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Panda Update 3.2 Happened January 18

Jan 26th, 2012
by Greekgeek.
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Has your traffic profile changed recently? The culprit may be Panda 3.2, confirmed on Jan 18, 2012. See that link on SearchEngineLand for more info.

To review what this Panda thing is about:

Google's search algorithm ranks pages' relevance to a given search query based on over 200 factors. For example, are the words in the search query ("what's in a hot dog?") found in the page's headers, or does that page link to other good pages about that topic? The pages that rank highest on relevance get listed first for that query when someone searches for it on Google. A better Google listing means more clicks, more visitors, more traffic.

Starting last February, Google introduced a new factor, code named Panda. This factor is weighted more strongly than many other factors. Panda is different from most of the factors in that it's a measure of the domain where the page is found. Are there a lot of spammy pages on that domain (e.g. Squidoo.com)? Are there a lot of pages whose content is found elsewhere? Or is that domain full of unique, useful pages? Panda attempts to determine the overall quality of a website. It then boosts or detracts the raw rank of any page found on that site.

Panda isn't calculated every day. Instead, it's recalculated manually whenever someone at Google says, "Time to run a Panda update again." It then crawls all the sites on the web and re-evaluates whether they're full of spam and junk or excellent content.

The long and short of it: each time Panda is recalculated, ALL articles on Squidoo may be somewhat impacted, depending on whether Squidoo gets a good Panda rating or a poor one. A good one means that -- other things being equal, a page on Squidoo will be listed higher in search results than the same page posted somewhere else. Or, if Squidoo gets downgraded, it'll give lenses a slight disadvantage, like a golf handicap.

January 18ith is about the time my Squidoo traffic jumped by about 20%. However, I haven't seen a lot of Squidoo members gloating over a sudden traffic jump, so this is evidently not much of a sidewide change -- in which case, my own traffic boost is probably not due to Panda.

There's another Google update muddying the waters right now, making it difficult to tell which factor is causing what. Search Plus Your World now shows strongly personalized results in Google searches, including things your friends and circle have tweeted and shared. I'm not clear on whether Google has started giving more weight to socially shared links as a ranking factor— one of those 200+ factors mentioned above — or whether it's still only regarding social signals from "trusted authorities" (say, a link posted by Neil Gaiman) as important and all the rest of our Tweets, Facebook Likes, etc as only significant to our friends.

At any rate, any one of the recent reshufflings of what Google displays as seach results could explain my traffic boost. It's not just more traffic following a holiday lull, as this is significantly more traffic than I saw in 2011.

ETA: Here's the Quantcast chart for Squidoo traffic. It may show a modest bump in traffic from the latest Panda update, or it may be within seasonal variation:

Posted in: News.
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Thoughts on Squidoo's Revised Activity Stream

Jan 25th, 2012
by Greekgeek.
3 comments

UPDATE: This post is now obsolete, as Gil has continued tweaking the new activity stream and has taken our suggestions onboard. There are now TABS that let us filter our Squidoo activity stream according to sales or other specific info we might want to see, and the data goes back more than 200 entries. YES! THANK YOU, GIL!

 

 

Squidoo is testing an update to our Dashboard. Squidoo quests, LOTD, and HQ announcements appear in the Activity Stream. Participation in polls has been removed. Participation in quizzes is still there, for the moment. The stream gets truncated after listing 200 items from our own lens activity, but will show HQ blog posts, LOTD notifications, and other HQ announcements going back a month (I think).

Here's HQ announcement about the New Squidoo Activity Stream A/B Testing.  Obviously, it's not finalized.

The revised version has been unrolled for many Giant Squids, so it's gotten my two big Giant accounts. The sales data that I rely on has now been lost, and cluttered up with a bunch of things I used to filter out using Fluffanutta's Workshop Add-on from SquidUtils. I wanted to share this comment I made in SquidU's discussion of these changes, because I think it's an idea that has broader applications:

I would've loved if they'd just made Fluff's tool canon and then added a set of checkboxes that stuck, so we could set our dashboard up once and for all to show the stuff we care about.

I'm a victim of the A/B testing. It only shows the 200 most recent items from lens activity. For me, that's 100+ people taking my quizzes, and there's not even a day's worth of sales records. Every Sunday, I sit down and review my sales for the week. I'd grab the info right out of the activity stream and GREP it into a tab-delimited chart that I could plunk into Excel. Now there is no easy way to do that.

Every one of us has a different lens profile and different goals. Some people may WANT to track how many quizztakers and polltakers they've got. Maybe someone's built some polls for research purposes and honestly wants to see that. Whereas others of us are here to earn a living and don't want the quests, monsters, and points cluttering up our dashboard -- we're only interested in real-world results. If we could customize it to fit our needs, instead of being mashed into what Squidoo thinks we should use Squidoo for, that would be really great!

I loved Fluff's tool because it did exactly that: let us focus on whatever we think is important.

It's hard to make custom tools that show different information to different users. It's much easier to extrapolate what most people use a site for, and create an interface tailored to that particular kind of user, figuring that everyone else will manage anyway. Big sites like Squidoo have so many features and stats (yay!) that it's hit the point where they can't show everything. That's a given. But what we'd love is to be able to tailor those features and stats to suit our own needs, instead of being given the options package the car dealership thinks we want.

Posted in: How Squidoo Works.
Tagged: · ·

Squidoo Takes a Page from Facebook?

Jan 11th, 2012
by Greekgeek.
5 comments

There are two different Web 2.0 approaches.

One is to provide tools, widgets and open-ended features that let users share their content. This is an "opt in" model, in which you provide really useful tools, and users find powerful ways to use those tools which you didn't even dream about. That creates goodwill and draws more traffic to your site.

The other is to repurpose users' existing content, mining and exploiting it and redistributing it in new ways that users may not have imagined. Following Facebook's lead, this approach is usually presented as a fait accompli. If there's enough user pushback, the company may add an "opt out" option.

Squidoo has provided us with many handy tools and new modules -- building blocks -- and let users find great ways to use those blocks. It's also taken some building blocks away, including powerful ones we still miss. (Squidcasts and favorites.)

Other building blocks have broken, or never worked properly. I keep hoping Squidoo will shift from the attitude of, "If you can't put up with a site that's got frequent glitches, bugs, and nonfunctional tools, then Squidoo's not the site for you" to "Our site has fabulous tools, more than any other publishing site, and we're going to nurture and cultivate that edge. Tell us what's broken so we can fix it and maintain Squidoo's superiority over other user-generated content sites."

Instead, in the past year, Squidoo has been moving in the Facebook direction.

  • Our lenses get featured in Squidoo magazines -- except, in practice, our lenses don't actually appear in these magazines. Our lenses simply get links across the top promoting the magazine, boosting its search engine rankings, and diverting traffic away from our lenses. Lenses hijacked by Squidoo magazines also get yanked from the SEO-friendly Squidoo category tree. For example, Google search results will display a lens under the breadcrumb trail "Happy Snowman" instead of "Holidays > Christmas > Christmas Tree Decorations." "Happy Snowman" is less informative, so less likely to get clicked on, and it undercuts search relevance for "Christmas Tree Decorations."  After a user pushback, Squidoo gave us the ability to "opt out," but refused to change it to "opt in." That means that every month, more of our lenses are hijacked by Squidoo magazines, so we have to keep "opting out" if we care about SEO.
  • The Facebook Gift Guides mined our Facebook friends' personal information to create for-profit pages which implied our friends had endorsed them. Member pushback, pointing out the illegality of this, convinced Squidoo to make Gift Guides "opt in" rather than "opt out."
  • Now Squidoo's added a "pin it" button to the top of each Squidoo lens, granting members of a third party website, Pinterest, permission to copy, share, repost, redistribute, and embed full-sized images from our Squidoo lenses not just on Pinterest, but on any blog or third party website. I'm not sure that the temporary traffic spike of a social media share will compensate for having my best photos posted who-knows-where on the web, forcing me to compete with myself for image search traffic (which is responsible for most of my lenses with 500+ visitors a week). Pinterest's TOS  also claims the right to redistribute, manipulate, or sell images posted on its site. That's against the TOS for Zazzle images, affiliate images such as Allposters and Amazon, or images that we have paid license fees to use on our own articles.

What other ways will Squidoo repurpose our content?

I'm concerned that Squidoo's focus is shifting from creating and maintaining tools for us to publish content to finding new ways to use and exploit our content.  

That approach may well work for lensmasters who aren't getting much return out of their content. However, for me, it's a reason to reconsider which kinds of content to post on Squidoo, which elsewhere.

Posted in: How Squidoo Works.
Tagged: ·

Have You Written Your Rep About SOPA Yet?

Dec 15th, 2011
by Greekgeek.
1 comment

Here's why SOPA wrecks the internet and threatens many of the websites we use most:

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

They call it the Stop Online Piracy Act, but it's actually the Stop Online Publishing Act. It's too broad and too flawed, and it actually does very little to stop the most blatant and widespread form of internet piracy (see the video for why).

Here's why SOPA (in Congress) and PIPA (same idea, but in Senate) destroys the internet.

  • It blocks any site which could POTENTIALLY be used for copyright violations. Not has been used. POTENTIALLY used. So all user-generated content sites will be threatened by SOPA. ALL.
  • Internet providers will no longer be protected by "safe harbor" laws. Before, users, not webhosts, were liable for their own copyright violations. Under SOPA, the website, the domain, and the internet host will all be liable for everything their users post. If a copyright violation is found anywhere on their sites -- on YouTube, on Facebook, on Blogger, on Squidoo, on Tumblr, on Wikipedia -- the internet provider will be liable for copyright violation. They could be prosecuted for felony. (Before SOPA/PIPA, the fault was the copyright violator's, not the host site or internet provider).
  • It gives internet providers immunity from prosecution if they proactively remove any content that might be a violation. So webhosts and sites are motivated to remove anything, quickly, WITHOUT due process, WITHOUT any legal expertise on whether it's Fair Use or an actual violation, to protect themselves. This means that corporations can make false copyright violation claims to censor anything they don't like. Think it won't happen? It's already happening:
  • Before SOPA has even passed, one of its chief lobbyist sponsors, Universal Media Group, sent a takedown notice to YouTube to take down a video that criticized them. Universal Media Group claimed the video violated their copyright. This was untrue. The video simply criticized them. YouTube capitulated to the takedown notice. So SOPA will let corporations or governments remove content they don't like, because webhosts would rather be safe than liable for their users' content.
  • SOPA covers not only copyright content, but links. Your email provider and any service you use will be required to filter any links you share and make sure they don't point to any pages with copyright violations. Think those filters will work 100% of the time? And if some of the links on a page you post point to pages with copyright violations, you're liable.
  • Liability means you'll be considered a felon, will go to prison for five years and have to pay a fine. Yes, you, who posted a video of your five-year-old dancing and singing a song from the Little Mermaid on your Facebook profile.

Think this video and I are being alarmists? Think again. Here's an open letter by 83 of the engineers who helped invent and build the internet begging Congress not to wreck the web with SOPA.

This New York Times editorial discusses how SOPA institutes internet censorship on a scale comparable to China's.

Journalists are also deeply concerned about news sites being taken down by SOPA censorship.

WRITE TO YOUR REPRESENTATIVES. WRITE TO YOUR SENATORS. SOPA = The Stop Online Publishing Act, and it will NOT do much to stop piracy.

Congress will be voting on SOPA any day now. Right now, they're only hearing from Wal-Mart, Disney, and other big corporations. Remember, under SOPA, the internet provider has to shut down the entire domain if copyrighted content is posted on it. Can you think of any sites that might be impacted by that? (Hint: YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, and of course Squidoo and Hubpages.) Any user-generated content site will be at risk.

I don't normally write to my reps: I'm shamefully apathetic. But I've written them on this. Scarily enough, during the SOPA hearings, one rep after another used "I'm not a nerd" (translation: I don't understand how the web works) as an excuse before passing judgment on SOPA. They are deferring to Hollywood's high-paid lobbyists to tell them how this law works, and said lobbyists are obviously not mentioning the fact that SOPA violates due process.

We HAVE to tell Congress! Use little bitty words like  "kills jobs" "stifles innovation" and "no burden of proof" that even they can understand! Use all your copywriting skills to get through to them!

Posted in: News.
Tagged: ·

'Tis The Season -- For Sales Research

Nov 25th, 2011
by Greekgeek.
No comments yet

You should get holiday shopping lenses done now, because Google has been favoring fresh content more than ever, lately. (Of course, last month would've been better, to make sure it got indexed in time.)

Regardless, this is the time to gather data about what your visitors are buying. On Squidoo, click the $$$ tab on the dashboard to sort your lenses by recent affiliate sales. Right-click the "Stats" button under each lens with $$$ commissions, choose "open link in a new [browser] tab," then click Squidoo's "Royalties" tab to see what items were bought from that lens.

Create new articles targeting similar kinds of products, which evidently you can sell because you've already did sell some!

But wait— remember my little riffs about coincidental sales versus direct sales? Direct sales come from a review or "best of" list you wrote in which you featured the product. Coincidental sales come from articles you wrote for another purpose — a How To article or a tutorial, for example, where you featured books related to your topic or included the materials used in a crafts project.

It's the coincidental sales you want to look for. You already have lenses to sell the direct sale products, so you don't need to make another. But if you accidentally sold toothbrushes on a lens about hairbrushes, maybe you should make a toothbrushes lens.

There is actually a spectrum between direct sales and coincidental sales, because people often click on a product review, go to the online retail website, and wind up buying something else entirely.

Consider creating lenses on "I went to buy X but bought Y instead" products.

Of course, you'll have to use your judgment. There's many things that one visitor will buy that no one else will buy — that's the beauty of the long tail. But it's time to examine all your sales and see if you detect any patterns (similar kinds of purchases) or any really good ideas for product reviews. New lenses may not get out in time for this holiday season, but at least you'll have them for later.

(And yes, I can hear you saying: "but if I publish them now, and they aren't indexed in time for the holiday shopping season, then they won't be as fresh for the holiday season next year." To which I say: never cheat yourself out of publishing effective content that may be building up an income stream because of something Google might or might not be doing.)

Posted in: Making Money.
Tagged: ·

More Tips for Building Amazon Associate Links

Nov 21st, 2011
by Greekgeek.
2 comments

I'm always fiddling with ways to display Amazon Associate links with big bold images and appealing layouts so they get more clicks.

I've got a few tricks I use all the time. They're fast, and I do them almost without thinking about it.

Unfortunately, when I try to explain them, they look scary, because the code Amazon gives us is scary, then I have to insert minor tweaks.

Which is why I've filed this Squidoo Tutorial under Advanced CSS. For old Squidoo hands, it may be useful; for new Squids, it'll probably make your head spin:

My Amazon Associates Links Beat Squidoo's Links

Hopefully they will prove useful to somebody.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in: CSS and HTML Tips.
Tagged: · · ·

Google Tells Us a Few Algorithm Changes

Nov 16th, 2011
by Greekgeek.
No comments yet

Aha, here's an official blog of Google's that I didn't know about, and should have: Inside Search. Most of it is information on using Google's tools, but occasionally, they reveal information about algorithm changes.

This Monday, they posted Ten Recent Algorithm Changes.

Sometimes, the changes that Google tells us about are not actually the ranking factors that determine how highly a page gets listed in search results, but rather, display factors. Do you see the difference?

Ranking factors determine, "will Google show this link on page one of search results?" while display factors determine, "And how will it look, when Google shows it?"  People click on a link or not depending on what's displayed. However, a page has to get listed in search results where people will see it, before they start deciding whether to click it.

I'm a little tired to be deciphering Googlespeak. In Google's post, I'm having trouble distinguishing which announced algorithm changes are "ranking factors" and which are "display factors."  For example:

Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.

So, wait. On the surface, Google is talking about how it displays page titles in search results. That's a display factor. But then it says "links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant." That sounds like a ranking factor, and it makes sense: people who build backlinks for their own pages, tend to use their self-chosen keywords, whereas an impartial outsider who links to an interesting site is less likely to use that page's primary keywords in the anchor text.

So does this mean Google is starting to deprecate backlinks with keyword-optimized anchor text? I wouldn't be surprised if it did; Google's avowed definition of webspam is any practice which attempts to manipulate search engines into sending more traffic. But I'm not sure.

Some of the other "algorithm changes" in the aforementioned post are similarly ambiguous.

Here's another, separate tip. On Google's official blog, they've filed a lot of posts concerning the Google algorithm and the kind of content Google is trying to favor under the tag "search quality."

Posted in: News.

Note to Squidoo: Facebook Is STILL Evil

Nov 7th, 2011
by Greekgeek.
10 comments

Dear Squidoo:

No, I will not be taking advantage of this new "opportunity" to label my lenses for Facebook's Open Graph (and I think you should come out and inform non-savvy users that Open Graph is part of Facebook -- there, that's better). Why?

1. Facebook is evil.

Or, in case you're laughing at silly old Greekgeek and her quaint Facebook phobia, let's review:

What the CIA failed to do in 60 years, Zuck has done in 7: knowing what 800 million people--more than 10% of the world's population--think, read and listen to, plus who they know, what they like and where they live, travel, vote, shop, worship. — Forbes Magazine

Facebook is a big steaming pile of p....rivacy violations, a site designed to collect more and more more personal information from its members to sell to its advertisers. And it started with a Big Lie.

Originally, Facebook enticed users to join with promises of community and sharing their personal lives with their closest friends. Then Facebook turned their private info public and started selling previously-confidential information. Enter the Facebook Privacy Erosion Cycle: privacy protections would come down, savvy users fought back, Facebook promised not to do it ever again, then did it again a few months later, repackaging the launch slightly. Rinse and repeat, until Stockholm Syndrome wore down users' reservations, and Facebook could get onto the next personal-data-mining push.

"Privacy is dead!" Zuckerberg trumpeted again and again. "This is what YOU want! It's an OPPORTUNITY!" And then he made another million selling people's personal info to his advertisers.

Don't take my word for it. Take Facebook's word for it. See Facebook's Changing Privacy Policy Over Time. Or, better, view this fascinating animation of The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook.

Or take Zuckerberg's word for it. Remember, this is what he said soon after he started the embryonic Facebook:

  • Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
  • [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
  • Zuck: People just submitted it.
  • Zuck: I don't know why.
  • Zuck: They "trust me"
  • Zuck: Dumb fucks.

Source: http://articles.businessinsider.com

Enter Open Graph. Open Graph is Facebook's latest attempt to collect, codify, and spy on its users' web browsing activities. It's trying to get us to "integrate" our off-Facebook content with Facebook so that it can collect ever more specific information on our readers and visitors' viewing habits outside of Facebook's garden wall. It's doing this because it's maxed out the amount of content it's milking from its own users. Now Facebook is asking us to assist it in collecting information about users when they stray from its walled garden.

Again, don't take my word for it. Here's a good discussion of Open Graph by TIME's tech blogger.

So I don't want to hear about Open Graph integration as an "opportunity." It's an "opportunity" for Facebook, not for me, and not for my visitors. It's an "opportunity" for us only in the sense of this famous cartoon:

The "Free" Model by Geek & Poke

 

Yes, Google is also guilty of exploiting us as its personal piggybank, but that does not make it better. I have a few bones to pick with Google. However, Google never presented itself as a social community for sharing personal information with your friends, then tried to redefine the meaning of friendship itself in order to collect information for advertisers. That's bait-and-switch. At least Google was up-front the start that its goal was to collect and index any published information it could find.

Facebook has not earned my trust.  It may claim it's the web, just as AOL did in the 90s, but it does not deserve to be the web. Therefore, I will not let it gather information on my readers, and I will not assist Facebook in its bid to take over the web. (Update: it may be impossible to stop it, of course, since Facebook tracks and records all web browsing of non-members as well as members, once they've visited any Facebook page.)

Oh, and speaking of "opportunity," I've been seeing that word being used in a strange way lately. To quote Inigo, "I do not think that word means what you think it means." I keep seeing "opportunity" used in the context of someone  trying to exploit my content for their benefit. How very Zuckerbergian!

Think hard before sliding down the slippery slope to Zuckerberg perdition. Remember, there are— or were— alternatives.

Twitter is starting to win the social media war, because it does not go down the Facebook route.

Remember Squidcasts?

With Squidcasts, I was communicating directly with my readers who were interested in the subjects I was writing about.  With Squidcasts, I was able to give them highly-targeted, relevant info specific to their interests without collecting data on them, without forcing them to sign up with a social network. They got the benefit of my content, my tips, my recommendations— for free!— and it kept some of them coming back. They chose whether or not to subscribe to a particular article's Squidcasts, and they chose how to use the info I gave them, rather than the other way around. My traffic dipped slightly when Squidoo took Squidcasts away. Yes, Squidcasts were a bona-fide "opportunity," and now they are a missed opportunity...as in, "I miss them."

Remember Seth Godin's concept of "permission marketing"? Squidcasts (and Twitter) implemented that concept beautifully. Facebook betrays it.

Meanwhile, lately, I've seen other "opportunities" promoted on Squidoo— contests and such— only to find I'm excluded from those "opportunities" because they only exist through Facebook pages where I can't participate without turning over my personal info to Facebook.   When I signed up with Squidoo, Squidoo was not Facebook, and did not require me to be a member of Facebook to participate in Squidoo.

Don't go there, please. Don't relegate me to a second-class citizen because I like Squidoo but not Facebook.  Don't make Squidoo an appendage of Facebook.

Squidoo is better than that.

Posted in: Thinky Thoughts.

Don't Listen To Me

Nov 5th, 2011
by Greekgeek.
2 comments

This is an unsolicited, sincere, enthusiastic endorsement of a site on writing marketing copy and killer online prose.

But don't listen to me. Listen to Copyblogger.

For instance, check out the Magnetic Headlines ten-part lesson.

The site is chock-full of actionable, useful advice you can use right now to grab, hold, and tempt your readers to buy and click.

Make yourself a cuppa tea, coffee, or your favorite beverage. Take a break and explore the copywriting tips on this site. You'll be so glad you did.

Posted in: Conversion.
Tagged: · ·

Handy Squidoo Tip: Caption a Lens Logo or Text Module Graphic!

Nov 3rd, 2011
by Greekgeek.
No comments yet

Screencap from my lens

Eureka! Why didn't I figure this out sooner? There is a fairly simple CSS way to force a caption (including an image caption with clickable link) to hang out directly under a Squidoo lens logo or an image uploaded into the text module!

Ta-da! Actual screencap of a lens!

Here. I have, of course, created a new Squidoo tutorial:

Squidoo Image Captions: Handy Tip

Of course, the easiest thing would be if Squidoo would add an optional caption slot for images.

But then, I suppose there's no way to guess what height / style the caption slot ought to be. It depends whether you're trying to make a photo credit or some kind of comment/description.

Posted in: CSS and HTML Tips, Graphics Tips.
Tagged: · ·

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