Hubpages versus Infobarrel - Comparison number 1

In my February 2010 monthly update I mentioned that I would do a comparison of Hubpages, Infobarrel and Xomba. I created an article for Infobarrel and an article for Hubpages on the same subject but was unable to get enough information to create a third article which was on the same subject but still slightly different (but not too different) and as a result I decided to just leave it at an Infobarrel article and a Hubpages article. The article in question is very UK based and so I felt this would give a good comparison of how the respective websites coped in a foreign search engine (I believe both Hubpages and Infobarrel are based outside the UK).

These were both published about a week ago now, and so this is a quick update on how the Hubpages article has rated against Infobarrel. To start off with the Infobarrel article was published slightly ahead of the Hubpages article, but they appeared to both appear in Google results at the same sort of time (certainly it wasn't large enough to make a difference unless the article in question is a breaking news story). Neither got very high in the Google SERPs and in fact both articles were struggling to stay in the top 200 places, although the Hubpages article was positioned slightly higher. I placed a single link to each site on She Told Me (a great backlinking site) and this improved the search engine rankings. Again the Hubpages article is much better - in Google it is higher than the Infobarrel article for the chosen keyword. In addition, this difference is even more pronounced when using the British version of Google - with Hubpages far outranking Infobarrel. For both Hubpages and Infobarrel though the articles rank higher in the Google US than Google UK. The difference between the two sites in Yahoo is even more interesting. On the US Yahoo the Infobarrel article ranks 50% higher for the chosen keyword than the Hub. When using the UK version of Yahoo this is repeated - only the Hubpages article is even further behind the Infobarrel article.

So far this has been interesting - Infobarrel appears to rank higher in Yahoo and Hubpages higher in Google. At the moment this would suggest Hubpages is the better choice since Google is used more than Yahoo - particularly in the UK where Google accounts for about 95% of the total search engine usage!

Over the next few weeks I hope to increase the number of backlinks which I have to each article to see whether I can increase the point at which each article sits in the search results to a level where I can get decent traffic. From this, I hope to be able to do a comparison to see whether there is any vast difference in earnings (eCPM) and click through rate between Hubpages and Infobbarel - although obviously as per Google Adsense TOS I will have to be very vague!

Monthly Update - February 2010

During February I did a lot of work to try and assist me making more money online. I published two new hubs, one on The Helford River in Cornwall and another on buying Motorola Droid Screen Protectors Online. In addition I joined Xomba - which is a site which allows both bookmarking of existing sites and new articles to be written. As a result I wrote five articles on Xomba - We7 Music, Work from the beach with Google Adsense, Amazon, eBay and Hubpages, Get A Hotel in Falmouth, Cornwall, What time does evening start? and Valued Opinions. As you will notice several of these articles are linked to articles I already have in Hubpages and Infobarrel etc and so it was a chance for me to see how well Xomba compares in terms of the search engine rankings which will be something I shall do more and more in the future so keep checking back to this page to see how I get on.

Hubpages - $49.62 (70% increase over January 2010)
Infobarrel - $1.29 (2% decrease over January 2010)
Xomba - $1.41 (New this month)

As can be seen, I did sort of hit my targets from the January 2010 update. I managed to stop the slide in total earnings and in fact posted a large increase. However, this was mainly due to excellent performance from Hubpages and there was still a slight fall in earnings from Infobbarel which is worrying. I was also pleased with the earnings from Xomba, especially as I only started using Xomba during February 2010 and only wrote five articles.

In March 2010 I hope to keep my total earnings from all sites over $50 and hopefully manage to push the earnings from Hubpages alone over $50 and with that I shall round up my monthly earnings report for February 2010.

Monthly Update - Janury 2010

In January 2010 I did very little work on my online sites etc and so it would be expected that I would have a similar income to last month. I still felt I should be able to meet my targets from December 2009 for my income.

Hubpages: $29.24 (6% decrease)
Infobarrel: $1.32 (6% decrease)

Once again I have had a fall in my earnings. However, it is no-where as big as the fall in December 2009 and so hopefully I have reached the bottom and it will start to increase. As such my target for February 2010 is to at the very least avoid my earnings from Hubpages and Infobarrel falling any further.