There are many popular Squidoo, Hubpages and “recently” launched Google Knol where everyone can join and publish their own content. Most of them are admirably built from the seo perspective and market themselves as communities of people with different passions, or alternatives to Wikipedia. In my opinion they are built with the intention to make their user to generate content optimized for search engines, not necessarily good content.

I’ve created 2-3 pages on squidoo and I’m very pleased by a health check they have there. It displays a few check points where you have to work on your article to improve it. All of the points are just the seo advices written in a language that someone who doesn’t know what seo is can understand.

In reality many people publish content there with the solely purpose to get some link juice to their own websites. I think this is an option but in 99% of the cases is one of the worth option. The first reason is that the page you publish in a website like squidoo will have have bigger chances to outrank your pages you want to promote this way, so first of all visitors will go to squidoo before coming to your site.

Another reason why you should take care when you publish content on other sites is that you’ll not be 100% control to that content. A blog post caught my attention regarding it: Be Careful with HubPages – Dofollow Nofollow Fraud. The author noticed that links in his pages on hubpages gets nofollw when he dosn’t log in in the hubpages account for a long time, and that this fact is not made public by hubpages.

I don’t think sites like hubpages, trying to reach the top of the search engines are purely evil. Everyone want to do it. However they have to do this by generating as much content they can, selecting good content and publishing new content all the time. And not always their goal is your goal.

So, I think you should take care before enriching other sites with your content, and remember that the content you put there might be yours, but the benefits you get from there are controled by them.

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