Search Engine Optimization
Source: https://ahrefs.com/blog/content-hub/
A knowledge of search engine networks and hub/authority rankings can be applied to a practical matter: increasing the page ranking of a website. Increasing ranking will also increase the traffic to that page due to its elevated position within a search engine. This can potentially boost revenue due to views and clicks.
Pages are ranked based on several factors, including keywords and links. To boost the authority score of a webpage, it is helpful to create another page that acts as a hub, linking to important pages on a given topic as well as the target webpage. Increasing the hub score of a page involves adding links to pages with high authority scores, as the hub will then be regarded as a good compilation source. According to this article, content hubs are beneficial for search engine optimization because users are more likely to click on multiple pages of content, sending positive feedback to search engines.
Hub pages should be more focused on compiling informational content rather than links to e-commerce sites, as pages with informational content will be ranked as more authoritative. It is also beneficial to base hub pages on keywords that are popular, driving more users to the site. Additionally, hub pages should have subpages including more details that link back to the homepage. This ensures that the main webpage is not overwhelming the user with text, and likely aids in page ranking by adding links. It is possible for a page to be an authority and a hub simultaneously. If a hub page is seen as a good source of information, it may be linked on other sites, bringing up its authority ranking.
The page ranking of websites used to be displayed publicly by Google, but rankings have been made private. Page ranking was originally introduced in a paper by Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, where it was described as a way to transfer an aspect of the academic literature sphere over to the internet. Just as academic citations indicate the importance of a paper, links can indicate the importance of a webpage. Brin and Page further detailed page ranking not only as a way of voting on importance, but also as a way of modeling user behavior. If there is a user who clicks through pages randomly, the probability that this user visits a certain page is the page rank. A “damping factor” is the likelihood that the user will get bored and switch to browsing another random set of pages. Anchor text, the text of a link, is also taken into account by associating this text with the page it links to. These factors are good to keep in mind when designing websites for optimal search engine ranking.