HubPages redirects all www.hubpages.com to hubpages.com with a 301 redirect. However, someone must have fed google a ww.hubpages.com link. We use relative links, so the site shows about 90K ww pages in the google index. The interesting thing is that many of these pages are ranking better than the hubpages.com version of the page. Before Panda, we never noticed any of these pages existence. We now handle this by redirecing ww and wwww to Hubpages.com.
Archive for May, 2011
Email has been the best way of growing social engagement on a website. Today there is a bit of a conversation going on about the topic. Whether it’s notifying a participant that they were tagged in a photo or letting them know someone responded to their question or comment. The key is sending the right notifications at the right interval. Send emails people don’t find useful or send too many emails and they turn them off, send emails people want to get and they open them and click through at very high rates.
From my experience, Facebook sends five emails about an item, and if you haven’t clicked through or responded, then the emails stop. If you respond or click through, the emails keep coming. You also have pretty granular controls to opt out of emails. I still get FB emails, although my preference for these types of notifications is to get them as notifications on my phone.
Groupon was sending me email every day about local deals. They didn’t seem targeted, and they annoyed me, so I turned them off. Interestingly, FB has been sending me deal emails daily now. They have started to annoy me as well, so I’ll turn them off.
I think the next wave of email and notifications will be less about making sure the email has been delivered by avoiding junk filters and more about sending the person the right emails that they will find useful. This is where we are spending our resources at HubPages. A smart way to send emails to people that they will open and most importantly, to stop sending mails they don’t respond to, so we can stop sending before they turn us off.
I’ve been frustrated by Google’s recent search engine algorithm update call Panda. A few days ago, I wrote a hub. That hub was indexed by Google, but when I search for the first sentence of the hub, I can’t find it in the first ten pages of Google’s results.
Today, I copied my original hub and pasted it into a knol. I’m curious which will rank higher.
Update: The Hub and Knol were indexed. The knol ranks higher.
