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Squidoo

Silly Squidoo Trick: 3-Month Stats Shortcut

Aug 11th, 2011
by Ellen.
No comments yet

Do you check your long-term (or at least medium-term) stats regularly to investigate traffic sources and keyword trends?

Here’s a fun trick. Make sure you’re logged into Squidoo, then click this SquidStats shortcut (I programmed it myself; it’s safe).

This shortcut skips over the multiple steps I was having to take to see three-month stats:

  1. go to the dashboard
  2. click “Stats” under a lensname
  3. click “traffic” tab
  4. choose “3 month range”

The only catch is that you have to remember a lensname — the part of a lens URL minus http://www.squidoo.com — or have the lens open so you can grab the end of its URL. (or, if on the dashboard, right-click to copy the URL, paste it into the entry box, but delete http://www.squidoo.com/ before hitting return.)

If you find this Squidstats shortcut useful, then drag it onto your bookmarks bar.

Are Squidoo Tag Pages Dead, Or Just Different?

Aug 9th, 2011
by Ellen.
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…)

Check Your Article in Google’s Cache

Aug 9th, 2011
by Ellen.
2 comments

Do you know what Google knows of your article?

The result may surprise you.

Take the URL for your article, hub or lens and Google the following:

cache:http://www.squidoo.com/yourlens

If you see spinny “loading” icons, that means Google doesn’t have that part of your page indexed. Google will only send search traffic based on the content it can see and index.

Other places you can check:

  • Webconfs’ Spider Simulator, especially useful to see what links are crawlable on your page
  • The Internet Archive: does it have a copy of your page yet? If it does, search engines most certainly do.

When Squidoo (or any) website is glitching…

Aug 8th, 2011
by Ellen.
3 comments

We’ve endured about two weeks of connection timeouts and edits that refuse to take. You may want to give up entirely and work on some other site. But if you’ve got work on Squidoo that can’t wait, get in the habit of this simple, VITAL technique:

Right before hitting the “Save” or “Post” button on a field of text, ALWAYS click Control-A (Command-A on Mac) to Select All, then Control-C (Command-C) to copy the contents to the clipboard.

That way, no matter what, you’ve saved what you just wrote and can copy it to a text document or try again. It’s an imperfect solution — and I advise working in a text document for longer chunks of text and pasting them across — but it will save you at least a little screaming.

My Five Key Methods of Squidoo Success

Jul 28th, 2011
by Ellen.
5 comments

…which aren’t quite as successful as they were due to Squidoo setbacks, but that’s another issue. Even so, while I’m panicking at having my Squidoo income dropping from $600 to $400 in the next month or so due to lensrank drops and recent upheavals, I have not abandoned five key methods I use for being moderately successful on Squidoo.

Most of you have seen me rant about all of these before, but I see some new Squids coming aboard who are asking “so, how do you do it?” Also, I wanted to do a self-check and see which methods I’ve discarded, which I’m still using. These are the clear winners:

1. Choose Topics that Meld Your Passions & the Web’s

I created this diagram a while ago for Squidbits, and it still holds true:

How to Pick Topics That Get Traffic

If you write on what you love without considering your audience, people may never read it, because they may not be interested in what you have to say. But if you use the “content farm” method of looking up what people are searching for and churning out half-hearted content, they won’t read it either, because your material won’t satisfy them. The trick is to figure out which parts of your interests, expertise and passions overlap with what lots of people on the web care about, and then use YOUR knowledge to give them what THEY want.

To figure out what YOU know (the left side of this chart), see my Ten Suggestions for Squidoo Lenses, which is NOT a list of specific ideas, but a brainstorming aid.

To find out what THEY want, do this:

2.  Keyword Research and On-Page Optimization

See my “New Long Tail SEO” tutorial for how I research keywords before creating a new page, and how I use traffic stats on existing pages as leads to refine my content or as ideas for new articles.

3. Encourage Clickthroughs

See my “How to Get More Clicks, Sales” tutorial.

Squidoo lensrank rewards lenses that get lots of clicks and interaction, on the theory that, hopefully, they’ve found something useful or interesting enough to click on. Clicks aren’t the only proof that your visitors have found something they like on your page, but it’s hard to gauge readers’ reactions unless they interact with the page in some manner.

4. Attract Visitors With Graphics

See the “attracting visitors with images” section of my Uploading Images tutorial. I love this method because it’s so easy to do; you can incorporate it just like capitalization and punctuation.

5. Cross-link Related Content

Once I’ve landed a visitor, I try to make the most of that visitor by sending him/her to more of my content. You can’t cheat by creating a virtual scavenger hunt sending visitors from one page to the next looking for real content—if you don’t give visitors what they want, they leave in ten seconds or less. But if you’ve provided good content that your visitor likes, you have then earned his/her trust enough to recommend other related content.

You’ve seen one way I’m doing it in this article: when I refer to something I’ve talked about before, I link to it. I also make heavy use of Squidoo tags for cross-linking. And I create clusters/series of articles in the same area or niche, linking them together with fancy tables of contents, the “Featured Lenses” module, the “My Lenses” module (giving all the lenses in the cluster a unique tag), or the “Rollover Feature” trick I figured out for Squidoo.

All of These are Making the Most of One’s Assets

You’ll notice that I don’t focus on social promotion, backlink building, or external strategies more than I absolutely must. I tweet new material, yes, but I don’t submit to directories; I don’t look for places to advertise my articles other than online communities where I’m active anyway.

Instead, I concentrate on maximizing my content with on-page optimization, on-page graphics, on-page links, and pointing to my other work where and when it’s relevant and useful. Rather than taking time off to advertise, I spend as much time as I can making more content and enhancing existing content. This method takes time. It results a slow build-up of real, useful, interesting assets and content on a variety of subjects.

You can do this in different ways: blog posts, more articles on multiple publishing sites, even posting photos on Flickr or videos on YouTube and linking back to related lenses. (For example, see this YouTube video where I share a Magic Trick pointing to a lens that explains the trick).

The key for me is to spend my time discovering what content I have (I’ll actually dig through my hard drive looking for old school papers and photos that might be seeds for a new lens), creating unique and interesting content, and hooking it up to other nodes of my ever-growing network of content.

Whch is why I kick and scream when people tamper with my content through “site improvements” or by removing the channels through which I’ve been sharing tips and content. (See: Squidcasts. ;) ) I do not want to have to use social media separately to promote. As much as possible, I want my content to be its own promotion! (RSS feeds are lovely for this.)

Finally, notice that this method absolutely depends on creating original, unique, interesting and/or useful content — MY content, MY passions — rather than simply collecting and curating content. Curation can be powerful and helpful, and I’ve got a few lenses that are simply curation lists in fancy packaging. But the majority of my lenses hook visitors with interesting and/or useful content that they won’t find elsewhere.

Google Adsense on Squidoo Lenses

Jul 19th, 2011
by Ellen.
3 comments

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.

 

Simple Tip: Copying Google Search Links

Jul 17th, 2011
by Ellen.
1 comment

I was a total idiot recently, wondering why my dashboard comments pane looked weird, until Fluff pointed out there was a long URL in it. (If I’d just taken care of the comment instead of sticking it on my To Do list, this would not have been a problem)!

But it illustrates an annoying problem about Google search results. Long ago, when you searched for something on Google, the Google search result page gave you the actual link of each search result. Nowadays, it throws a bunch of invisible gobbledygook into the link.

For example, if you search for “Nessie Heinrich Harder” (the name of an artist who did a painting of Nessie), you get:


The Loch Ness Monster: Nessie

www.proof-of-evolution.com/loch-ness-monster.html- Cached

Is Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster, really a plesiosaur trapped in a giant … A plesiosaur drawn by Heinrich Harder in 1916. The weight and anatomy of a …

 

Well, there we go. Want to share that link? You’d think you’d just right-click the clickable link, right? The part that’s underlined.

WRONG! If you do that, the URL copied to your clipboard is a monster:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBgQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.proof-of-evolution.com%2Floch-ness-monster.html&ei=sEojTsnVKMrc0QG45cnEAw&usg=AFQjCNHQAvPvGAL91lnFlD5fWh06KB21Dw

Ugh. Google, why? Okay, yes, I know why. You want to track every use of Google, and possible getting people to go to Google, not bypass you. But tough. I don’t wanna share that huge long link! I want the URL!

One could copy and paste the link written out under the page title:

www.proof-of-evolution.com/loch-ness-monster.html

But on Google’s listing it (a) isn’t a link, so you can’t right-click it to grab it and (b) is missing http:// at the beginning.

So, either you have to put the http:// back in, or you click on the link, GO to the webpage, and grab its real URL from this location bar. This is a good idea in case there’s a redirect. Also, you should probably not share a link without checking the page yourself  to make sure it’s kosher. You never know when a page will have a horribly annoying popup or other problem your readers may not appreciate.

Keeping up with new lenses by some good lensmasters

Jul 7th, 2011
by Ellen.
No comments yet

It’s no substitute for SquidCasts, but Mimi has her own personal Google Reader page keeping up with the RSS feeds of 100+ good Squidoo lensmasters. This will show new lenses by these lensmasters.

Squidoo Setbacks

Jun 14th, 2011
by Ellen.
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 Ellen.
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.

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