social-media

Partial Recovery of Lost Squidoo Fans List

I don't like losing useful information (see Spirituality's blog post on why the Squidoo fans list was useful). I had meant to go on a tour of ALL my Squidoo fans after I hit 1000 fans last month, but hadn't gotten around to it. I'm not sure when I'll have time for that, but I can at least provide a backlink at the end of this post to some of you — THANK YOU!

Grab Search Engine Caches of Your Fans List

Many search engines let you view cached copies of their last crawl of each webpage. If they're not too efficient, their cached copy may be from just before fans disappeared from our lensmaster profiles. Unfortunately, in 2010, Squidoo started displaying only a selection of your fans and hid the rest behind a "more" link which search engines can't see. So many fans are gone for good. But this will recover at least some.

You're probably thinking, "What about the Wayback machine?" and rightly so. However, its archives will still be around next week. Whereas search engines' caches only exist UNTIL the search engine crawls the webpage again. Here's the ones I found whose cached copies -- as of June 2nd -- predate Squidoo's removal of fans. I used a few international search engines since they tend to crawl English sites less frequently:

GOOGLE. Search Google for: cache:http://www.squidoo.com/lensmasters/yourname
Bing.com: search for: lensmaster page yourname
then mouseover to the right hand side of the listing, click the right-arrow that pops up, and scroll down to the bottom to find the cached link. I couldn't get this to work on Chrome, only Firefox.
Yandex, the main Russian search engine: search for lensmaster page yourname
then click the копия link (if you've got Google translate turned on, it says "copy"). This was the most up-to-date one just prior to Squidoo removing fan clubs.
Baidu, the main Chinese search engine. Search as usual, then click the only link right under each search result. It only has some lensmaster pages. (While you're at it -- I don't normally recommend wasting time submitting your pages to search engines, since most crawl Squidoo very often anyway, but with international SEs it may be worth it. Here's the submit URL link for Baidu. Keep in mind Baidu will tend to favor content in Chinese and/or content of interest to people in China, plus your content has to pass web censorship, but at least some Squidoo pages are getting through the Great Firewall of China. But do that later. Let's grab your fans first).
Gigablast.com: search for lensmaster page yourname as usual and click "cached". This was a fairly recent cached copy as well.
Exalead: Who are these people? Donno, but they're saving caches of the web. Search as usual and hit the "cached" button.

You will note that most search engines give you a date for when their crawled copy of your page was cached. Make a note of the most recent one to get a fairly accurate estimate of your fans just before they vanished. Ah, vanity.

Find More Fans From the WayBack Machine

Once you've gotten all the fans you can find through search engine caches, THEN go to the Wayback Machine aka Internet Archive and punch in http://www.squidoo.com/lensmasters/yourname into the "Take me back" search box. This will pull up a calendar. Dates with highlights represent cached copies of the page; click on one of them to go to that date. Then you'll have a menu at the top of the screen that lets you skip forward and back through cached copies. The layout for Squidoo pages from 2010 onwards is too complicated for the Wayback Machine to reproduce correctly, but the fans list is there: scroll down to find it. Note that pre-2010 Wayback Machine caches of your lensmaster page include ALL fans from that time, since Squidoo displayed the whole list until 2010.

Copy that data into your document too. Save it.

Dump your list into Microsoft Excel. Add a row at the very top (row one) and label it "Names." Then, to hide duplicates:

Select the column of names.
choose "Filter > Advanced Filter..." under the Data menu
Say "OK" if you get a nag popup.
Click the "Unique Records only" box and click okay.

And you can sort the column alphabetically. Alas, the result will be all your pre-2010 fans, but coverage of recent fans will be spotty.

A note on lensrank:

The Squidoo FAQ has long mentioned "lensmaster reputation" as one of the factors in lensrank. In 2009, as part of my comprehensive lensrank study, I guessed — although I can't be sure — that this included fans as a lensrank factor (probably only a minor one). Right after Squidoo dropped the fans list, I dropped to 5-6 tier one lenses. That represents about a $150 drop in income. Ouch. I'm hoping that drop is due to the fact that everyone is scrambling to update their lenses to cope with all Squidoo's changes, but maybe it means a more level playing field for newbies.

Backlinks for MY Fans: A Small Thank You

I only recovered half of my 1045-ish fans (wah!) but as a small thank you, here's all the ones I've managed to save. The links will be very minor backlinks. (I've added a few more that I know were on there.) Feel free to add yours in comments if you like, and thanks again.

(more...)

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.

Recent Posts

My Webhost Since 2003

Archives

Categories

Blogroll

My Profiles

Search

Subscribe by Email

My Best Squidoo Tutorials