I’m now part of three different blogging communities drawn from Squidoo lensmasters and it’s not only fun, it really helps with SERPS. Two observations:
- If you search for anything online, Google is only going to offer up three (at most) options that come from the squidoo domain – you have to click “more results from squidoo.com” to see any others.
That means on any topic – even if somebody searches adding the word “squidoo” in the searchbox – even when it’s a topic with scores of squidoo lenses – only three squidoo lenses will be offered.
But squidlog.net, or any other blog, is in another domain and will show up separately.
Example: I just searched for “custom rss feeds squidoo” – that was the topic of my last post here.
Of the three squidoo lenses offered, one is utter empty junk and the other two are of very dubious utility.
But directly under the squidoo domain, my post from this blog appears. Success!
- Google seems to notice and index blog posts much faster than Squidoo lenses. I have a lens called How to Avoid Christmas which has been up for a few weeks. Not findable by Google still.
Yesterday morning I wrote a blog post about it at Valley of the Giant Squids called How to avoid Christmas Entirely. It showed up in Google search results by early afternoon!
I live between Chapel Hill and Hillsborough NC, near Durham and the RTP. I have two donkeys, ten chickens, and two kids. I play fiddle, concertina, piano, and sometimes viola with two bands you can see and listen to at
I’ve noticed a sharp decline in Google’s interest for my Squidoo lenses as well. One of my best loved lenses took over a year to get indexed even though it has hundreds of backlinks and only very little competition. Every time someone just casually mentioned it in a blog post it appeared on the index while the actual source did not.
But since many lenses still rank well on Google I guess it’s not generally against Squidoo. In any case, it’s obvious from your examples that adding a wholesome dose of blogging to your marketing mix is the smart thing to do.
Awesome. And true! I’ve consistently found that my favorite writers on Squidoo almost always have a blog somewhere — if not several of them.
I think this is good news… having lots of Squidoo pages come up in Google is not necessarily beneficial, as searchers will see the Squidoo domain name as being over-spammy. However, when your lens link comes up in a blog, people tend to go, “Ooh… interesting…” Well, I do anyway! Let us blog to our hearts’ content.
Bevx