It’s been three years since Squidoo ran aground and our lenses were transferred to HubPages. While I don’t miss the frequent rearranging of deck chairs that SquidHQ required of lensmasters in its last two years, I do miss the revenue and freedom to publish curated lists.
My annual earnings on HubPages have been less than what my typical monthly earnings were on Squidoo, even in its final months. This is mainly because my hubs don’t get anywhere near the amount of traffic they did as lenses and HubPages tightly limits the number of Amazon and other affiliate links.
To make matters worse, you never know when editing a hub will cause that hub to become unfeatured (meaning it won’t be crawled by search engines or featured on other hubs). That’s because editing a hub sends it through the arbitrary quality assurance process where it may get dinged because of a new interpretation of what makes a quality hub, even if it’s been featured for over three years with no issues. This can effectively discourage authors from maintaining their hubs by fixing broken links, adding content, etc…the opposite of what HP staff should want.
So I’m finally doing what a lot of other former lensmasters had been recommending, moving some of my content to my own sites. Not all, only those pages which don’t fit HubPages’ rules, particularly on number of Amazon links, or content that can justify and support being on its own site. Particularly content that I want freedom to format and update how I want without wondering if an edit will cause it to lose featured status.
My first launch of redeployed lenses is the Lost Books List featuring much of the content from my lenses on the TV show Lost. Being a book list, the pages had more shopping links than HP permits and had been unfeatured for a while. I’m a fan of the show that enjoyed watching for new books and researching them for the list so I wanted this to have a new home.
Many of my other hubs will remain on HP. The hubs that are on HP’s niche sites generally do a little better than those on the main site. I may even add new ones there since HP is still a platform to publish stand alone articles on a topic and I tend to get writing ideas on a variety of subjects.
I’m moving another group of lenses/hubs to a new site of my own that I expect to announce soon. And I have a few ideas for other moves.
Unfortunately, several of my hubs will be left to rot in unfeatured or unpublished status. They don’t fit HP’s model and aren’t worth the effort of moving to a stand alone single topic site.
My new course is set and the journey continues…
