Addendum — just because I’m curious — how many Squidoo pages have the different search engines got indexed?
- Google: about 1,340,000 from squidoo.com (This was in JANUARY. In June, it is about 398,000! Mayday! Mayday!)
- Yahoo: Pages (9,671,276)
- Bing: 446,000 results
- Altavista: found 9,660,000 results
- Lycos: 1,107,211 results
- Ask: 222,500 (? — I’m not sure if I figured out how to query Ask properly.)
Again, I don’t think Google’s spiders are less effective than Yahoo’s — no WAY — but it tosses an awful lot of pages into the “suppemental index” if they seem not to give any good info that can’t be found on other pages on the same website. I.E. if you make a lens that’s just like a ton of lenses, don’t expect it to get seen in Google search results!
To figure out if your lens is indexed, use one of the searches above, then add the title of your lens!
You said it in the forum today:
“It bugs me that Squidoo has become so dominated by lenses on cooking recipes, homestuff and child care as if that were all that Squidoo members and visitors might be interested in.”
and I’m sure you will get no thanks for saying so.
I’m hard pressed to find Squidoo visitors for my lenses – they’re not really interesting for most WAHMs, many of who seem to be of the Christian, Republican persuasion. Still, I like the Squidoo look!
I have to be careful. On the one hand, I hate that Squidoo has lost the wide range of lenses it used to have, and that official encouragement from the top has chosen to support one narrow slice of the Squidoo community.
On the other hand, I like the fact that WAHMs are finding ways to be more independent and support themselves and be a part of the web. I don’t want to be denigrating what they do.
I just wish there were as much diversity on Squidoo as there used to be.
Also, a separate and more thorny issue is that Squidoo’s reputation is built on what people see, and if they see Squidoo is a place to go for cooking recipes, toys, and home stuff, they’re not going to look to it for history, education, science, or other topics.