Hub Sites?!

Richard,

Can you explain more about your plans for a "hub" site - what you want to build? My guess is that folks don't know if you're talking about a niche authority site, a curated content site, a market portal site, or maybe something else. All of these could be referred to as a "hub site."

In direct answer to your question (and maybe I'm assuming too much), "no" I don't know of any training that is specific to what I think you're asking about. Probably the closest thing I can suggest would be to find some training on content curation - to me at least - that fits the Drudge Report model the closest.

Steve

No, not aware of any, but maybe reading about Facebook's rise to fame, or go and ask the team who created Graphicriver, or Creative Market, and they will most likely point you in the right direction.

From what l have seen thought you need to build a team, site maintance, graphics, Adwords, etc, and have a lot of meetings and be your bank managers best friend, you will probably need him.

Hi Richard...I'm not sure of the context of "hub site". Just to make sure we're talking about the same thing, a "hub site" is an old SEO term from 15 years ago.

In this context, a hub site is similar to an authority site, the main difference is a hub site uses pages that contain lots of links to related sites and pages as opposed to an authority site which generally uses original content/articles of their own.

Both hubs and authority sites are (were?) well-respected by Google. This is generally due to the quality and quantity of links to the hub site, as well as the hub site linking to other quality sites.

I'm not as familiar with how Google feels now about hub sites now as I was a few years ago, but back then Google really liked quality hub sites as Google considered them to be beneficial in helping people find quality resources on the Web.

I would hope that for $997 there would be some "secrets", but basically to build a hub site you want to create pages that are collections of links to quality resources, as well as build quality links to your own pages. I could be wrong, but I would focus on collecting links to resources that Google seems to like too.

An example of a hub site may be one that focuses on WordPress and has pages with things like "best WP plugins for security", "best WP themes", "best resources for writers", etc., where you have pages that link to these things.

Rbowen,

You're talking about building a NEWS AGGREGATION SITE.

Drudge simply writes great headlines and links out to 3rd party sites

Low overhead

Lots of repeat traffic

You can build something similar using a WP theme that was inspired by drudge.

The bigger issue here is traffic.

There's a quick trick that will enable you to get lots of organic traffic using Facebook and other conservative sites

Kurt -

Thanks for such a comprehensive post. At least I have a better understanding of 'hubs'.

I've been researching how to build a hub site for a while now. But I haven't been able to find much - at least not much that's A) really helpful & usable (especially for a rookie) and
B) anything (in the way of a course) that I can afford.

I think I mentioned in an earlier post that I got inspired to look into hub sites after sitting in on a webinar, but the guy was charging $997 for his comprehensive,' take you by the hand & show you over his shoulder' course. I'm sure it's good - but it's way too expensive for this near-broke old, retired guy.

If you happen to come across anything like that, please let me know.

Thanks again,
Richard

Again, I would research how to create an authority site, as the promo (linking) for authority sites will be the same for hub sites.


If I bought the course I'd want to know some tips on finding the best sites to list on hub pages. It should also include tips for what anchor text to use for the links to those pages. Anchor text isn't only important for backlinks to your site, anchor text is also important for the links on your pages that point to other sites.


IMO hub sites have been very under-used in the SEO world over the years. For people that would rather do research finding quality resources than write articles hub sites can be a good alternative.


While a little off topic for this thread, this is related to hub sites...Talking about other content is a great way to create content. Find some great resources for a topic and link to them, telling people about the resource is essentially talking about other folks' content.

Hey Richard,

If by "hub site", you mean "authority site", check out authorityhacker.com. They put out some really great content on the topic as well as a podcast. That should get you well on your way with no out of pocket $.