Squidoo and Hub Pages

[Greenline]

I think squidoo is still an excellent free resource but in my experience it is not as effective as it was say 6 months ago which is a great pity lenses do not seem to rank as high as they once did regardless of how frequently you update them it is still worth using but the honeymoon period is over i feel.

[genuwine4532]

I agree with that, if you look through some of the lenses they are filled with nothing but sales adds, and spam. Squidoo does not monitor or have guidelines for the content so anyone can post anything. 2 of my lenses had disappeared COMPLETELY from the search results, and then came back but lower than page 1 where they used to be.
BUT
I will tell you that if you join the groups on Squid and especially the top 100 (and there is a group for every possible topic) and also join the Isle of Squid (directory) then you get backlinks for your squid lens and rank goes up, PLUS
there is a strong network there and you get a lot of traffic on your lenses, and comments, which really helps to rank better. I found that since I joined like 50 groups my traffic has tripled on my lenses and I got a couple of sales.

HUB pages on the other hand, monitors the content with strict rules, regarding excess of affiliate links and salesy content, they also give each HUB a score dependent on amount of content. Google still favors and ranks HUB pages high because the content is much higher quality overall than Squid.
Also it is a very tightly knit community on the user end.
The key to HUB pages is to write HUBS as if you are talking to family, and NOT selling something, I usually only put 1 affiliate link at the bottom after I have given lots of helpful information.
ALSO reading other hubs and becoming a fan of those and leaving comments for them results in others going to your hubs and doing the same and that increases traffic to your hubs and helps with the serps.

[frugalwench]

I started out on HubPages, and still have some stuff there, although I'm slowly moving all my website related stuff to my site, and doing personal stuff on Hubpages. They've made a lot of changes lately that simply killed my adsense earnings, so I've basically started pulling out all my SEO and affiliate stuff. I was making most of my money from my hubs, because they get really good traffic. I stay on, and link to them from my other Web 2.0 sites because you can do an affiliate referral thing with them, and if anyone signs up from your link, you can still get paid. I don't like the look at HubPages much, and the functionality in formatting articles is very limited. I never made a cent from my Amazon on HubPages, but I never optimized it. A lot of people complained about making no money from Amazon on their hubs. Unless you write a hub on a particular product, and optimize your affiliate links, it isn't going to make you any money. There are a few people on there who make a couple hundred a week on hubs that are optimized for a product.

I also just joined Squidoo, and did a lens there. I got a good response, and I'm learning a lot about CSS there, since you can use it to build your lens. I've really enjoyed my Squidoo experience more than my Hubpages one. I really haven't tried to optimize it yet, so I'm not making any money, but I've played with it awhile, and I'm thinking it's a good thing. I like the fact that you can use the HTML and CSS to format your lens modules. Like I said, I'm new there, but I've already seen some traffic to my main site from Squidoo, so I'm going to stay.

Remember, any traffic is better than no traffic. There are people who are loyal to both, and you aren't going to get their traffic unless you go where they are. Don't turn away from Squidoo because you don't know HTML. You can use the tools they have, and still get traffic due to your content. Like anything else, you have to work some to get the traffic.

I think actually, that Google turns away from Squidoo because of all the affiliate stuff on there, but again, if you have good content, Google will definitely pick you up. My one lens on Squidoo was on page 1 on Google two weeks after I built it, and all I did was register the page with Google.

Google is changing, looking more for good content, it seems, and this can't be anything but good for those of us who are building content related sites. So it doesn't matter where you put your content, as long as it's good content, and you work to get some traffic.

Make sure to not rely on just the HubPages and Squidoo traffic, but register those sites with each search engine individually. I've found it really helps with ranking if you register each page of your site, not just your homepage.