It has been some time since I wrote the above, and I've had a bit more time to observe how my hubs and lenses are doing in Google's search results so I thought I would update with new observations. As far as I can tell my hubs are doing just as well as my Squidoo lenses. It is hard to copare them exactly because they are on different topics, and there is a big distribution in my rankings, I've been quite lucky with some hubs, some are doing less well than expected. However, I haven't observed any advantage in terms of ranking from having the lenses on the big Squidoo domain. Quite a few of my hubs are doing pretty well in Google for their, not very competitve keywords.

Either Google passes on some advantages from the HubPages domain to our subdomains which the SEO programs like Market Samurai don't see, or the links we get from HubPages count as backlinks and give a big boost to hub ranking. In Webmaster tools, links I get from other hubs (by appearing in the sidebar as a related article) and links form the main domain appear as backlinks, so presumably this is how Google treats them. If this is true, then having one's hubs appear in the 'best of' or 'hot' of a category becomes very important, since these pages have pretty high PageRank (PR5).

I have not been paying much attention to hubscores, since I reasoned they were a HubPages specific metric that didn't affect Google ranking, but, since appearance in 'best of' is presumably determined by the hubscore, I think it is important to aim for a high one, since it will get you a high PR link. The hot and best lenses of a second level subcategory have a PR of 4, while the third level subcategory has a PR of 2.

In terms of earnings, I find the Squidoo model to be quite frustrating. To me there is a major lack of transparency in how lensrank (which determnes the share of the site revenue you get) is calculated. This has put me off writing more lenses and I now have 4 times as many hubs as I have lenses. Having said that I think I will make approximately four times as much from HubPages as from Squidoo this month, (Squidoo pays out with a two month delay, so this is the first month I will see my earnings from the site). It appears that for me at this early time, both sites are working very similarly in terms of Google ranking, and of earnings.

Of course it is still early days, it will take a few months (and some more lenses), before I can really say anything definitive about how HubPages compares with Squidoo.