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!