Hubs help search engine positioning  

Claim: Groups of Web sites linked together may get especially high authority.

Status: Unproven

A "hub" is a group of sites that or pages that link to each other and that supposedly seem to search engines to be "main thoroughfares" of the Web for a particular topic. An explanation and a tool to identify such sites are given here: Hub Finder.

Here's how it is presumed to work. Suppose your site links to Wikipedia and CNN and they link back as well as linking to each other. That supposedly makes your site or page into a Hub. It is not clear if individual pages on the sites must link to each other or if it is sufficient that each site has a link to the other somewhere. My experience is that it is good to have a Hub page or site, but it is not clear if the search engine visibility that is generated is more than what would be generated by being reciprocally linked with a number of authoritative sites. There is no proof either, that reciprocal links are better than one way links to you or that any page gains because of links between the other pages beyond what that page would gain from the authority of each page. .

For non-profit organizations that provide a service or information, you can often link to a relevant Wikipedia page, and edit that page to get a link back from it or even create a page for your organization at Wikipedia. If you are lucky, a high-ranking site will link to you of its own volition and you can link back.

"Hub page" is also used as a buzzword of uncertain or variable meaning. This article for example, talks up the virtues of Hub pages without explaining what it means - ezinearticles.com/?How-Hub-Pages-and-Squeeze-Pages-Can-Boost-Up-Your-Traffic-and-Ranking&id=1350295

and some sites and blogs advertise themselves as "Hubs."

While Hubs may or may not be better than getting the same number of unreciprocated links from pages with the same Google Pagerank, it is certain that for you, it is good to have a cluster of established sites and Web logs that link to each other and support each other. Once you have done the hard work of building a few large and authoritative Web sites, it becomes a lot easier to use those sites and their supporting sites to publicize related ones.

If you know how to use such a cluster or Hub, it  is often sufficient to ensure that a brand new Web site and its pages will be registered and listed in Google in a few hours and it will get listed in Yahoo and MSN Live not long after.

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