HUGE – hubpages will be moving all of it’s authors to their own subdomain, to counter the inpact of Panda: Source
You can move all your stuff over to your own subdomain today, manually, or wait till they do it automatically. I advise moving over ASAP.
The steps are simple:
- Log into hubpages
- Go to your profile
- Edit it
- Go to the tab ‘subdomain’
- Follow instructions under ‘subdomain’ in the sidebar
You get the subdomain of your username, so those of us who picked one with a keyword have an added bonus. I’m at: http://spirituality.hubpages.com/
[edit]Of course the hubs will get new URLs but the old ones will redirect to the new URLs. [/edit]
You will have to change your Google Analytics account information:
- Log into your Google Analytics account
- Go to your Hubpages account
- Add a new profile (on the right, don’t click through to your stats), select ‘add a profile for a new domain’.
- Add the subdomain, in my case: spirituality.hubpages.com - in general it will be yourusername.hubpages.com
- Follow instructions
- It will give you new GA code to put on your site: on that page you’ll also find the GA code for your subdomain in the from of ‘UA-1111111-2′
- Go to your Hubpages account
- Go to ‘Earnings’ > ‘Affiliate settings’ > ‘Reporting Settings’ > configure Google Analytics
- It will take a while before GA picks up on the change. Change things now: summer is a low season in most niches anyhow. You want things in place well before traffic start picking up for Halloween and Christmas.
All in all I’m very glad with this move by Hubpages. It will help people who have good content on the site: they will have their own subdomain, so their own content determines your ‘trust’ rank but you will still have the advantage of the hubpages directory and tag structure to get your pages ‘internal’ links.
Another way to explain this is that this is a bit the way it works at blogspot: there are a lot of spammy and semi-spammy blogger blogs out there, yet individual blogs rank very well. The content in one subdomain is not impacting the ‘trust’ of blogs on other subdomains.
Similarly this will help hubs by one author avoid being penalized by the low quality hubs by other authors on hubpages. The best will rank better, the worst will no longer rank better than they deserve (at it certainly did pre-panda) because it’s on a generally trusted site.
Instead each author will have their own site and with that their own ‘trust’ imparted by Google, based on their link profile and content.
Note: this post was made possible partly by my Google+ friends.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Now I want to change my username! This is great info.
Thanks for the info, especially the reminder to update google analytics. I’m anxious to watch my visits graphs regain their upward trend!
I see three unfortunate side effects of this update:
1) Google page rank is determined independently, not only for each top level domain, but also for each sub-domain; so these sub-domain hubs will no longer benefit from the high page rank of the main site
2) In the same boat as above, high quality hubs will no longer be hurt by low quality hubs because they’ll be on different sub-domains, which Google will treat as different sites; but high quality hubs will no longer be helped by other high quality hubs written by other authors
3) Google is going to be confused for a bit as to where the hubs went, and even with proper redirect techniques, I expect the position of the hubs in search engines to fluctuate for some time after the update
This update basically eliminates the value of using a writing site like Hubpages, by limiting the amount of authority given to new hubs based on the site’s authority. Each account at Hubpages is going to be much more like a blogger blog now, not benefiting from the authority of the site as a whole.
Pagerank of a domain is totally unimportant and the pagerank of your articles is not going to change one bit from this update, because all the links TO your hub will stay in tact.
And with Panda it’s clear that hubpages no longer had all that much trust on it’s domain anyhow, so there is no issue with losing it.
The main advantage of writing on a site like hubpages is:
- ease of use
- ability to write about anything, with no worry about your site branding (avoiding of course certain no-no topics).
- backlinks from a reasonably reputable domain (not a high quality one any more, but still a reasonably reputable domain)
If you have the skills to create your own sites and get the same kind of traffic to them and monetize them as well: by all means go ahead. That’s the direction I’m moving in personally. However, I find that there are still topics to write about that don’t fit the sites I own. Hubpages, Wizzley and Squidoo are great sites on which to write on such topics.
This sounds good except one thing — all my links to those hubs are not bad, right? I’ve got to hunt down each and every one and change them? I’m reeling, just thinking of it. Any tips for making it easier? They are scattered on my blogs, lenses, wizzes, and assorted guest posts.
Oh, I’m hugely relieved! I found here that the old hub links will automatically redirect. I can’t say how happy I am.
I would never have recommended doing this if they weren’t redirecting the old URLs to the new ones. However, I should have mentioned it.
The only reason I said to change the links is that redirected links are not as powerful as normal links, so in the long term it’s better for your hubs if you link to them directly. However, in the mean time Hubpages does the redirecting for you as you noted.