HubPages and Squidoo - Waste of time...??

[Easy Cash]

Can someone please enlighten me on these websites?

To me it seems like creating pages on these sites is a waste of time.

Apparently you can't create links to your own sites apart from the Bio boxes.

What are the chances of people looking at these and clicking through to your sites?

Seems like a ton of effort building unique content on someone else's website and having little or no benefit for your own.

Any comments appreciated.

[Michael Lee]

Originally Posted by Easy Cash

Apparently you can't create links to your own sites apart from the Bio boxes.

Squidoo and hubpages are different from article directories. In article directories, you can only promote in the resource box, and most of them don't share adsense revenues with you.

Squidoo allows you to put as many links as you like in your content. So as long as you're targeting the right keywords and giving great content, the search engines will love you and you will get visitors (and customers hopefully).

The same goes for hubpages, but you're limited to 2 links coming from the same domain. And they have stricter standards, so read their policy very carefully.

Squidoo and hubpages allow you to share in the adsense revenues too.

Cheers,
Michael

[kevinw1]

What are the chances? My experience (having built 47 Squidoo lenses) is that 1 in 20 squidoo lenses get substantial traffic (500-1000 visits per week) and can pass on a good chunk of it to the target sites you link to (and as has been pointed out, you can link to wherever you like, however many times you like, on a lens). Other lenses will often just sit there and get 1-20 visits/week. But even those give you a high quality, perfect anchor text, relevant backlink. So yeah they are most definitely worthwhile.

I only have one Hubpage so can't really speak to how well they work. I also have one Knol and that drives traffic, although the backlinks are nofollowed.

[Seattle Mike]

Squidoo and hubpages can get you on the first page in google for long tail keywords. I have built about 60 of them. A few get steady traffic. A few sell the occasional clickbank product for me. I use them as backlinks mostly.

Because I discovered I can get a new page on a new site to also get to the first page for long tails, I have slowed down using them and am building my own sites up. This does cost you the domain name fee. The squidoo and hubpages will usually outrank my website at first but as time goes on your website will go up and squid/hub will tend to fall down.

[SMS]

What about the dreaded Google Sandbox? Doesn't that inhibit the ranking of a new site?

Thanks.

Originally Posted by deverell

...
Because I discovered I can get a new page on a new site to also get to the first page for long tails, I have slowed down using them and am building my own sites up. This does cost you the domain name fee. The squidoo and hubpages will usually outrank my website at first but as time goes on your website will go up and squid/hub will tend to fall down.