How To Use HubPages Hubs For SEO Link building

This post will discuss how and why you want to incorporate hubs into your seo and link building portfolio/strategies.

If you’re in need of a quality backlink, you really can’t go wrong with HubPages.com “hubs”.

• These hubs tend to achieve PageRank pretty easily
• They can produce DoFollow backlinks with a high enough hub author score (75 last I heard)
• It’s scalable (you can create unlimited amounts of hubs)

With HubPages you create “hubs”, which is a good name for these types of pages and a good concept to explore in your overall SEO and Link Building strategies.  The term hub means center of activity which is what authority sites are… To be a hub, or to be an authority means you need to be talking about/linking to not just yourself but others as well, much like WikiPedia does.  Selfishly hoarding your links and limiting them to just internal on-site links doesn’t show the search engines you’re an authority, it merely depicts your site as an “island”.

HubPages hub -making features:

 

 

When you create a hub you can link to other related hubs quite easily.  Some hub layouts do this for you automatically and some layouts require you to do it manually.  As mentioned above, linking to other related sites shows the search engines that you’re hub-like in nature with your linking and is conducive to being deemed more of an “authority” because of this cross-linking, other-linking pattern.

 

The picture on the left shows Related Hubs that were automatically inserted/displayed and while this isn’t the REAL SEO boost that makes your hub score well, it definitely is one of the factors that makes hubs rank well with minimal effort.

NOTE: I still get some Google alerts alerts for when my name is mentioned somewhere on the internet and a good portion of these alerts are coming from when my hubs get displayed on others hubs in the Related Hubs section of their hubs.

Therefore, it stands to reason that the more hubs you have, the more mentions you’ll get, and this leads to more traffic for your hubs.  However, the traffic you can expect from displayed Related Hubs is minimal but it’s also free backlinks from other hubs, which leads to easier rankings for the hubs themselves.

 

HubScores:  Some things to be concerned about here….

You need a hub author score of 75 or above to have your outbound links on your hub to be DoFollow, and this is really the main reason why you’d want to build a hub in the first place; to get a high quality, decent Page Rank Dofollow backlink.

 

 

However, scores are given based on quality of content, layout (linking to other hubs), and the amount of traffic that the hub gets.  Sometimes your hub’s score will go down despite great content and there are 2 ways to increase your hub score

 

1- Write more content for a quick boost via hub re-assessment

2- Drive more traffic to the hub via article marketing and link building

The issue here with making Hubs is that you have to write a mini-site’s worth of content and/or do some link building to get it a steady amount of traffic, and that can be  a lot of work just for ONE quality backlink.

Since it’s easy to fall into the trap of writing continuously to a hub to keep the score up, you have to consider whether or not you want to devote all this time just to get ONE backlink from it.

So you need to ask yourself if you want to make robust hubs to get their scores up, or send continued direct traffic to them for hub score boosting and maintaining the DoFollow backlinks obtained from these hubs back to your money sites.

Even if you do create robust hubs with 4-5 content pieces, you’ll still need some traffic in order to maintain the hubscore and dofollow link attributes, so read this article on how to use Unique Article Wizard to see how I get a steady flow of backlinks and direct traffic to my hubs and other Web 2.0 properties.

Using Hubs for link building:

Now, there’s more to making hubs than getting 1-3 backlinks from your hub content.

RSS – You can add links in your hubs to RSS feeds from related sites, whether they be your money sites, other hubs you made on similar topics, other Web 2.0 properties etc…

There’s an expression,”a rising tide lifts all boats” so when you focus on building up the authority of your hubs and they’re linking to several other web entities optimized for similar terms, the authority of the hubs acts like a rising tide that boosts or merely just solidifies the SEPRs of the other entities linked to from these hubs.

Twitter - You can Tweet your hub content to Twitter to help it get indexed faster.  Read about Twitter link wheels to understand how you can get even more backlinks automatically to your websites.

But do you really want to go to all this effort to develop one single solitary backlink?

As mentioned above, a hub is good for linking to more than just one website and can be used to link to several web properties form jus tone hub.

• One solid hub linking to your other hubs lifts those “boats”
• Several hubs linking to your sites’ RSS feed and pulling displaying that RSS content leads to more links and direct traffic to those sites.
• The more hubs you have, you larger your web influence becomes, and the easier it gets for your other hubs to rank well and for your main sites to develop link juice.

So don’t think of a hub as something you’ll work on to create 1-3 decent Dofollow backlinks.  Think of them as entities you’ll want to develop to create link building portals/spheres of influence.

Due to my link building “prowess” I’ve actually gotten some hubs to rank highly for their optimized terms, which wasn’t the goal originally but all the direct traffic and backlinks sent to them caused for some pretty good rankings.

Personally, the next step is to figure out the best monetization strategies for the hubs I build because they’re overtaking some of my money sites in the SERPs…more on that later once I figure out how to best monetize hubs.

NOTE: As the know it all who just left a comment pointed out, there’s a difference between hub AUTHOR score and score of a hub itself, my apologies if I left a word out, which apparently makes entire post “full of wrong information” lol 

 

Hmm This post is almost 100 words… but leave one word out and it’s “full of wrong information eh?