Hub and Spoke Planning That Starts With a Refusal

Topical authority is not a score that accumulates. It is a judgement about whether your domain is a sensible place to send someone for a subject, and the fastest way to lose it is to publish twenty thin pages around a hub because a template said twenty. Every hub we plan has to pass one test before we design anything: can you say something on each spoke that a buyer could not already get from the pages ranking now. Where the answer is no for more than half the intended spokes, we plan a smaller hub or tell you the subject is not yours. What the plan contains: The hub page's job, written as the question it answers rather than the phrase it targets. A spoke list where each entry carries its own query evidence, its own reason to exist independently of the hub, and its own source of a fact nobody else has. Link rules between hub and spokes in both directions, expressed as template behaviour wherever they can be. A publication order. And the pages of yours that get folded in or retired because the hub supersedes them, because a new hub almost always makes existing pages redundant and a plan that does not name which ones is unfinished. The test a spoke has to pass: It has to be able to rank on its own. A spoke that exists only to point at the hub attracts neither links nor clicks, and a cluster of those confers nothing on anything. We check each candidate against the current results page for its query and against your domain's own history in that neighbourhood. Where a results page is held by publishers with far heavier link profiles, we say so in the plan and either mark the spoke a long play with a stated horizon or drop it. Publication order and pacing: Spokes first, hub second, in most cases. The hub is worth writing once there is something for it to link to; published into an empty cluster it spends six months as an orphan. We order the spokes by the sequence a buyer moves through rather than by descending volume, because the pages read closest to a purchase are the ones that justify the rest of the programme to whoever approved the budget. For marketplaces specifically: The hub is frequently a category page rather than an article, and the correct plan is often to strengthen the listing page instead of writing a guide that will compete with it. We have argued clients out of an entire planned hub twice on exactly those grounds. If your category page could hold the head query with better copy, better facets and better internal links, that is cheaper and faster than a cluster, and the plan will say so even though it means a smaller engagement. Not part of this: Writing. Briefs. Any commitment to a number of pieces per month. We do not produce a twelve-month calendar, because the plan should hold only until the second or third spoke is live and the data tells you whether the thesis was right. A calendar that outlives its evidence is a commitment device, not a plan. Say no if: You already have coverage of the subject and the real problem is that it is scattered and competing with itself. That is a consolidation job, and building a hub on top of it makes the situation worse rather than better. Say no also if the hub is meant to support a product that has not launched. There is no demand evidence to plan from, and we would be guessing at your expense while calling it strategy.