I set up this blog long ago when I first started out as a full-time freelance writer. As you may know, this blog runs on WordPress, the popular, open-source blogging platform. The design and layout of WordPress blogs is controlled by a “theme”. There are numerous good, free WordPress themes out there. I have spent some time (too much time) looking through lots of different WordPress themes while looking both for my own use, and as a way to find good WordPress themes for writers. The trick to finding a good WordPress theme for your blog is both getting one that looks like you want AND that performs well both for speed and SEO.

Unfortunately, many WordPress themes are automatically disqualified from ever being used on any of my blogs by a very popular, but very dumb, feature WordPress theme designers love. Giant header images, often coupled with some sort of scrolling “top stories” feature waste both bandwidth and precious screen real estate.

Have you ever seen a popular, high-traffic website using a design like this?

Lately, Google has added more reason to not use a big header image layout by saying that it may downrank or otherwise demote websites that have too many ads relative to content above the fold. Depending upon how Google defines “content,” big header image layouts could be a ticket to lower search rankings because a big header image and a single 336 x 300 ad will eat up almost all of the above the fold room on many monitors.

New WordPress Theme for Freelance Writing Blog ArcticLlama

The difficulty in finding a good, fast-loading, SEO optimized WordPress theme for writers that I also like the look and feel of, kept this site with the same look for a while now. However, I was spurred to action when I finally noticed that despite my best efforts last time to find a theme that was good as well as good looking, I ended up with a theme that misused the header tags.

You see, Google overemphasizes header tags to a fault. Second only to counting links and matching the query with your title tag, having the right H1 and H2 tags makes all the difference in where your page ranks in Google’s search engine results pages (SERP). The key is to NOT have your blog title as your H1 tag. Rather, your POST title should have the H1 tag. Otherwise, you are optimizing every single page for your blog title rather than the individual content, and that won’t end well.

Sure enough, my old theme had the Freelance Writing ArcticLlama line as the H1 tag, on both the index page and on all the individual post pages. The post title was relegated to H2 status with subheadings having H3 or lower tags. This is SEO suicide.

The new theme does it right. Each post title owns the sole H1 tag on the page meaning that post can rank wherever it deserves for that topic without being anchored down by an H2 tag. I like the look too. I do wish it had a footer, and I’ll probably hack one into it in the future, but for a redesign on Superbowl Sunday, I think it’s pretty nice.

If you are curious, this is the Trending theme from the Hybrid Theme people. Like all the Hybrid themes, it is free, although you can sign up to get technical support if you so choose.

Let me know if you find any bugs and how you like the new look.

- Brian

New Look at ArcticLlama Freelance Writing Blog originally published at Freelance Writing Blog of ArcticLlama.com

It’s an unfortunate reality that for small business owners, like us, the tax burden can be extraordinary.

Small Business Taxes for Freelance Writers

Both Democrats and Republicans say that they support small business owners. When it comes to sole proprietors, at lest, they are both liars.

As a successful sole proprietor you will pay the highest tax rate of anyone in America unless you are very careful and very organized. No one, Republican or Democrat is talking, even in their pie in the sky campaign promises, of doing anything about that high tax rate for freelancers.

What kills freelancers on taxes is that you not only have to pay ordinary income taxes on all of your income, you also have to pay self-employment tax. The self-employment tax is essentially the result of being both the employee and the employer.

What many Americans fail to realize is that the amount of money that comes out of an employee’s paycheck each pay period for Social Security and Medicare, is only HALF of what actually gets paid in Social Security taxes. The employer also pays both Social Security and Medicare taxes for each employee. When you are a freelance writer, you pay both halves.

The employee typically pays 7.65 percent in Social Social Security and Medicare taxes and the employer pays a matching 7.65 percent. As a single person small business owner, you pay a whopping 15.3 percent. This is referred to as the self-employment tax.

2011 Self-Employment Tax Rate

For 2011, us freelance types catch a small, but helpful break. Just like everyone else in America, we get a temporary 2 percent reduction in the employee share of the Social Security taxes. The employer side, however, gets no such relief. Thus, the 2011 self-employment tax rate is 13.3 percent instead of 15.3 percent.

If you have been following the news, you know that House Republicans decided they were getting too much bad press to oppose a short-term extension in this temporary rate reduction for the first two months of 2012, so that went through. However, as of this writing, there is no tax cut for the whole 2012 tax year passed and signed into law yet, so don’t count those pennies for this year.

Adding to the self-employment tax for 2011 is your regular income taxes. If you made enough money in your freelance writing business to hit the 25 percent tax bracket, for example, you actually will have to pay 25 percent + 13.3 percent, or a soul crushing 38.3 percent for federal income taxes. Of course, you still have to pay state income taxes in many states as well. The Colorado state income tax rate is 4.63 percent, so I’ll be lopping a stunning 42.93 percent off of my earned taxable income for 2011.

The only hope we freelancers have is loading up on small business tax deductions. Fight back by taking the home office deduction, if you qualify. Don’t forget to deduct all of the stuff you bought for your business using the higher 2011 Section 179 deduction amount. You can also deduct things like domain registration fees, business cards, office supplies, and more. This lowers your taxable income, which means that that ridiculously high percentage ends up applying to a smaller number.

Unless you have limited income that won’t really effect your taxes, or you end up taking the standard deduction, it is probably worth the expense to get a tax preparation software like TurboTax Home and Business or TaxCut small business edition to walk you through getting all your deductions.

Most importantly, though, is to be sure to collect and correctly enter all of those 1099-MISC statements you get from clients that report your income. Misreporting your income can really increase your tax audit odds with the IRS and they have computers that match up all reported 1099s with the 1099 income that you report.

Remember, you get to do something that you love, and you get to work for yourself. It can be easy to forget that when you are filling out a check for some-thousand dollars to get even with the IRS. Then, remember to keep every scrap and receipt for every single thing you spend money on to get all your deductions this year, and the next, and the next, and the next…

Freelance Writer Taxes originally published at Freelance Writing Blog of ArcticLlama.com

Anyway, let’s get the new year started off on the right foot with some great resolutions for writers for the new year.

New Year’s Resolutions for Writers

Every writer is different, but there are some things that seem to be true for most writers. I’ve started off this list of writer’s New Year’s resolutions with those that fit into that almost universal category and then moved on to those things that might be more useful for fellow freelance writers.

1. Write - No matter who you are or what you do, writing is the one thing that will always improve your craft. Reading is useful (see #2) but there is no substitute for just writing. The thing that catches many writers is that they force themselves to write certain things in order for it to count as “writing.” For example, a freelance financial writer may only count the things written about finance as writing. In truth, any writing is useful, skill building writing. In fact, writing outside of your comfort zone is a great way to develop better writing skills. Writing for recreation, is a great way to avoid burn out. This blog is a great way to turn procrastination into useful procrastination. Cranking out a blog post may not drop any income on the table (at least not immediately) but it has many uses. In addition to being cathartic, this blog allows my freelance writing business to show up in searches, help me meet and become friends with other writers, and pay it forward by helping others develop their own writing craft or writing business.
2. Read - The other thing that helps all writers is reading. Reading allows you to learn and hear other styles. It allows you to gather new information, obtain a fresh look on old knowledge and it keeps your mind working in complete, grammatically correct ways. The other important benefit of reading is that it allows you to know more. New writers often hear, “write what you know.” That is true, but what blocks too many writers is not realizing that you can always know more. You can “know” about being a prisoner in Alcatraz by having served time there, or you can always learn by reading everything you can get your hands on about the subject.
3. Brag and Boast – Too many writers, especially new ones, are reluctant to put themselves out there as high-quality writers. I’ve seen many a top-notch writer dismiss what they do to others. “I mostly just write little things for some ad agencies,” is hardly the way to make the kind of impression that might lead someone to remember later that you are a professional writer. When you tell people about what you do, toot your own horn a little bit. That way, when the day comes that acquaintance happens to be in a room where someone talks about getting some professional writing help, he’ll think, “Hey! I know a great writer.”
4. Market - Many writers are writers because they like to be in their own heads. They often like to work alone, if not by themselves. For writers like us, marketing can be a major downer. Unfortunately, marketing is the only way to develop and keep a reliable pipeline of freelance writing gigs coming your way. Fortunately, you don’t have to cold call like some telemarketer begging for work. This is the 21st century. There are literally hundreds of ways to market yourself without every picking up a telephone or shaking hands at a Chamber of Commerce mixer. Create a website, start a blog, build up a following on Twitter, print up flyers, take out ads, make sure you have compelling, up to date profiles on Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. A little legwork in one or more of these areas can improve your exposure greatly.

Lastly, never forget why became a writer in the first place. If you don’t love it, figure out another way to make a living; there are a lot of jobs out there that are easier and better paying for someone who isn’t a hopeless wordsmith.

Good luck to everyone on their new year and may 2012 be your most successful writing year ever, in whatever way you frame success.

Good Writer Resolutions originally published at Freelance Writing Blog of ArcticLlama.com

Whatever it is, it is annoying.

Tomorrow (or later today if this mental fog clears) I’ll be posting the best writer’s resolutions for the new year. Until then, Ugh!

Writing in Your Head originally published at Freelance Writing Blog of ArcticLlama.com

With article marketing, you publish articles on websites, generally for free and without any editorial approval, and then use those articles to link to your own webpages. The idea is that since Google is basically a glorified link counter, making more links point to your online writing content is a good way to boost how high your rank in search engine results pages, or SERPs.

The “best” place to publish said articles changes from time to time. Sometimes it changes because Google figures out what everyone is doing and they make some tweaks that make publishing on the old place less valuable. Sometimes it changes because the websites themselves figure out what is going on and shut it down. And, sometimes is just changes because people decide to go somewhere else.

The first article marketing website I remember hearing about was EZinearticles. The required an editor to approve your article, although the standard wasn’t exactly high, and they restricted the number and placement of your links to your own content. It was theoretically worth the restrictions because Google thought highly of EzineArcticles.com.

Later, I heard about Squidoo. On Squidoo you build “lenses” which are webpages built with the help of Squidoo.com’s tools. Essentially you type your content into various fields and the site generates and publishes a webpage. Squidoo was the first site I heard of being “taken down” by some sort of Google action. Squidoo remains, but it’s value as a pure article marketing play isn’t as high as it once was.

From there I heard about site after site. Most of the time I took a look, maybe published a freelance writing article or two and then moved on. For example, I have a handful of articles published at EzineArticles. You can find them via my ezinearticles Expert Author page. I also have a couple of lenses published at Squidoo under the name BrianBrightHub, which I’ll be changing if you can change usernames since BrightHub ended it’s revenue sharing program.

Eventually, I heard about HubPages. The strange thing is that I liked it enough to stick around for a while and publish over 100 “hubs,” which are also just webpages created via the HubPages interface. You can find my hubs under Hub Llama.

HubPages Earnings

Like most of the freebie publishing websites, I eventually moved on. It usually just makes more sense to publish your own unpaid content on your own websites. You control all of the rights. You build up the credibility of your websites. You get 100% of any advertising earnings.

I used HubPages largely for things I wanted to write but that I had place to publish them that fit. Every month or two I would end up back there for some reason, often to build a link to an article that had surprisingly, popped up in Google AdSense reports as making some money for me. But, in the end, I mostly dropped out of using HubPages.

However, there were a couple of things I liked about HubPages. First, there was no editorial review, so as soon as you hit publish, your article was live on the web. That doesn’t mean there are no rules however. HubPages nofollows links until you generate a high enough author ranking to get your links followed. That puts a crimp on the one-and-done types. Also, there are automated checks of things like how many links go where and so on. It is all very easy to circumvent, but it blocks the worst abuses.

HubPages has revenue sharing as well. The interesting thing about HubPages revenue share was how it was done. Hubs were published with Google AdSense ads on them. The way the revenue share worked was that HubPages showed Google Ads with your AdSense ID on the ads 40 percent of the time and showed ads with the HubPages company ID the rest of the time. In theory, this gives you a 40 percent share of all ad revenue.

Still, I hadn’t been to HubPages in some time. All of that changed recently when I decided to redirect BrightHub links to other things I have published since the company will no longer be paying any revenue sharing. Since I had some links built from HubPages, I dropped by and found a nice surprise. I’m earning money at HubPages.

Sometime in the last year, HubPages started using its own advertising program. I have no idea how it works or where the ads come from, but I clicked Yes to sign up for it. It turns out that now I’m making money from HubPages.

Don’t get me wrong, I made a little money each month with the Google AdSense program on HubPages, but never anything worth working on. However, with the new HubPages ad program, I’m earning closer to $50 per month, for articles that I haven’t updated, linked, or thought about in over a year. My greatest number of pageviews come from an article about the current Happy Meal toy at McDonalds, although my article about 529 plan contribution limits in 2011 is a close second.

I can’t help but wonder if publishing a little more on HubPages might generate some additional passive income. As it turns out, I have some extra material I can easily publish since some of it was returned to my ownership when BrightHub shut down.

Now, I have to decide how much effort is warranted at this stage.

Do you use HubPages? Are you making lots of money on HubPages?

Making Money with HubPages originally published at Freelance Writing Blog of ArcticLlama.com

Now, as most of my readers know, I’m not a big fan of revenue sharing. The main reason is that there are just too many factors out of my control. No matter how great my freelance writing is, for instance, there will never be any traffic to speak of if the site it is published on doesn’t link to the content, have a good layout that both human readers and search engine spiders like, and so on. In other words, my efforts and work are not reflected in whatever I might earn via revenue sharing. One of the main reasons I became a freelance writer is to have my own hard work pay off for me.

Bright Hub Revenue Sharing

When I first started writing for Bright Hub, they paid $20 per article plus a certain amount of revenue sharing. In my mind, that meant that BrightHub paid me $20 per article. Period.

Over time, however, the amount of content I published at BrightHub began to add up. Additionally, some of my articles began to rank highly for certain search terms. An article I wrote about seaport.exe, for example, pulled in several thousands of page views each month. I started to make noticeable passive income from my BrightHub writings. I even wrote a followup article about how to get rid of Seaport that generated more traffic. Both of these articles were written after I had blogged about it at my business and computers website BestHubris.com.

There is a very big difference between the promise of revenue sharing, someday, somehow, somewhere, and actual income earned from revenue sharing. Once I started earning real money with my revenue sharing, I decided to help the process along. I built links to my content on Bright Hub, starting with those articles that had the highest number of pageviews and moving down the list. This boosted my content and the corresponding income it earned. I even linked to the BrightHub articles from my personal articles about similar topics because they paid per page view instead of per click like the AdSense ads on my own websites.

Even after Panda hit eHow and Bright Hub, I still earned a decent amount of passive income from Bright Hub’s revenue sharing program. It was less than half of what it used to be, but it was still nice income, even if it was no longer impressive. Therefore, I made no effort to take down any links to my published work on Bright Hub.

However, this month, the freelance writers for BrightHub received notice that the company was ending what was apparently an optional program of revenue sharing. Even then, I didn’t really make much effort to unlink my content. After all, there is no reason to kick someone while they are down. But, then I noticed in my Twitter stream that Bright Hub is still publishing new material at a pretty good rate and still making money off of my original content that I wrote for them.

On the one hand, the content was bought and paid for by BrightHub, much in the same way the content I wrote for Demand Studios was bought and paid for. Both companies are welcome to do whatever they wish with the content.

The difference is that I never linked to any of the stuff I published for Demand Studios or eHow. I made a good faith effort to build the traffic and revenue my content generated for Bright Hub based upon their good faith effort to share the rewards with me. The thing about revenue sharing is that it is a percentage and by its very nature adjusts up or down based upon how well the content performs for the owner. When Google’s Panda update caused them to earn less money on my content, I also go paid less. It rubbed me the wrong way for them to take away my cut now, but continue to benefit from it in the same way.

So, long story, short, I’ve been removing the links I made from my sites and other published content and, whenever possible pointing them back to me or my content that does still benefit me.

The point of this post is two-fold. One, it turns out that I build a lot of links when I get motivated to do so. All writers should come up with ways to quickly build links to their own content. Two, it turns out that I am earning money with HubPages (I had some links from there too) and I never even knew it. That is my next post.

Related articles

• Google Search Update or HubPages Improvement ? (besthubris.com)

Taking Down Bright Hub Links originally published at Freelance Writing Blog of ArcticLlama.com

What is even better is writing for your own websites, building your own traffic and making money off of what YOU want to write, when you want to write it. It’s better than just working from home. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Even when you do succeed, there is no guarantee that Google won’t come along and whack your traffic after you’ve built up a nice little piece of passive income on the side. (See how this freelance writing blog recently got hit with the October Panda update.)

The catch is that most successful freelance writers already spend a lot of time writer and writing and publishing even more online for future, potential income can be a stretch. I constantly worry that someone will judge the writings on my own websites as professional freelance writing samples because I can’t take the same amount of time on them as I do my paying writing gigs. The truth is that I seldom proof read my blog posts. What comes out, is what goes up. I simply don’t have the time to polish all of my online writings as much as I would like.

Fortunately, platforms like WordPress help writers to create and publish websites quickly, without having to become an expert in setting up and running Apache server or other systems. However, that doesn’t make everything easy.

In order for your own websites or online writing to succeed, you need to be able to create and produce webpages that are both attractive enough to capture and maintain the attention of your readers and tweaked properly to appease the Google search engine spiders that come and index your website. In other words, you need to do things like add images to your posts and always keep one eye on your site’s SEO needs. Unfortunately, I can no longer believe that writers should ignore SEO.

As you can imagine, this takes up time.

Zemanta WordPress Plugin

This is where Zemanta comes in. The idea behind Zemanta is that the online service does some of those “extras” you need to do in order for you to successfully make money writing online. The way it works is that is adds recommended links and images based upon what you are writing. Then, you just click the links you wish to include. No need to search, find, copy and past links into your articles.

Theoretically, the service offers well matched links based upon keywords and phrases that appear in your posts. It does that rather well, with not much spam. However, there are a few more suggestions for Wikipedia than I would like. There are several configuration options that I haven’t yet gone through, so there may be a way to reduce or eliminate all of the Wikipedia suggestions.

(Note: There is nothing wrong with Wikipedia or links to that website. However, a great many of those links are nothing more than definitional, which I do not feel adds much value on a website like this one. For example, one of the suggested links for this post is to “freelance writing” on Wikipedia. I’m not sure that would be all that helpful to our readers. Even if it were, I have to assume at this point that pretty much everyone in the world who reads websites knows where to find Wikipedia if they need it.)

I’ll be trying Zemanta out over the next few weeks here and on my ADD Tips blog so if you see anything funny let me know.

Zemanta Review Issues

So far I have encountered a couple of issues with Zemanta that do not diminish its utility. However, it might be useful for those reading this to know how to get around these potential Zemanta problems.

1. If you use NoScript or similar plugin, you’ll have to turn it off or allow Zemanta.com otherwise you won’t see anything. If you can’t tell if the Zemanta plugin is working on your blog, you probably have it blocked.
2. I set it up on Addessories.com first and then here on ArcticLlama.com. I logged into Zemanta to set preferences but they do not seem to propograte to my other websites. Perhaps I’ll need to login from them somehow or copy and past the API key that was mentioned during setup.
3. Speaking of which, only some settings can be set on the plugin. You have to create an account and login to Zemanta.com to set many more settings. Don’t thing that just what you set on the WordPress dashboard is all there is.
4. I write a lot of my stuff in Windows Live Writer. It isn’t that I can’t write directly into WordPress, I can and do. However, WLW has a nifty feature where you can automatically have certain keywords or phrases be linked without any manual intervention. For example, when I write posts in WLW the phrase “freelance writers” automatically goes to www.arcticllama.com and “freelance writing blog” goes to www.arcticllama.com/blog/  It’s just another one of those ways to speed things up. It appears that Zemanta only works in the WordPress editor screen or via a browser plugin. — For now, I’ll have to either type directly into WordPress or write in WLW and then upload as a draft and then take advantage of Zemanta.  — If anyone knows of a Windows Live Writer plugin for Zemanta, let me know. (I’ll go Google that when I finish up here.)

I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

Do you have experince with Zemanta? How do you use it on your blogs.

Update: Oh, for the love of Pete. There is a Zemata Windows Live Writer plugin right on the Zemata download page. (Just scroll down.) I’ll be testing that too.

Zemanta Plugin for Online Writers originally published at Freelance Writing Blog of ArcticLlama.com

Officially, Bright Hub and brighthub.com remain in business and the website will stay up along with all of the content they commissioned from writers over the years. However, revenue sharing payments will cease on December 15th and any new articles will be written internally or by a small group of writers who are contracted with on an “ad-hoc basis.”

In other words, Bright Hub, as it pertains to freelance writers, is closed. The writer forums were also unlinked or deleted. I was able to grab a traffic report to keep on hand in case I need a list of what was published when it shut down.

This is particularly sad for me. Although I haven’t written as extensively for Bright Hub in the past year after they cut the rates they paid for articles, I always had a special fondness for BH. When I started my freelance writing business several years ago, Bright Hub was one of my first recurring freelance writing gigs. It was a lot of fun and I published a lot of articles with them. Over the years I think we both made some good money.

I can’t say it comes as a surprise. After the second Panda hit Bright Hub there was a lot of panic. A wide swath of articles were pulled down in hopes of appeasing the gods of Google search results by eliminating “low quality content” that was supposedly weighing down all the good stuff. That didn’t seem to ever help much. More recently, Bright Hub cut the number of opportunities available to writers. Traffic never recovered.

The articles I wrote and published will remain at Bright Hub, although I’m not sure whether or not my name will remain attached to them. According to the email internal staff will edit and update the articles, so I’m not sure at what point they cease being mine and start being someone else’s.

If an article is deleted, I supposedly will be notified and the copyright will revert to me. I suppose I should find out which ones that has already happened with and republish them on my own websites or on HubPages, which ironically seems to have recovered quite well.

With the termination of the revenue sharing program, I certainly won’t be putting any fresh effort into linking or building up those articles that I published with them.

This episode serves as yet another reminder to writers about working for revenue sharing or other unguaranteed future earnings. After cutting the rate paid for articles, editors frequently tried to remind writers that the upfront rate wasn’t the whole pay because you also got revenue share. I feel sorry for those that bought too much into that argument.

By my count, with the demise of Bright Hub, all of the so-called content mills that paid writers for articles have shut down now, officially or just by never offering any writing assignments. It seems that the Panda arrow was well placed and the perceived beast of mass content has been slain.

Bright Hub Shuts Down originally published at Freelance Writing Blog of ArcticLlama.com

The Panda algorithm has been updated and changed through out the year. During that time there was no discernable affect on this freelance writing site or any of my other sites. However, on October 13, this site and my personal finance blog at FinanceGourmet.com were both hammered. Traffic from Google dropped to a third of their previous levels.

Panda AdSense Recovery

I didn’t really "do" anything when my sites got hit by Panda. I use all of my websites as writing samples, so the quality stay relatively high. Of course, they are free web resources that I crank out quickly in my spare time, so they obviously are up to the same standards as my paid professional writing work, but they are definitely not spammy or "made for AdSense." In other words, there isn’t really a lot I could do other than guess at structural issues that Google might not like.

While AdSense income has never been a big component of my monthly earnings, I had gotten very used to the passive income it provided. The only saving grace for October was that my earnings pre-Panda were on track to be my best ever, so when the bottom fell out mid-month, the end of the month result was ball-park with an average month on the lower end.

As you can imagine, I have been very concerned about what this all adds up to for my November earnings. It seems like things are getting better, although nowhere near the levels they were before. Still, earnings have gone from 10 percent of former levels to closer to 50 percent, which is definitely moving the right direction. Hopefully, they keep moving in that direction.

The interesting thing is that traffic has not recovered as much. Instead, the click through percentage has increased. Where my click throughs across all sites use to hover at around 1.1 to 1.3 percent, they are now 1.8 to 2.0 percent, which is a significant improvement.

Skimlinks Update

An update to readers who are curious where the whole Skimlinks trial stands: I had tried Skimlinks right before the Panda update lowered my traffic dramatically and worried that maybe there was a correlation. I turned off the Skimwords feature that it can’t add any new links to my pages. That means only whatever I link manually can be turned into an affiliate link which should ensure that my sites don’t count as having "too many" of those kind of links.

I don’t get huge traffic here, nor do I generate a lot of clicks for things, but so far, Skimlinks has reported just over 100 clicks and 12 cents of revenue. At that rate, I won’t bother keeping it on here for long, but I am re-trying it again now.

Mini Panda Recovery originally published at Freelance Writing Blog of ArcticLlama.com

Bright Hub is the latest of the online content publishers to essentially admit defeat in the wake of the Google Panda update. I mentioned earlier this year when I wrote about whether writing for Bright Hub is worth it that traffic, and therefore revenue sharing, from Bright Hub dropped dramatically after the second or third round of Panda updates.

Unlike the traffic on HubPages (at least my Hubs on HubPages), it seems that traffic has not recovered and, like many other content publishers, Bright Hub apparently has substantially lower revenues that allow it to pay for substantially fewer articles. Perhaps Bright Hub made a rash decision in removing oodles of previously published content in hopes of cutting out whatever “low-quality” content it was that Google saw and punished the site for. Perhaps Bright Hub needs to follow HubPages’ lead and move its organization to a subdomain-based system rather than using directories. Or, maybe, whatever Google is using to rank, judge, and demote websites is just pegged right at the heart of Bright Hub.

Bright Hub Writing for Search Engines

The irony, for me at least, in the fall of Bright Hub is that in the beginning, at least in my experience, it was probably doing everything right to have built an online content empire, and survived, the Google Panda update. Back then, writers wrote about pretty much any topic that they came up with that the channel editor thought would be good content for the channel to have. That ensured that there was a wide variety of content in each area of focus, so wide, in fact, that Bright Hub actually was the authority on certain topics, while being a useful contributor in others. It also ensured that professional freelance writers looking to write on something other than the same old topics flocked to the website.

Sadly, along the way, Bright Hub went the route of Demand Studios and others. Instead of writers coming up with articles and then publishing them, editors were tasked with being keyword researchers and publishing article assignments based on an exact keyword phrase. Unfortunately, keyword research is not a panacea. My best performing article on Bright Hub last month (and for many months before that) was one I wrote myself, out of the blue, about seaport.exe when it showed up on my computer one day.

Worse, publishing rules drifted ever more toward SEO obsession land. Where writers were once encouraged to write engaging titles with keywords in mind, they were eventually told to use the exact keyword phrase in both the regular title and the SEO title, as well as being required to use it in the meta description and the teaser for the article, regardless of any grammatical issues. After Panda, of course, these requirements were dropped and everyone was instructed to once again write for the readers. In fact, numerous articles of mine were tagged for issues that they only have because I was once explicitly instructed to commit the exact “errors” that now exist in those articles.

It seems that it was too little too late.

In my opinion, the site put too much faith in the idea that Google could be appeased by removing “low-quality” articles. The biggest issue what how low-quality was assessed. Essentially, my articles that once received good amounts of traffic from Google and other search engines, but that did not receive as much traffic after the update were tagged as “low-quality” or “problematic” content.

In reality, many of those articles were solid content. That these articles were suddenly outranked by other content didn’t make them poor articles so much as either

a) false positives

or

b) something that was still good, but was now being outranked by something that was arguably better.

In deleting all of that content, Bright Hub lost its coverage for numerous niche articles and long-tail searches in the name of higher quality. I understand that as a for-profit business the company had to do something but it may not have done the right things at the right time. It was also suggested that Google hard targeted pages with too many ads or the wrong types of links. Maybe saving the content and tackling these issues first would have produced better results. Unfortunately, there is no way to really know.

What seems to be true is that the criticism that Google is easily gamed by content mills has been smashed. All of these article publishers cutting back to minimum operations or shutting down shows that they have been hit and hit hard and that they don’t have a recovery path in mind.

Indeed, they may be self-fulfilling the prophecy by reducing their ability to shine through and break to the top of some searches by having LOTS of great content on a topic. Instead, they all seem to have taken the concept of having one article covering any given topic or keyword phrase as sufficient. Ironically, my own experience shows this to be a self-defeating strategy. That seaport article that is my biggest traffic getter? It has a very similar cousin about how to delete seaport that was my third highest ranked article last month. Perhaps two (or more) articles about the same thing can be useful.

In the end, it seems that several of my original homes have been damaged or destroyed. I understand Google’s motivation, but it is sad to move on without old friends.

Bright Hub Cutting Back Too originally published at Freelance Writing Blog of ArcticLlama.com