Many people use Squidoo and HubPages in their SEO efforts.  In this article, I will present many articles discussing Squidoo and HubPages, their differences, and whether they are worth your SEO time.

If you subscribe to Richard Cummings (which you should do below), you know that I don’t spend much time promoting this particular site.  I write quality articles and let the SEO value come in over time primarily through natural links.   You can read more about this strategy in the article Ranking Your Name in Google which tells you how to simply move your name to the top in the Google listings.

However, with other sites and competitive terms, you need a healthy dose of SEO to have any chance of being highly ranked in the SERPs.  Among many strategies–including article writing, PR Releases, RSS Feeds, blog commenting, bookmarking, etc–one strategy to use is what many refer to as “community pages”, the two most popular of which are Squidoo and HubPages.

I have used these in the past but not to great extent.  Today, I am reevaluating their value as SEO tools and I bring you my research and conclusions.

SEO, Squidoo, and HubPages: Overview

As I wrote in the article SEO and Golf: They Both Look Easy…Until You Try Them, the premise behind generating well-trafficked pages is simple:

1. Create a well-written page using a few select keywords and ensure that the page has solid on page SEO (OPSEO) with the use of proper titles and tagging.

2. Create inbound links to that page using the few select keywords as anchor text.

So, where do Squidoo and HubPages factor into this? Well, by creating popular pages on Squidoo or HubPages and including links back to your web pages on the same topic, you are adding juice to your web pages, and the best kind of juice at that: inbound, contextual links with the anchor text of your choosing. Both Squidoo and HubPages are very Google friendly because, like WikiPedia, they employ tremendous intra-site linking and achieve a solid PageRank and SERP placement quickly.

The end SEO goal here is to create very solid inbound links to your site, fulfilling step #2 above. If you are so inclined, these sites also allow you to make money off your content. A simple search for Squidoo Earnings displays many people who journal of their Squidoo payoffs.

SEO and Squidoo: The Research

With our SEO goals in mind, let’s have a look at my crack research and see what the pundits out there are saying. Each of the links below opens in a new window:

Squidoo for Traffic – Link Building: In this article, Shell Harris declares: “With Squidoo you get an awesome link building resource where you control the anchor text in the link, where the link points to, where it lives on the page and what is written around it.” Shell concludes that Squidoo is essential in your SEO efforts.

Is Squidoo Good for SEO? Likely More Than You Think!: Obviously, the title on this one says it all. Mark Aaron Murnahan declares “I know very well that Squidoo links are valuable for SEO.” Importantly, he notes that your Squidoo pages–or “lenses” as they are called–must be worthy of a visit on their own and not filled with spammy links to your personal pages.

Squidoo SEO uses: In this article, the author discusses Squidoo SEO uses and does some very interesting tests regarding inbound link building to his Squidoo pages.

Using Squidoo For SEO: This article describes how to use Squidoo for SEO purposes and the SEO benefits that you receive. Ironically, this page is on Ezinearticles and not Squidoo.

As you can see, most of these authors feel that the time spent in building Squidoo pages is worth the SEO effort. Now, let’s see what people are saying about HubPages.

HubPages and SEO

Here are some quality articles on how HubPages can be used in your SEO efforts:

How To Use HubPages Hubs For SEO Link building: In this article, Daniel McGonagle claims “If you’re in need of a quality backlink, you really can’t go wrong with HubPages.com “hubs”.”

Hub Pages – the Center of your SEO Universe: In this article, the author explains exactly how he got a certain term to the top by using inlinks from HubPages.

Why I Do not Use HubPages for SEO: This is an article worth reading. It questions not whether the inbound link is worth it, but whether it is worth the time. You need a certain “score” on HubPages to turn your link into a do-follow link and it may, or may not in this case, be worth the time.

Do Squidoo & HubPages Have A Place In Your Law Firm SEO Campaign?: This article asks about using Squidoo and HubPages for a law firm. But, it begs the questions: Can businesses use these platforms to any avail?

HubPages HubRank Minimum to Avoid NoFollowed Links: This article references how, by creating 30 HubPages in 30 days, someone raised the position of their website in the SERPs and also made money. The author then tried to do it.

SEO, Squidoo, and HubPages: Conclusion

As established, SEO is all about creating quality inbound links to quality content.  The reality is that this takes a lot of time. So, we must ask the question: Is creating a Squidoo page or a HubPage worth the time?

I found it interesting in my research that many of the articles returned in my searches came from sources such as Ezinearticles. As a big fan of using article marketing in your SEO campaigns, this is a telling. And, with article marketing, you simply write an article and do not need to “participate” in a community.

However, the links that come from a quality Squidoo page or HubPage cannot be overlooked.  They are simply the best kind of links:  contextual, do-follow (if done right) links. These are so much better than a comment link or a bookmark link that it is not even worth the discussion.

Thus, my conclusion is this. If you spend a lot of time to create a quality web page, you become an authority on that topic. The time it takes to write another article on the same topic with a slightly different keyword focus (use WordTracker to discover new keywords) is definitely worth your SEO time.