New HubPages Sites Launching Soon
Featured on the Landing Page for the Beauty Hub?
It's so omnipresent on HubPages I guess they'll want to give it a prominent spot on the new Beauty site as well!
Hey watch it, bucko! That pepper sandwich cured my cancer!
All joking aside, IIRC, that article has plenty of comments with people basically saying "no need for chemotherapy, eat this pepper sandwich instead!" It's dangerous, IMHO.
On another note, sorry if I missed it in this long thread, but was the "ring" portion of "TatRing" ever explained? I don't get it. But I am definitely not a member of the site's target market, so I guess it doesn't matter if I understand the name or not.It's another term for a piercing like earring, tongue ring, belly ring, etc.
Whatever you do or go, Mark, I wish you all the best. I will always treasure your Blue Katsina.
Actually, looks to me the vast majority of Hubbers are fine with this. Am looking forward to a fun and possibly even prosperous 2016.It has been a hell of a long time since I was a 'hubber', and the site has changed radically since I was here in pretty much every way (rules, staff, members, design), but I've followed this place a bit since I departed and their various attempts to recover from Panda. Its a really interesting case study because I can't think of any other site which is reasonably publicly transparent in their attempts to recover, probably because most have given up.
I really hope that this change works out for hubpages. It feels like it is make or break for the site, its probably all going to boil down to how good the editors are at ensuring that they select only the highest quality content and don't allow any complete rubbish to slip through the net.
A huge problem that I think Hubpages currently has is that they'd really struggle to define their current purpose in a sentence. Just before I quit this site I really gave a lot of thought to that question. "A place where can people can write stuff to try and make money" is effectively how they would currently define themselves.
From an external perspective it is easy to see why people would struggle to understand what value it adds to the internet or their lives, save for the odd occasion that they are looking for a specific piece of information on Google and chance by a helpful page which solves their problem or satisfies their curiosity. As somebody who searches for stuff on Google a ridiculously number of times per day, I can tell you that this doesn't happen too often these days.
When you are a content creator earning $3000 a month and an algorithm update bumps you down to $1500, then $750, then $500, and you are looking at the situation with a highly vested interest, it is easy to shout about how evil Google are destroying livelihoods and small businesses.
But when you look at things from an outsiders perspective they had a point about doing away with what was termed as "content farms", because they existed for just one purpose, and that was to grab search traffic to generate ad revenue, they were self-serving. They existed solely for the benefit of the author, not the consumer.
Niche sites can, if they are done right, be a completely different proposition. If you have a site about tattoo and piercings, and somebody who is well into tattoos and piercings (does Relache still write here?), they will visit the site and probably stay around and look at the other content, possibly even bookmark it, follow it on twitter and facebook, perhaps even decide they want to add some content to it.
Hubpages can define itself simply as: "A business operating a network of specialised information websites". There you go, a reason for existence.
And every single niche site has its own reason for existence, and people who may value it. I'm assuming that Hubpages also intends to create social media profiles for each niche? As this would be a huge opportunity missed if they don't, I've seen examples of some really successful sites recently which obtain 60%+ of their traffic from social media, this change shouldn't be all about whether you can escape Google panda but also how the site can diversify its traffic sources.
At this moment in time literally nobody thinks "I fancy looking at some tattoos, I'm going to hubpages". And literally nobody follows hubpages on social media on the strength of a great article about tattoos they read, and then wants to see their next post sharing an article on Auschwitz in their feed.
From an SEO perspective though, I'm really surprised that you are creating these sites on brand new hand regged domains with a 1 year registration period. Would have thought you'd have allocated a small budget to domain acquisition, and registration length of new domains is well known to be a proven consideration of Google in how to treat a site. Will surely be a period where the domain has to gain authority and trust irrespective of the redirects.
Contributors to this site should be excited by the prospect of niche sites if executed correctly and hubpages broader strategy moves away from simply existing to game Google, that is so 2011.
For Hubpages though this shouldn't be simply about starting afresh to try and escape panda, they really need to push social media for each site to diversify their traffic. That's going to be a big labour intensive challenge assuming that there are going to be dozens of sites, each of which need their own social media profiles managed by the hubpages office.
As an aside, hello to anybody who was here back in the day and remembers me, doesn't look like many of youYes, excellent analysis, ryanpugs. Maybe you can get a resume to HP and offer your consulting skills?
I learned a lot just reading the broader picture you've presented. Thanks for the cogent presentation.
That is excellent news!! Thank you.
