<b>Do hub pages pass more authority than equivalent links from body content?</b>

<b>Do hub pages pass more authority than equivalent links from body content?</b>

A hub (pillar) page linking to 20 cluster articles vs those same 20 links scattered through body content — does placement change what flows?

I found 12 sites that migrated from scattered contextual links to a centralized hub structure for an existing cluster, with content otherwise stable, and compared the cluster's aggregate visibility 90 days before/after.

— Cluster pages gained a median +9% impressions post-hub.
— The hub page itself often became the cluster's strongest ranker for the head term — sometimes outranking the individual articles it linked to.
— Pages that were previously orphan-ish (1-2 internal links) gained the most; well-linked pages barely moved.

The mechanism is probably mundane: hubs raise the minimum internal-link count for weak pages and concentrate anchor-text relevance. The "magic of pillar pages" may just be "you fixed your orphans and tidied your anchors."

Which is fine — it works — but it means a hub adds little if your cluster is already densely interlinked. The gain is in the redistribution, not the template.

Method note: link structure diffed via crawls; visibility from GSC + a rank tracker.

Confidence: medium.