Why Not Duplicate Content on Squidoo and Hubpages?
Several lenses gave instructions not to duplicate content on Squidoo and HubPages but they never said why. I read the Squidoo and HubPages terms several times and couldn’t find any prohibitions. Tonight, I found a really good reason.
An interview with the HubPages Marketing Manager Jason Menayan noted seven things they did to gain market share against Squidoo. Number 4 caught my attention.
4. We checked all articles for copied content, and applied a score penalty to
those with content already published on the Web (even if they had rights to
republish that content). Those articles with very low scores were not shown to
search engines.
Ack, Ook! For my duplicated content (which I had rights to republish), I decided to remove duplicate versions quickly before the filter caught me.
The question was, “Which one would stay?”
For Best Temecula Wineries, this was a no brainer. The Squidoo page had been up longer, I had promoted it more, and yet the HubPages page had 68 views versus 8 for the Squidoo page. That’s a ratio of 8.5:1 in favor of HubPages.
The decision was as easy for Top 10 Temecula Wines. The Squidoo page was promoted more and yet the HubPages page had 35 views versus 5 for the Squidoo page. That’s a ratio of 7:1.
Moreover, 42% of the traffic came from hubpages.com. See the diagram below for Best Temecula Wineries on HubPages. In contrast, Squidoo hadn’t sent any traffic to my Squidoo pages. So I removed the duplicate content from Knol and Squidoo and those pages became shells of their former selves.
Note: The HubPages FAQ clearly states that copying content already available on the Web will be penalized by lowering the HubScore. I was focused on Squidoo at the time and didn’t bother to read the FAQ until now. Count that as a lesson learned.
Photo courtesy of AckOok
UPDATE: I later learned that the HubPages penalty isn’t nearly as bad as the Google Penalty.