paynt - 3:35 am on Dec 6, 2001 (gmt 0)

Thanks Andrew (agerhart),

You are right on target.

How do I set up a hub ?

The perfect question, LOL. Once you get to know me you’ll know you’ve been set up. Not really but it may appear that way.

First you’ll want to read some of the previous discussions, simply for history and background.

A question of hubs [webmasterworld.com]

These are a few new ones I like

Building a Small-Medium Theme Site [webmasterworld.com]
Designing and Maintaining a Hub [webmasterworld.com]

Plus you may want to search for canonical in the site search because in one form or another much of this fits.

This probably won’t come to surprise some of you but I have this sort of passion and fascination for hubs, themes and canonicals. I think too that I’m refining what I feel a hub truly is all about. It’s always been the center. If you are working with a theme and have several sites that are off shoots of that theme the question becomes how to bring those shoots all together. That’s the hub.

To be a hub is the ultimate theme. A hub should stand-alone yet be the center of what surrounds it. When you have separate domains, specific to niches within a theme, you want to tie them together to make them strong. Otherwise they are floating around without something central to connect them.

The hub, as I suggested, is the most general term and I agree with Andrew that you’re better off if you niche that general term to its lowest denominator. You give your hub a neutral name and you build a site around that. Provide content and neutral resources. Then, for every separate domain you develop create a separate canonical. So if you are promoting your theme of European apartments that then can be your hub. You could then create a canonical for each of the cities as in:

Rome.apartments.com
London.apartments.com

And so on and so forth. In general terms you can talk about renting or buying apartments in each of the cities, provide resources and content (text). Then you want to link to the domain that promotes that specific city. Promote it.

Such is the beauty of the hub.