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January, 2012:

Panda Update 3.2 Happened January 18

Jan 26th, 2012
by Greekgeek.
6 comments

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: Click the widget below to view the full-sized 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. (Here's Hubpages' traffic, too, for comparison.)

    

 

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.

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.