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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.

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.

Squidoo Pay Day Coming: Two Things to Check

Sep 6th, 2011
by Greekgeek.
2 comments

Squidoo Pay Day is almost here. Someone usually posts a thread in SquidU when earnings start showing up in our dashboard.

You can find them by clicking the "stats" link under an individual lens, then the "earnings" tab. There's an Ad Pool "earnings" amount showing for 7/30. That's July earnings, which will be paid in September.

Nice to know, but first something to check: are your Payment Settings correct?  It's a bummer when a charity drops from Squidoo's list, so that your donation to your favorite charity goes to another instead. It's even more of a bummer when you make a co-brand lens that sends all your earnings to charity by default, or when Squidoo glitches and sends your earnings to charity. I've started taking a screenshot of all my lens payment settings for my records.

You get to the "Payment Settings" overview of which lens is set to donate to which charity by clicking "My Settings"  at the upper right of Squidoo's control strip, then "Payouts,"  then scroll down and click "Individual Lens Settings."

One more thing. Do you have multiple accounts? There are advantages and disadvantages to niche accounts. One disadvantage is that you pay the Paypal transaction fee on EACH account, which is (I think?) something like 2%, capped at $1. I'm a little worried about Squidoo glitches and the hopper, but I've just raised the payout threshold on my accounts to $50.

Are Squidoo Tag Pages Dead, Or Just Different?

Aug 9th, 2011
by Greekgeek.
8 comments

Katinka has raised some important interlinking questions about how recent changes at Squidoo are impacting SEO of our lenses. We don't have all the answers -- are these changes temporary or permanent? -- but I've been pondering interlinking alternatives.

One important method of interlinking on Squidoo is, or was, Squidoo tags.

Fluff explained how Squidoo tag pages work on his SquidUtils blog back in '09. Squidoo tags sit in our lens sidebar and point to a tags page. For example, here's Squidoo's lenses on pirate costumes. That tags page lists all the lenses sharing that tag, including a brief excerpt of the introduction of each lens. If all the lenses are relevant to a topic, and their introduction text reinforces that topic, then, presumably, the tags page acts as a relevant backlink.  But if it's an orphaned tag shared by few or no other lenses, then the tag page may not matter much: it looks really empty, and I don't see much relevant link juice.

In the past, I've occasionally seen Squidoo tag pages appear in Google search results.

But now...

(more...)

Google Adsense on Squidoo Lenses

Jul 19th, 2011
by Greekgeek.
1 comment

Are your Google ads on Squidoo wildly inappropriate? Well, that sucks.

It would be worse on your own website, where clickthroughs directly impact earnings. On Squidoo, poorly-targeted ads don't impact you quite so directly, since you're not getting paid for individual clicks. (Otherwise people might game the system.) Instead, all Adsense revenue for Squidoo lenses gets put in the monthly Ad Pool -- which also includes other advertising -- and then distributed to the 85,000 top performing lenses via payout tiers.

However, there are three reasons poorly-targeted ads on Squidoo still matter to Jane Q. Lensmaster.

  • Highly inappropriate ads may turn off readers. "I'm an abuse survivor looking for tips on how to escape a stalking ex, and the ads are for people who want to hire private detectives to snoop on their spouses. UGH!"
  • Clickouts. You want clickouts, don't you?
  • Indirectly, of course, we all benefit from more effectively targeted ads.

So, er, how does Google pick the ads for Adsense anyway? Well, as usual, I was tinkering around under the hood of a Squidoo lens, and I think I may have found the answer:

<!-- adsense setup -->
<script>
[... blah blah blah ...]
GA_googleAddAttr("cont_tag", "computer history,brief history of the internet,cern,computer history,history of web,internet history,internet map,internet timeline,tim bernerslee,web,who invented the internet,who invented the web,world wide web,www");
[... blah blah blah ...]
</script><!-- /adsense setup -->

See that "cont_tag" stuff? That's the Squidoo tags for that lens. Assuming I'm understanding the code correctly, Google is using Squidoo tags to help it pick the ads on the page, as opposed to simply analyzing the page and deciding for itself what your page is about, as it does for search. (Alternatively, Adsense may be analyzing the text on your page and combining that data with what your keywords are to pick its ads.)

If you were really trying to maximize every click, you might want to poke around in Google's Keywords Tool to find strong related keywords that advertisers are bidding for (that's the competition) and that lots of people are searching for. That tool is what many of us use for SEO, but was actually designed to help you find and choose keywords for Google Adsense.

However, we've got other stuff to worry about besides optimizing our pages for Google ads. So it's not worth your time to do it on Squidoo... unless you're getting wildly inappropriate Adsense ads. In that case, it might be worth trying Google's keywords tool to find alternative keyword phrases whose related searches seem to be more in line with what your page is about.

Unfortunately, not all ads on Squidoo lenses are Adsense: a significant number are Chitika, and they're the ones that tend to be off-base. I see a bit of code that may imply the keyword tags are used by Chitika. But on the other hand, Chitika ads are often based on what people have searched to find your page, or on local advertisers in your reader's neck of the woods. So the Chitika advertising on a Squidoo lens may not have much to do with your topic, but at least, hopefully, they have something to do with your reader.

Since the dawn of the web, I've learned most of what I know about HTML, CSS, and webpage design by checking under the hood with "View Source" (or, alternatively, through my shareware web page editor...MacOSX only, sorry) found under the "view" menu of most web browsers. I've discovered a lot of things about Squidoo this way. I don't understand everything I see, but it's fun detective work.

 

Squidoo Setbacks

Jun 14th, 2011
by Greekgeek.
6 comments

Since Squidoo's removal of favorites, Squidcasts, fanclubs, page breaks, bio box content, lensrolls and so many other  changes, it's impossible to tell which are the contributing factors in lensrank changes. A slight drop in Google traffic  muddies the waters further.

But now that we're past the flurry of updates precipitated by these changes, and Squidoo is starting to stabilize, I see that this is not simply a temporary lensrank churn. I'm down to 5-7 regular tier one lenses from 10-12 before these changes. That represents a loss of over $150 a month. I've got tier 2 lenses with 500+ visitors. All together, about 30 lenses have tumbled down into the "dud" range, making nearly a third of my lenses non-earning. (See my Squidoo Stats.) Sales are down slightly too, although some of that is seasonal.

I had guessed, but was never sure, that number of fans was a minor lensrank factor. My lensrank drop across the board seems to confirm it. If so, that's good news for newbies. But I can't be sure that's the cause. Many lenses which dropped were page break lenses and/or received visitors from Squidcasts, since I used to use them to share Squidoo tips or interesting news related to the topics of my lenses. And all these changes have shaved about 2000 weekly visitor total from my lens portfolio. Therefore I'm left guessing: too many factors, no way to know which is the cause.

On Squidoo, the cause doesn't always lie in your lenses, but in everybody else's: lensrank is a comparison between all lenses on the site. Many members had to do a tremendous amount of updating as a result of Squidoo's recent changes, and all those updates mean different content, which Google will have noticed. There may be other Google factors, too: Google may have reacted to the changed structure of Squidoo brought about by the loss of lensrolls, navigation links in bio boxes, the extra Adsense above the fold, or other changes.

And just because many of us have experienced drops does not mean there haven't been gains elsewhere. Quantcast.com's Squidoo traffic measurements suggest no more than typical seasonal variation. So I don't think it's just Google traffic. Other members may have good lenses that were overlooked under Squidoo's old system. I'm not seeing any more spam or junk lenses than usual at the top levels of Squidoo. Just stiff competition.

So now what? My personal goal to have Squidoo earning me $1500 by the end of this year has been set back by all these changes: I'm still not through fixing all my page break lenses, and I have created almost no new lenses apart from repotted page breaks. Some are getting traffic, and may in the long run be successful, but for now they are struggling to get onto Google's radar; it still has some of them filed under their old page breaks. I was hoping to get my niche account up to Giant status this month, since it was rejected in April, but I'm still working on page break repairs there, too, and will probably miss the June deadline.

Beyond Squidoo, I've been seeking other baskets for my eggs, but each requires a learning curve that's difficult to climb while at the same time doing Squidoo triage. Wizzley.com is a possibility. I see Hubpages as a sleeper opportunity: Squidoo got hit hard by a Google slap 2007, got written off by many, and came back stronger. Print-on-Demand sites like Zazzle continue to have untapped potential. Self-hosted blogs or sites are probably the most viable long-term option. The closure of Amazon Associate programs in many states is worrying me: it may make the only monetization of my main blog obsolete. Longterm, the answer for me is to get my first novel published, but I was hoping to use Squidoo and other online earnings to provide a base income while I buried myself in writing.

In short, this is a rough time for all of us. I don't have the answers, and in fact I can't post many Squidoo tips right now, since the strategies that used to work for me seem to be sputtering. I just wanted to share my own experiences, to let others know that you're not alone: even experienced Squids hit rough patches. Like any job, the test is to persevere, find and identify what you can work on, and look for and test alternatives.

The Latest Google Update and Squidoo

Feb 25th, 2011
by Greekgeek.
No comments yet

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.

Thad Has a Thought

Nov 4th, 2010
by Greekgeek.
2 comments

(Yes, I am Thad)

I've avoided posting this because I'm afraid it might set off a kerfluffle.

But ostrich mode is boring, so.

It has always been true that a lens published mid-month will probably not earn until the next month, because however strong its launch, its average lensrank for all the days it didn't exist should be estimated as...what...? two million?  Lower than any lens that had a single visitor However, I think it was once possible to get a payout for a lens' first month of existence, if it did phenomenally well.

However, if I'm understanding Fluffanutta right -- and he knows Squidoo's guts as well as anybody -- a lens now earns nothing from the Ad Pool during its first partial month of existence, full stop. (It is eligible for affiliate sales through modules like Amazon from day one.)

This raises a question.

(more...)

Tier One Lenses: How Much Traffic Do They Need?

Oct 14th, 2010
by Greekgeek.
2 comments

Challenge Lens Status: LR 5648 today, Oct 14. Started at 84,121 on Oct. 10.

Many factors must sustain a Tier One Lens: a combination of traffic, clickthroughs, community ratings, sales, frequency of updates, and factors Squidoo keeps under its hat. (My guess: visitors interacting with polls, duels, etc; and maybe Squidoo counts it somehow if you're getting traffic from more different referrers.)

Different types of lenses find a winning formula in different ways, depending on the topic and the working style of the lensmaster.

For example, Jollyvillechick's 40+ Things My Husband Does Right will probably not be sustained by search engine traffic, unless her mention of battery testers or other specific products in the "he fixes stuff" section catches search engines' fancy. However, it's a well-written human interest lens, so it may succeed through social media promotion and word of mouth.

Other people's lenses succeed through sales and/or extensive social promotion and linkbuilding. Mine succeed primarily through a combination of traffic and clicks, a trickle of Squidoo community ratings, and the rare sale. I also re-publish every 60 days, but I only see a small 3-4 lensrank spike from it, so I don't rely on update frequency.

Therefore, I need to tackle each of the first four factors.

Let's talk traffic.

(more...)

Old Squidoo Lens Rises from Lensrank 100K to 10K in 7 Days

Oct 12th, 2010
by Greekgeek.
No comments yet

This is why SquidQuizzes need extra content.

Take a look at what happens to the lensrank of an old SquidQuiz when I supplement it with new content for search engines to pick up. A little promotion doesn't hurt either.

Average Lensrank -  Nov '09 to Sep '10: 105,197

Lensrank - Oct 5 2010: 101,282

Lensrank - Oct 12 2010: 13,824


Ten months in the life of a Squidquiz:

Squidquiz Lensrank by MonthBreakdown from SquidUtils:

Date Lensrank Visits
November 2009 127,995 1
December 2009 93,938 36
January 2010 103,854 66
February 2010 121,585 47
March 2010 110,926 53
April 2010 80,809 51
May 2010 118,422 48
June 2010 89,571 35
July 2010 122,344 43
August 2010 106,551 49
September 2010 103,974 52

Lensrank Last Seven Days:

Squidquiz Lensrank By Day

Breakdown from SquidUtils:

Date Lensrank Visits
30 September 2010 104,110 0
1 October 2010 108,284 0
2 October 2010 109,855 4
3 October 2010 106,819 4
4 October 2010 103,502 6
5 October 2010 101,282 4
6 October 2010 69,496 3
7 October 2010 75,158 1
8 October 2010 80,357 3
9 October 2010 84,138 4
10 October 2010 84,121 6
11 October 2010 25,125 18

So far so good, although most of this is not sustainable since it derives from SquidLikes which wear off in a few weeks.

However, as outlined in the first post for the Tier One Challenge, I've been laying the foundations for longterm improvements; the Squidoo social stuff is a side effect and not what I'm targeting. I see single search traffic results from Yahoo, Google, and Ask targeting the new lens content, and a couple visits from the LJ* post I made yesterday.

Today I'm going to work on syndication of Squidcasts and RSS feeds.

I already have a syndicated PR2 Livejournal blog that's several years old where I announce updates to Ancient Greece Odyssey, so I just announced the quizzes there, and I'll announce it on Mythphile.com as well, a PR3 site that's 2.5 years old.

I'm also going to finish updating related lenses, the other Squidquizzes in the series. I did most of them last week, but there's two still awaiting my attention. They all cross-link to each other, so they need uniform look-and-feel plus good content on all of them, which will attract traffic and drive some to the test quiz.

*(I'm both surprised and relieved that Livejournal, forerunner of MySpace and Facebook, has never registered on SEO / Social Media radar; it's only a huge social blogging community that's been around since the 90s! But it's not designed in an SEO-friendly manner like modern blogging software and sites.)
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