know many will says Google PR is nothing more than just a plain green bar but that's not true. Google PR shows the number of quality links point to a site and with a better PR, you're giving a better boost on your website's backlinks indirectly. Further more, do remember than most links on HubPages are NoFollow. 2. Interactivity Grouping, lens of the day rewards, lensroll, links plexo - all these enable you to promote your Squidoo page (a lens!) easier internally. HubPages seems less happenings in contrast (unless your page is so good that it got featured!) 3. Traffics Amount This is the main reason why Squidoo meant a lot to us as webmarketers. Squidoo's relative new, but yet, its traffics volume is huge according to Alexa. At the time of writing, it hits the 1500 reach per million spot. HubPages on the other hand looks less attractive with just about 750 reach per million. (Check on diagram, that's 50% of what Squidoo have!) And, for the less important issue. 4. User friendly Personally, I think Squidoo is easier to be used and the design looks much better than HubPages. But that's for me - it might varies for you. 5. Google's love (A tied between HubPages and Squidoo!) The only thing that I see HubPages come close is on Google ranking. Squidoo lenses or Hub Pages are both prefered by Google - and will be indexed and ranked by them very soon.
Wow! Thanks for all the feedback! It looks from the above that Squidoo wins the recomendation contest with both as probably the real winner overall. So, my plan will be to create lenses that I then modify a little to create again on Hubpages though Squidoo will be home base for creation... Thanks again!
Trying to do what you want to do is only achievable on Squidoo. I'm a BIG fan of both. But HubPages will shut down a page that is only there to drive traffic to another site.
According to my researching experience, Squidoo is better than HubPages for SEO in both Google and Yahoo.
Hi All: I'm the Community Manager over at HubPages, and I thought I'd step in to correct a few misconceptions about HubPages vs Squidoo. The graph shown in a post above is only a rough estimate from Alexa, while Quantcast reports are direct, verified traffic numbers. As you can see from this Quancast graph comparing HubPages and Squidoo, our traffic follows a very similar trend to theirs: Bearing in mind that there are over 4 times the number of lenses on Squidoo as there are hubs on HubPages, you can see that each hub enjoys about 4 times the traffic of each individual lens. We also offer a generous impression-based revenue sharing: revenue from 60% of impressions are solely the user's, while 40% of the impressions are HubPages'. Squidoo offers a 50% share of total revenue. Regarding nofollow, we only apply this to links in hubs with a score below 50 and/or hubbers with a score below 75. It isn't too hard to reach these numbers with original content and a little participation, and helps us ferret out spammers who come in solely to linkdrop without adding anything of benefit to the community. Overall, HubPages rewards quality, unique content that will continue to bring in traffic long-term, and penalizes low-quality and spammy posts. Our standards are fairly easy to meet, but they ensure that we maintain our authority as the leading online publishing ecosystem. For more on the differences between HubPages and Squidoo, see the recent GigaOm article "7 Things We Did To Beat Squidoo" by our Marketing Manager Jason Menayan. Hope to see some of you over at HubPages in the near future! --- Maddie Ruud HubPages.com