About four weeks ago, hubpages announced that they were experimenting with sub-domains, where they were switching individual hubbers to their own sub-domain on hubpages, with rel=author built into their hubs to identify them as a brand.
You could switch there and then, or wait for the mandatory switch on August 10th. I switched immediately.
The results? Good. My traffic climbed to pre-panda levels, and my sub-domain survived the July 23rd Panda update (Panda 2.3) and it looks like it's survived the Panda 2.4 update which has just rolled out.
However, some other hubbers report a drastic fall in traffic to their sub-domain due to panda 2.4.
So what can you do to make sure your sub-domain and it's hubs stays ranked?
1. Add some text to your profile page (which is now your own personal home page). Just leaving it as a series of links to your hubs is not a good idea.
2. Remove the comment capsules on your hubs - you'll just get spammed, and the comments usually detract from the hub as most people post inane rubbish like "good post" which Google identifies as typical of spammers (even if those commenting are innocent hubbers!).
3. Include some quality long non-commercial hubs in your account. Google doesn't want to see content farms. Having a few decent quality non commercial hubs can help. My 1400 word hub on Sarkozy's wives and my 2700 word science hub Genealogy and DNA testing make me no profit, but Google loves them, sends a lot of traffic to them, and I'm convinced that they have helped lift the quality score of my entire sub-domain (because people spend a long time on them, and they are most definitely not content farm material).
There is some evidence that if a sufficient amount of articles on your domain or sub-domain are considered bad quality, you get a site-wide penalty (or sub-domain wide penalty) while the reverse is also true - a sufficient amount of hubs of good quality can uplift your entire sub-domain.
4. Backlink your hubs. I can't stress this enough. Your hubs are just not going to rank without some support. Yes backlinking is a pain, but if you've invested time and energy writing hubs, then it's easier to get a return by investing a little extra time backlinking, then starting all over again on some other platform.
