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February, 2011:

The Latest Google Update and Squidoo

Feb 25th, 2011
by Greekgeek.
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A Squidoo Parable:

When I moved to a little condo by a lovely small park of grass and trees, I met my aged hippie neighbor taking a walk with weeds in his hand. He explained he weeded the park each day so that our homeowners' association would not spray chemical herbicides. We all benefitted from his effort, because we never had to inhale or walk on poison. Institutional solutions tend to be overkill.

I have always considered the "Report Abuse" button at the bottom of every Squidoo page to be our version of volunteer weeding, with one crucial difference: Squidoo HQ double-checks to confirm it's a weed before yanking it.

Since January, I have been concerned about Google's widely-discussed updates to weed out low-quality and scraped content. I'm glad Google is doing it: search results were getting junked up by content from the "build crap and slap ads on it to make money" brigade. At the same time, I'm worried my baby may be tossed out with Google's bathwater.

Obviously, I don't consider Squidoo a content farm, or I would not be turning my old academic papers into Squidoo lenses (revised for the general public), receiving random plugs from Washington Post columnists needing a source for ancient Greek military history, or making Squidoo into my main platform for publishing articles on everything from volcanology to CSS help to personal product reviews. I have been publishing articles on the web since 1993, because I'm committed to the web being a place where you can find out and share what you know on anything. But the reality is, I need to earn money on my content, so I began posting it on Squidoo where I would earn a passive income for my work.

There are thousands of others like me who put a lot of pride, research, and work into our Squidoo articles. After all, we don't earn a cent unless our pages actually perform with traffic, clicks, ratings and/or sales!

Yet on any open publishing site, there are always some who take short cuts. They're the ones that worry me. We don't want shoddy, low-quality pages eclipsing all our hard work. Thankfully, Squidoo has had mechanisms for years from spam filters to the Squid Angel volunteer program to ordinary members who report copied and spammy content so it can be weeded out. So hopefully Google has noticed our efforts, and will continue to rank good-quality Squidoo articles well. But we cannot be sure.

The good news is that (unsurprisingly), Squidoo HQ has also been watching developments at Google Webmaster Central. Read Megan's post in the official Squidoo announcements forum on additional steps Squidoo is taking to help detect and remove bad apples quickly and proactively.

We can all help, too, by continuing to tweak and improve our own lenses. Make sure you do not have content plucked from elsewhere (we don't know which copied content Google penalizes, and anyway it's against Squidoo's TOS). Look at the search queries on your traffic stats and ask, "Did my page answer what that person was searching for? Really?" Read your lens and ask, "If I found this as a random page on the web, would I read it? Would I click on some of these links? Really?"

Watch out for and report any copied content or spam you find. The "report abuse" button is at the bottom of every Squidoo page. Use it. I'm sure, in light of these developments, SquidHQ will be looking at those reports even more closely.

Google understands there are sites like Blogger (which it owns) where some people produce better quality than others, but the best content is unique and outstanding. Let's keep proving that Squidoo is a similar site.

Two Thoughts About Traffic and SEO

Feb 24th, 2011
by Greekgeek.
1 comment

These aren't really big enough to deserve a post, but they've been sitting in my "Post Topics" box forever, so I toss them out for whatever they're worth:

Greekgeek's Maxim:

Traffic isn't everything, but everything comes from traffic.

I've become more aware that clicks, sales, and other factors are almost more important than traffic. Traffic quantity certainly isn't as important as some people think: attracting 5 people who are ready to buy what's on your page is better than 500 people who are just browsing, or even 50 Squidoo members who are ready to say, "Nice lens!"  However, you can't get clicks, sales, or anything else without first getting at least some people to the page.

Yeah, it's stating the obvious again, but I kinda like the maxim.

SEO Is NOT Social Media; Both Get Traffic

I've stated this before, but never clearly enough.

1) When you're doing SEO, you're optimizing your content and links so that search engines notice them. Use specific language, keywords, and keyword research (traffic stats) to refine your SEO.

2) When you're doing social media, you're talking to people. People respond to clear, exciting, brief writing, appeals to emotions, and benefits. (What's in it for them?)

Always ask yourself: which method are you trying to use at the moment? Each requires a different approach. The one you choose to use may depend on your topic:

1) Some topics get traffic most easily through SEO: product reviews, for example, are not very exciting, but when someone needs to replace or buy a Quixtop 234, by golly they're going to search for Quixtop 234.

2) Certain topics almost can't get search engine traffic. Your personal story, your opinions, your advice about important issues, your passions may not fit into some neat little label someone might search for. Then you have to rely on social promotion: putting out Tweets and Facebook updates and viral videos and other person-to-person content that stands out enough to tempt someone to click.

Social promotion requires skilled writing and a grasp of psychology. You're running up against human indifference — they're busy, so why should they read your page? You need to "be remarkable," as Seth Godin puts it, in order to attract visitors and word-of-mouth recommendations. It can be done. But it's not easy. Check out Seth's blog for one example of how it's done well.

What to Write on to Get Traffic

Feb 23rd, 2011
by Greekgeek.
1 comment

Apologies for stating the obvious (again), but yet another "just write on what you love, and the traffic will come" post in a forum inspired me to make this graphic:

How to Pick Topics That Get Traffic

Traffic does not come to read what YOU like to write about. Traffic comes to find what THEY are searching for. The key to getting traffic is to find the overlap between the two!

Oh No, Should I Update More Often?

Feb 13th, 2011
by Greekgeek.
3 comments

Ugh. There's a part of the Squidoo lensrank algorithm I've been ignoring, because it's not what I want to be doing. From the Squidoo FAQ:

Wikipedia has a system with one entry per topic. We don't. Instead, we encourage multiple lenses on a topic. Then, we use an automated algorithm-LensRank-to rank the lenses. We look at community ratings, lensmaster reputation, clickthrough rates, frequency of updates, inbound and outbound links, revenue generated, and lots of other factors and give the lens a number.

Fine and dandy. But I have over 200 lenses! I generally don't update unless I've heard some news, discovered a product, or found some interesting tidbit to add to an existing lens. Only rarely do I go back and substantially tweak/improve lenses. A photo here, a caption there, adding a new featured lens or widget, sure, but most of my updates are cosmetic. I republish each lens every sixty days, since lenses sitting longer than that appear under the "needs to be updated" label, but beyond that, it's ad hoc.

However, I'm beginning to suspect that republishing lenses once a week really does give a lensrank boost, especially to bottom-of-the-heap lenses. Check out this week's lensrank on Sunday, two days after I actually did republish all my lenses:

Most of the tiers haven't changed that much, which is good: they're holding position through performance. However tier 4 ("dud") shows a distinct improvement between last week and this week.

IS it worth it? Republishing every lens takes a lot of time, and updates are meaningless unless one looks at every lens and edits/improves each one. I'm sure most of those updated tier 4s are just going to earn 25 to 30 more cents as tier 3 lenses, at best. Whoopie.

I don't want to just republish for the sake of republishing. It's time consuming and perhaps not as valuable as making another lens. However, I may be doing it more often than every sixty days, now.

Fooey. I honestly hope the results turn out to be "it doesn't make much difference," but that uptick is troubling me.

And in more cheery news, my 2011 goals are on track so far. Can't wait for the next payout.