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Is HubPages a Scam or Legit – 2021 Review
Hubpages used to be Suidoo and then they sold to Hubpages.
What Is HubPages
Hubpages is a website which publishes your content. So instead of publishing your content on your website, you can post it on Hubpages which is supposed to get ranked better on the search engines. And from there you can send visitors to your site. But does Hubpages really rank good on the search engines? This is scope of this article.
When trying to get good rankings some people will come across some tips to publish their content on Web 2.0. Web 2.0 are some directories which allow you to publish articles with links back to your site. HubPages is one of these directories.
These kind of tactics used to be effective in the past, but nowadays Google has changed its algorithm and backlinks are not so important as they used to be. So, is it worth publishing articles to Hubpages anymore?
Want to know what really works now to get rankings?
How Does HubPages Work
Here’s how HubPages works in a few steps:
1. Sign up on HubPages and complete your profile.
2. Choose the ads program.
3. Write articles.
4. Earn from the ads and affiliate links you promote in your articles.
HubPages is going to get a percentage of your ads earnings and deposit the other part in your PayPal.
Can You Make Money With HubPages?
One of the ways to make money on HubPages is through ads. Your article are knows with the term “hub”. When you create a hub, ads will appear around it, Adsense ads or Hubpage’s own ads network. You get paid as a percentage of the clicks on those ads from the people reading your hub.
HubPages is partnered with Google Adsense and Amazon’s affiliate program.
The second way you can earn with HubPages is through the affiliate links that you put in your articles. HubPages does not automatically sign you up to Amazon’s affiliate program. You have to sign up directly on these sites and provide them with your HubPages ID.
But the problem is that the earnings of the people who submitted just a few articles on HubPages are next to nothing.
However, someone who has posted thousands of articles through the years on HubPages can see some results.
My Experience with HubPages
I signed up when the site was quite new back then in 2013. I made about $50 with my articles accumulated, most of it was from the HubPages own ads network and from Adsense. The earnings from the Amazon’s affiliate program the earnings were insignificant. I have published 25 articles in three years.
Then I abandoned this method and decided to start my own site, which has worked much better for me.
However, I know that some people have made thousands of dollars on HubPages.
HubPages Success Stories
Back then when HubPages was a new site, a lot of people achieved success, but Google Algorithm changed and a lot of people lost their traffic. They were not earning as much as before the algorithm change, if at all, so all the success stories were vanished, people were not having anymore success with HubPages.
If you search for HubPages success stories on their site you will notice that most of the posts about people who achieved success are from a lot of time ago. The days when most people were drawn to HubPages and when people would earn a lot on HubPages are gone.
Writing for HubPages vs. Writting on Your Blog
As you may have understood from my post till know, I am in favour of wring on your own blog, building a brand and relying on something which is truly yours.
As I mentioned before, after one Google’s algorithm change, people who used to be successful on HubPages are not anymore now. And consider that HubPages is one of the article directories which survived the years. For other similar sites it was so much worse. Google algorithm changes can affect your site too, but you can adapt, while as a writer on HubPages you can do nothing about it. Nothing beats your own content on your own blog.
However, there is also one advantage of writing on HubPages compared to writing on your own blog. When you write on HubPages, you are not constraint to stick to a particular niche, so you can take advantage of any good keyword that you may find. However, while writing on your own blog you have to stick to a niche for brand purposes.
This comes with an opposite argument too: when you write on your own blog you build a brand and you build trust among your visitors as an authority in your niche, someone who knows best about topics on that niche. This is far more important, in my opinion, than being able to write about different niches.
To sum it up, you can achieve much more success with your own blog.
Is HubPages a Scam?
HubPages is marketed as a way for people to make money online and promote their business by giving links to their website from the HubPages articles. Scam is a strong word and I wouldn’t consider HubPages a scam, even thought it has faced a lot of accusations online for being a scam.
I wouldn’t call it outright a scam, but I don’t choose to participate on it. I also don’t like the way that HubPages is marketed, it seems like they are trying too hard to recruit new writers and there are no stories of people who are making money on HubPages these days (in the past it used to be a good opportunity). I found only one story of someone claiming to have success with HubPages in 2019.
For promoting your site, it can be good. Not that your posts are going to reach a high number of traffic, but it can be considered a good way to lead people from your hubs to your site.
While doing my research about weather Hubpages is a scam, I found some reviews of it from the most successful HubPages users and they were saying that it is not a scam. If it is a scam, why would be the users defending it?
To be fair, only a small fraction of their users are making money on HubPages. I think HubPages fails to give users the full information about them: they say nothing to the users about their “nofollow policy“, encouraging users to publish new content on their site and threatening them to reduce the value of the links in their past articles.
Does HubPages Receive Traffic
Here is the traffic which this website gets (SimilarWeb statistics):
And only about 40% of the traffic is from Search:
This is in fact a bad sign because the reason that someone would write on HubPages is to get traffic from the search engines. If there’s so little traffic from the search engines it means that the articles on HubPage are not ranking so well on the search engines. Meaning that someone would be better publishing on their blog, the articles would rank better compared to HubPages. The percentage of traffic from the search engines on my sites is a lot higher than that, close to 90%.
Search engine traffic is better because it is more targeted and it is free, you practically have nothing to do to get traffic if you posts are ranking good on Google and other search engines as they receive organic traffic.
Want to know what really works now to get rankings?
The problem is not solely with HubPages itself. The problem is greatly with Google Adsense. I got an account with them in December of 2017. Because of a lack of clicks over five months, they recently reset my Adsense account and told me to reconnect my HubPages site with my Google Adsense account. I consulted with the HubPages Team on how to do this, and I inadvertently ended up losing my Adsense account altogether because of poor instructions they gave me. In other words, I inadvertently ended up submitting an application for a new Google Adsense account when all I really wanted to do was to connect my HubPages site with my existing Google Adsense account, which apparently no longer exists. I haven’t been banned from Google Adsense, but they have twice told me that I somehow have violations. I don’t know how, because I have the same 15 articles that they so happily praised me for when they first approved my account back in 2017. I’ve only published three new articles since then, and none of them are controversial in nature. I did come across information on Google Adsense that stated that having more than one Google Adsense account was a violation. However, I don’t know what to do to address that issue, because I can’t even click into the tab “account” to check whatever it is that could solve the problem inasmuch as it is grayed out. The HubPages Team has led me around in circles, and I’m getting nowhere with this situation. Google Adsense never responds to e-mails. Moreover, the money that was on my Google Adsense account has also disappeared. I’m getting ready to pull all of my articles off of HubPages and seek other online writing alternatives that do not put me at the mercy of Google’s blatant stupidity and nefarious treatment of publishers. This is not the first time I’ve had problems of this nature with Google. Once I’m out of their orbit, the first thing I want to do is publish an article putting all their dirty laundry on exhibition to the entire world. I don’t think that I’ve ever been angrier at Google in my entire life. I don’t condone violence and murder, but I have to admit that I could understand the rage of that Iranian woman out in California who went into YouTube at Google headquarters and shot at their employees a year ago. I wish that she hadn’t shot herself dead, because a lot of dirt probably would have come out about Google at her criminal trial and investors would have started pulling out on them as they so deserve. These Google people are so disgusting that it’s not even funny.
I understand your point Magical. Definitely creating your own blog is better than blogging on HubPages.