HubPages Subdomains Helps Increase Traffic

By Demand Studios Review Editorial

Posted On 9/23/11

We at Demand Studios Review have been keeping a close eye on HubPages since they announced they would introduce subdomains to try and fight the impact Google Panda has had on their traffic. It is a move that no other big name Panda victim has tried.

Google’s Matt Cutts contacted HubPages CEO Paul Edmondson to advise him on how he might be able to improve the site and get its traffic back to pre-Panda levels. One of the main pieces of advice he gave Edmondson was to try subdomains, which could split up content across the site into different categories.

While Google usually recommends using subdomains to separate out different topic based categories, HubPages has chosen to separate their content by authors. This makes sense for a user-generated website like HubPages. The theory is that strong writers won’t be pulled down by weaker ones. The better writers will still benefiting from the high page rank and large number of backlinks enjoyed by HubPages as well. 

There has been much debate as to the long term viability of using subdomains in this fashion. Some wondered if it would work at all. The grand experiment so far seems to be yielding some positive returns.

Traffic is still nowhere near pre-Panda levels. It is slowly but surely growing however. When we look at the other big name Panda victims at the website Pandalized we see that even just as light uptick in traffic is nothing to sneeze at, to say the least. Demand Media’s own eHow is still plateauing along in the basement after being given the Panda slap.

A site like eHow would probably have a harder time utilizing subdomains in this way, but it might not be a bad idea to place all the user-submitted eHow articles under its own subdomain.

The other side of the coin is, of course, that bad writers won’t be helped by switching to a subdomain. They will see their traffic remain in the basement and in fact may even see a decrease in hits. We still recommend any HubPages writers reading this to switch over to subdomains. It should give you a reality check if nothing else. If your traffic drops or stays at post-Panda levels, it means your writing probably isn’t up to par.

There are many factors when it comes to ranking well on Google, so you may just need to write more articles, utilize better SEO tactics and start building backlinks to your articles.

Even if your traffic improves you should start looking elsewhere for freelance writing income. HubPages is a great place to build links - provided you’ve got the right scores or else the links will be no follow instead of do follow - while earning a bit of extra cash on the side.

But we can’t be sure if HubPages will ever fully recover, and you’re better off writing for private clients, upfront pay sites like Demand Studios, or setting up and maintaining your own blogs and websites. Or, better yet, do a combination of all those things.

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