Google Panda Update: HubPages Goes From Victim To Victor

As you may know, Google launched its latest iteration of the Panda update early last week. The company confirmed this for us on Friday. Shortly after that, SearchMetrics compiled lists of the top winners and losers. Some were surprising (as usual), and some weren’t.

Perhaps one of the biggest surprises was the placement of Hubpages on those lists. Panda enthusiasts probably recall HubPages getting hit pretty hard by the Panda update, as the company hardly let us forget. CEO Paul Edmondson was very vocal about the whole thing in the aftermath of the Panda massacre. Now, HubPages has made the top winners list.

When asked about his feelings on this, Edmondson told WebProNews, “HubPages has always cared about quality. We’ve done a tremendous number of things to highlight the best of HubPages. Our internal metrics now show significant redistribution of traffic to higher quality pages.”

While being vocal about Panda, as mentioned, Edmondson had called out Google in the past for treating its own YouTube property differently, despite YouTube and HubPages having similar models in acceptance of user-generated content – each with its fair share of lesser-quality content. YouTube was actually the top winner this time around too, per SearchMetrics’ data.

You may also recall Edmondson’s idea to implement subdomains across the site, as to separate content from other content on an author-by-author basis.

When asked about the main factors he thinks turned things around with this latest update, Edmondson said, “HubPages has a tremendous amount of high quality content. Stuff that is so good that they’re labors of love. We concentrated on giving the best content the best opportunity.”

He didn’t mention the subdomaining, but the site implemented this back in July, after some testing appeared to indicate that it helped the better stuff rise in search visibility.

It’s really quite interesting that the Panda update was always tied to discussion about content farms, yet with this latest round, sites like eHow, EzineArticles, Suite101, etc. are off the grid, as far as the losers list, and HubPages was even able to become one of the top winners.

Either way, the fact that HubPages was able to do a complete 180 on the Panda scale should give webmasters who have been victimized, a bit of hope. On the other hand, DaniWeb was able to make a 110% recovery before getting slammed again with this update.

There are 4 Comments. Add Yours.

Cory
October 4, 2011 at 7:49 pm

I’m not completely sold on the sub-domain trick yet; I think that they are just banking on the fact that the content looks new and Google is giving it temporary authority because it’s on a sub-domain. Over time, I think they’re just going to devalue it again.
Mike Behnken Personal Trainer
October 7, 2011 at 8:49 am

I tried the subdomains and it had zero affect. Of course my subdomains weren’t completely unrelated and were interlinked quite a bit.

In the case of hubpages, (blogger, wordpress, etc.) I could see it working because each separate subdomain isn’t related to each other and does not link together very much.
careercounselor
October 8, 2011 at 5:31 pm

I just started writing for revenue sharing websites 6 months ago, pretty much during the time of the panda drama and it was a time of confusion for many freelance writers who had been using these content farms for over a year or more.

All in all I think it taught everyone a lesson and Google excercised their dominance and made everyone take notice to the kind of content they were putting on the web.

Having quality content is a move in the right direction. It is important to understand that the web is a ever-changing organism that must stretch and grow, and if webmasters want to last for the long-term they will have to make the necessary adjustments.

The bottom line is advertising dollars and if a site like Hubpages can give a good ROI to businesses trying to get exposure to ad campaigns then Hubpages has the winning formula for doing it.

At the same time writers can benefit if they know how to write content that is compatible to these products and services the advertisers are showcasing on the article pages.
Anamika
October 15, 2011 at 2:18 am

I would say that implementing sub domains to separate content from other content on an author-by-author basis was an excellent idea from HubPages side. When I saw a drop in traffic after the Panda hit on HubPages I was so discouraged but after the sub domain switch my traffic went to more than double of what it was Pre Panda. I have never seen any other revenue sharing site which put consistent efforts to improve and keep the writers happy.