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March, 2011:

Image Hosting on Your Own Domain

Mar 24th, 2011
by Greekgeek.
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I've used ICDSoft as my web host for 8 years now, long before Web 2.0 burst onto the scene. I've hosted various personal websites on it and used it as file storage space for online communities where I was an admin or member.

On Squidoo, I continue to find it extremely useful for image hosting. First, it's fast, and I'm not dependent on Squidoo's servers. Second, I have ICDsoft's own traffic stats data, which records longterm trends like keyword searches that brought people to those images. I've got eight years of keyword data to mull through when pondering what people search for -- I really need to spend more time digging through the records to help me brainstorm for lens topic ideas! Third, ICDSoft lets me block hotlinking.

Most importantly, having images hosted off-Squidoo lets me store the images for each lens in folders whose names reinforce SEO. For example, all my images for my volcano lens are stored in a folder named [blah blah]/volcanoes/[filename].jpg.  This means every single image reinforces the relevance of that lens for the keyword "volcanoes." You could use this technique on image hosting sites like Picasa and Photobucket as well, provided they let you name image folders, and those names are incorporated into the image URL.

On a side note... Where can you find information on which of your lens graphics is generating search traffic?

  1. Check Stats for that lens.
  2. Click the traffic tab.
  3. Scroll down to "Referrers" below the pie chart.
  4. Under "Referrers," click Google. For some reason Squidoo treats Google image search as a referrer, not a search engine.
  5. Look for referrals beginning with these words: /imgresimgurl. Shortly after that will be the URL of the image. That means someone did a Google Image search, saw your graphic in the results of the image search, clicked on that graphic and came to your lens.
  6. It's a little hard to decipher, but if you right click and copy that "referrer" URL into a spare document, then search for %3Fq%3D (which is a weird way of saying &q=, computerese for "query equals..."), everything after that is the actual search term someone typed in to find the graphic. %2B is computerese for a blank space. So for example, I see a referral with this gobbledygook:

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.istad.org/lenses/volcanoes/mount-pinatubo&imgrefurl=http://www.squidoo.com/volcanoes/97556311-Famous-Volcanoes&usg=___AnwaK1u9sgow3vyisU9v7n5ODg=&h=388&w=590&sz=62&hl=en&start=18&zoom=1&tbnid=4QfABOnxUcaYNM:&tbnh=140&tbnw=199&ei=_wOJTaymFonC0QG-qtSJDg&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dmount%2Bpinatubo%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DX%26gbv%3D2%26biw%3D1259%26bih%3D599%26tbs%3Disch:10%2C413&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=490&vpy=322&dur=3094&hovh=182&hovw=277&tx=153&ty=106&oei=TwGJTfrzFYm-0QGztcm8Dg&page=2&ndsp=18&ved=1t:429,r:8,s:18&biw=1259&bih=599

That means that someone found my lens by doing an image search for mount pinatubo. I'm really not sure how, since other images turn up ahead of mine in Google image search, but they did, so there you are. :)

Normally you'll never need to dig that deeply into your stats, but just in case, that's how. Don't ask me what all that other gobbledygook is, though.

The Most Powerful Way to Get Clickouts

Mar 14th, 2011
by Greekgeek.
3 comments

I've had a lens that's been driving me nuts. My Aligning Images tutorial was getting 500, 600, now 700-800 visitors a week, but it was always tier 2. Why?

Simple. People read tutorials, and then they leave. No clickouts means no tier one for you. I had included links to a free HTML editor and various other resources, and still, the fish weren't biting.

I changed one graphic which I had created for my How to Get More Clicks, Sales tutorial. I didn't really expect it to make that much of a difference.

Kapow. Tier one, baby. You can offer people freebies, useful resources, and printables on a silver platter, but they may not click. You need good clip art to get the clicks. (My favorite two are OpenClipart and clker.com.)

That, or everyone is too curious when they see a random URL of a YouTube video not to check it out.

I'd think that's a joke, except that I've seen a similar "What's in the box? I have to poke it!" effect when I use the Amazon module in thumbnail mode. Normally, people are less likely to click on small images than large ones. But if it's a "what the heck IS that thing?!" type graphic, they click, because they want a closer look. Sometimes they buy it. More often they buy something else. Or, maybe, they don't buy, but at least you scored a clickout!

I've seen a similar phenomenon on bizarre images with humorous captions that are slightly too small to read. Demotivational posters on Zazzle are very effective for clicks.

But of course, the most powerful way to get clickouts isn't a killer, you've-just-got-to-click graphic.

The key is that you have to link to the Extreme Shepherding video.

Google Panda/Farmer Update Cont'd

Mar 10th, 2011
by Greekgeek.
2 comments

I thought I'd check back in on Squidoo and Hubpages now that the Google Farmer Update (Panda update) has had some time to work. Short-term results can suggest major upheavals, but it's the long-term stats that really mean something.

Here's today's traffic charts from Quantcast, showing that Hubpages traffic has stabilized:

Google Panda Update Impact on Hubpages and Squidoo

Keep in mind that the update was only for Google's US search engine. It hasn't yet been unleashed globally. The drop in U.S. users is included in "global" as well as "local" results.

My prediction, based on what I'm seeing, is that after this change, Hubpages' traffic is going to be nearly the same as Squidoo's. It already is within the US.

The Spam's the Thing?

Jennifer Ledbetter of Potpiegirl.com made a mini study of specific spam phrases confirming by the numbers my guess in my last post on the Farmer Update: Squidoo's ongoing spam crackdown means it has fewer (but alas, still some) pages on the most spammy topics than Hubpages and several other sites. This DOES explain why ehow.com didn't lose places in the SERPs: it has even fewer pages matching these spam phrases.

Jennifer didn't test this, but we both also argued -- in different ways -- that Hubpages' much, much stricter policy on outbound links may be causing it some trouble. She pointed out that links on Hubs are nofollowed until you've reached a certain status. I related my experience of having all my hubs locked for having one link on each of them to cite the source of my photos. Squidoo's got a nine outbound link per domain limit, instead, and it nofollows affiliate links in its merchant modules.

Various other ideas have been thrown out to explain the change. Another thing I pointed out is the significantly lower bounce rate of Squidoo compared to Hubpages, ezinearticles, and (of course) mahalo.

There's just one problem.

The Quantcast traffic charts show Hubpages U.S. traffic simply dropped back to Squidoo's levels.

If my explanations and Potpiegirl's  guess about outbound links were correct, Squidoo should now be outperforming Hubpages. But it's not. They're now about the same.

Jennifer's spam study shows that Squidoo has fewer pages than Hubpages on the spammy topics she chose to test, but not all that much less. The last phrase she checked ("tv for pc") actually had more pages on Squidoo than Hubpages. (It really shouldn't be filtered as spam; how to watch television on a PC is a reasonable query. It's just gotten targeted by a lot of spammers trying to cash in on a popular search).

So my vote is on the spam being the deciding factor -- as it should be -- about how Google's picking "quality" sites.  Let's keep reporting and flagging it when we see it, folks, and for goodness' sake don't write on a Squiddont topic! Also, don't give up on Hubpages. It's gotten humbled, but it's no worse off than Squidoo. And keeping eggs in different baskets is always a good practice.

The Google Farmer Update and Squidoo

Mar 1st, 2011
by Greekgeek.
15 comments

Google Farmer Update: Early Returns

So, the manure has hit the rotary blades, and we're starting to see some results from Google declaring war on so-called "Content Farms" in 2011. (When even mainstream news media hears about it, you know it's big.)  Various pundits and industry experts had ideas on what content farms are, but until we saw the traffic shake-up, we couldn't be sure how Google defined them.

Of course, I hear the little Michael Martinez devil's advocate on my shoulder screaming "insufficient sample size, short-term data is inferior to long-term data"! but with that caveat, we've already got some apparent results.

Squidoo users, for the most part, haven't seen any changes in traffic:

Squidoo Traffic Farmer Update

 

Hubpage users are feeling some pain (it's all over their user forums), which is reflected in the Quantcast traffic data:

Hubpages Traffic Google Farmer Update

 

Go play with Quantcast to test your own favorites. Some aren't available yet (ehow, ezinearticles), or are CLOAKED (mahalo.com, surprise surprise) so Quantcast can't measure them.

For the big picture, see Danny Sullivan's "Number Crunchers: Who Lost In Google’s “Farmer” Algorithm Change?" on SearchEngineLand, although Squidoo is too small a squid to have attracted detailed stat analysis by the experts, unfortunately.

My own traffic stats reflect what Quantcast saw: in fact, my traffic has been increasing slightly since the change (repeat: limited sample size) not dropping.

So what does this all mean for Squidoo users, most of whom publish on a variety of other platforms as well (including Hubpages)?

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