SquidLog Net

The New Keyword Density Dance

lakeerieartists — Thu, 16 May 2013 20:41:53 +0000

With the downward turn in overall Squidoo traffic, and the soon-to-be-released Panda 2.0 algorithm from Google, it is clear that Squidoo powers that be are revamping the rules on the site to clean up the level of spam, junk, and rule breaking content on Squidoo in the world according to Google.

Google is the prime player in search engine technology with the majority of searches run on Google. Therefore, when Google says that something is bad, we need to sit up and take notice. Recently, SearchEngineLand came out with a pictorial view on how search engine optimization works. This chart can really boil down the main factors for most writers to give you an idea of what Google is now considering as crucial factors in search engine technology.

One of the problems is keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is overuse of a keyword in an article with the intention of having this tactic push the article higher in the search engines. This is not to say that you shouldn’t do keyword research when you write a post, article, or lens. You should. Keyword research is as valid as ever. However, overuse of the keyword is not.

What has happened over time is that Google’s search engine technology is developing more sophisticated ways to detect content, and keyword stuffing is no longer the way to get your content noticed, at least in a positive way. It is still a good idea to use your keyword in your url, title, and module titles. However, to balance that usage, you need enough text content to dilute your keyword density to between approximately 2% to 5% of your total words. This includes the entire lens, tags, sales modules, introduction, and content of any kind.

Squidoo is working to get back into Google’s good graces. While this may annoy you personally, it makes sense from a business point of view because Google is where most of Squidoo’s income comes from. The measures they are taking to comply with Google may seem draconian to you, but the reason is to rework Squidoo’s image in the eyes of Google.

It is completely clear from articles on the HQ blog, that keyword density is a very big emphasis right now. So it is time to let go of all that SEO experts were touting a few years ago, and get up to date with the new reality. If you want to maintain your content on Squidoo, you will need to double-check the keyword density on all of your Squidoo content.

Image source CC 2.0

What Makes a Backlink Bad?

lakeerieartists — Thu, 09 May 2013 18:59:48 +0000

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away I joined a site named Squidoo. During the first year that I was a member, I was taught that creating as many backlinks as possible to my lenses was a good idea because it would make the lenses do better on Google search, thereby giving me more traffic. And so I linked everywhere, some places that are now defunct. You may have heard of some of them, Delicious, Tagfoot, Digg, and on and on.

It took me two years to unlearn that strategy, and to learn how to write lenses that did well do to keyword research. Keyword research was so much more efficient. I could get so much more traffic with much less effort. However, I did still create backlinks with short articles on other sites.

When Panda and Penguin first rolled out, it was clear that Google was taking another look at backlinks. They started to decimate the paid backlink services like Build My Rank and other sites. This type of backlinking was no longer a valid SEO strategy. Google has continued down this road since that point in time and they are only getting more strict in this matter. If you are buying links, trading links, or bookmarking at a rapid rate, you are wasting your time and your money. Google is downgrading sites that do this on a regular basis. They are working to bring back the original backlink, one that had real value.

Squidoo has been attacked by spammers of all kinds. This is not news to those of us who have been on the site for years. And they are working to clean it up. This week they came out with the newest cleaning filter which is looking for spammy backlinks. It is clear to me that backlinks from specific sites are being blacklisted while accounts with laundry lists of spam backlinks are being examined. These add no value to Squidoo, and in fact, detract value from the site.

Personally, I do not think that there is any reason for lensmasters to panic unless you have been actively adding spam backlinks. If you have, then you have not been listening to Google over the last two years. However, if you are in question about a lens that gets locked you can appeal the decision. It is possible for filters to make mistakes.

There is still value in valid backlinks. These are backlinks that link from related content or interest from readers. If you have lenses that are on the same general topic, blog posts, or articles on other sites that relate to what you have written you should link those together. A reader will want to go from one to the other.

In the end, a writer needs to think like the person who will be attracted to his work. If you think the links add value to your lens, whether outgoing or incoming, then go ahead and link. If not, then don’t. By following this practice, you will be doing the right thing.

Product Reviews for Dummies (or Newbies)

lakeerieartists — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 22:12:23 +0000

I have been involved in a discussion on Yuku with some other lensmasters regarding sales lenses and product reviews, and I thought that I would write this post as a guide for people who are afraid to dip their toes into the product review water, so to speak, because they can’t figure out what to review or how to make it different from the millions of other product reviews.

One of my biggest pieces of advice for new lensmasters is to write what you know. Google is now emphasizing this attitude with the downgrading of empty pages and upgrading of unique content. I have discussed this in a previous post, and this is also what Squidoo is now reacting to with their site improvements.

One of the biggest frustrations for newer lensmasters is understanding that to make money on Squidoo it is necessary to sell something. This means that they need to in some way, shape, or form do a product review. This can be in the form of a “how to” lens, an informational lens, or a product review lens.

Today I want to discuss more about product review lenses, because these are the ones that seem to intimidate people the most. One of the reasons they are intimidating is that people think that they don’t know anything about interesting products. This is completely untrue! I have learned that if you are interested in something, other people are too. Each of us has experience that we can share with people who want to learn about it.

I thought that I would share a lens with you that I wrote on the spur of the moment after taking my daughter to college for the first time. The lens is called Best Computer Printer for College Students, and it essentially discusses our search for a computer printer that was small enough to fit into the dorm room space that my daughter had at the time. She is now finishing her sophomore year at school and her printer was one of the best purchases that we have ever made.

As you can see by the lens, it is a simple basic lens written about why we chose this particular printer. It was chosen not because it was the best or the best price, but because the size of it fit on her shelf. It is a simple as pie, down to business printer that she prints her college papers with.

This is a product review. It is not in depth, nor does it point out too many features. Frankly, the printer doesn’t have very many features. This is mostly about having a daughter in college and meeting her needs. And I have to tell you that I have had many sales of printers from this lens.

What I am trying to point out is that a product review doesn’t have to be so much about the product as about the people who use the product. And that is what readers will resonate with. Sure, you can write product reviews about stuff that you don’t use, but why? Why not start with stuff that you do use?

Think about your daily routine and what you buy on a regular basis. Can you find just one thing that you use that you love? Or that you chose for personal reasons? Or that your kids love? You get the idea. Telling a story is what will draw your readers in. Then you can just tell them why you love this item or service, and walah! You have written a product review.

Why Can’t I Get Sales on My Squidoo Lenses?

Making Money on Squidoo without Being in the Top Tier

Remodeling Old Lenses

lakeerieartists — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:02:30 +0000

I wrote in the last post that I had been hit by the new standards filter on Squidoo, as I had expected. I am happy to announce that I have managed to get all of my lenses out of the doghouse, and the flags are gone.

However, I do not believe that this is the end of what we will be hearing from Squidoo, because passing the filter just means that we have done the minimum necessary to get rid of the flag. I have been thinking about that a lot because I would like to see my work get back into Google’s good graces, as I am sure that most of you would as well. So I am running an experiment to determine if adding a lot more content to my lenses will change their fortune significantly.

I am starting with lenses that are near the top of my list of lenses that are already getting good traffic. This way if the traffic and sales pick up, it will be noticeable more quickly. As you might have guessed, I have a lot of sales lenses. That is because I like to sell and I like to make money. That is no secret by now. I decided for this experiment, I would change about 10 lenses of different types or templates that I tend to use a lot.

The lenses that I am changing either focus on Ebay sales, Amazon sales, or both together. They will be in several different topic categories including fashion, education, and collectibles as well as others that I write in often. For these lenses, I am not taking anything off unless it is an out of date product or information. What I am doing instead is adding relevant information, links, and anything else that I think will add value to this page.

As an example, I am using a lens that I originally wrote 2 years ago in April 2011. It is well established and typically sits in Tier 2 on Squidoo, getting about 900 to 1500 visits per month. This lens, Collecting Antiques: Tea Cups and Saucer Sets, has not been changed much at all since I first wrote it, so it is a good one to experiment on. Yesterday, I spent time adding some content to the lens that is relevant to the niche I was writing about. This lens sends people primarily to Ebay to shop there.

Part of my goal in adding content was to enrich the keywords that would draw people to this page. I will see how much that makes a difference over the next few weeks and months. I will be working on more of these this week and next week because I think just passing the filter may not be good enough for Google, and that we need to do more than that. But other than changing the lens itself, I will not be changing anything else. This will give me a better idea of how the search engines see the lens.

Image by TheLivingRoominKenmore CC 2.0

Getting Hit By the New Filter on Squidoo

lakeerieartists — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 21:24:41 +0000

As I expected, I got hit by the new standards filter when it swept the Giant Squids accounts last week. In my account of over 800 lenses, I had 208 that were considered substandard according to the new filter.

This was not surprising to me as I have quite a few sales focused lenses that I have on a very simple template.

What I found as I went through and improved my lenses was the following:

Going forward lenses need to be published with a good balance of content which needs to be a mix of the following–text, pictures, sales modules, interactive modules.
You do not need all of those things to pass the filter, but a balance in what you have.
The filter will trigger if you do not have enough text and interactive content to balance sales content.
Keyword stuffing is not allowed. However, if you have enough general content to balance your keywords, then you are doing it right.
Don’t forget about the sidebar widgets. They contribute to the balance.
The interactive modules are necessary to pass the filter. That includes comments, duels, polls and any other module that allows readers to participate on your lens.

My personal lens template usually includes text and sale modules, either Ebay or Amazon or both, a Table of Content module (I prefer that over the one imbedded in the introduction), and a comments modules. For most of my lenses, I had to delete sidebar widgets, add text into sales modules, add interactive modules like polls, until the balance of sales modules was more in sync with the rest of the lens. I will be going back to all of those lenses and adding more text eventually because that will actually help these lenses with search engine traffic. The more text I add, the more keywords I can also add to my lenses.

Personally, although I did not love fixing all of these lenses at one time, I do believe that this is a big step in the right direction for Squidoo, and I applaud what they are doing. It will be easier to get this right with new lenses because we will be able to see before we publish what we have to add to the lens.

On another note, this project has forced me to take a good, hard look at some of my older lenses that clearly needed to be updated. I am sure that I have more in the mix that can with some good cleansing and refreshing. In the meantime, I am still getting sales while this process is going on, and I expect more as the individual lenses and the site as a whole regains Google’s good grace.

My biggest advice to lensmasters is that balance is the key to the filter. Too many of anything will shove your lens off balance and cause your lens to trigger the warning. And that is actually a good thing for us. We all become too focused on our own goals and not always what is good for the site.

In addition, Squidoo is clearly working to please Google’s new standards for detecting spam. For those of you who have trouble understanding this, you may want to read further here.

Image credit: puuikibeach CC 2.0

Spammers Be Gone

lakeerieartists — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 17:05:00 +0000

Yesterday, SquidooHQ announced their most recent decision to “nofollow” outbound links on the site. This is a controversial decision because there are clearly lensmasters who use Squidoo to send “link juice” to their own sites through links from Squidoo. However, by making this move, the Squidoo team has boldly stated that they are ridding themselves of spammers.

Spammers are any site’s bone of contention. Anyone who works online knows that spammers will show up in all aspects of a site, most commonly through comment spam, trying to get a link between your site and theirs. We get comment spam on Squidlog routinely. This kind of spam while annoying can be blocked with a akismet or another plugin that allows you to examine the comments before allowing them to post. A smart site owner deletes these comments because they are detrimental.

With Squidoo comment spam can easily be stopped by setting your comments to automatically need approval by the lensmaster before becoming public. I have also set my comments to only allow lensmasters after getting a ridiculous amount of spam. Some lensmasters choose to stop allowing any comments for this reason.

However, many other types of spam need to come from HQ through what they allow on their site. Squidoo’s success is sort of like a light in the darkness to spammers. You can compare it to how bugs are drawn to light at night. Squidoo has decided to change their light into a bug zapper now, because they are sick and tired of what the spammers are doing to the overall site.

I am very glad that Squidoo has decided to take steps to drive the spammers away from the site. This type of action is long overdue, and desperately needed. I will miss the ability to send “link juice” to my main site, Lake Erie Artists Gallery, and other smaller sites, and hope that eventually I will be considered a “trusted lensmaster” in order to get that back. However, I totally understand why Squidoo has chosen to spray Spammer Be Gone over the entire site.

Here are some interesting links to consider while thinking about this recent move by Squidoo. I want to thank jeffryv for bringing them to my attention.
Study Finds Google’s Penguin Update Getting Stricter Over Time

Matt Cutts: Quick Comment on NoFollow

So we can look forward to spammers moving away from Squidoo as they no longer are able to use common spam techniques to overburden Squidoo’s servers with spammy lenses, and system gaming moves while sending the “link juice” to their own site.

Image credit: kaibara CC 2.0

Rapid Changes on Squidoo

lakeerieartists — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 15:14:10 +0000

In the past week, we have seen a whirlwind of policy changes on Squidoo, all put into place to clean up the site and get it back into the good graces of search engines, specifically Google. Squidoo lensmasters have seen a drop in the traffic to their lenses since November 2012, and the HQ team is responding.

So far, here are the changes that have been put into place:

Banning lens transfers
Adding a filter to detect spun, overly commercial, and poorly written lenses.
Locking lenses that have been made by gaming Squidoo’s system.
Making most coloring pages a SquidDon’t.
Adding a prompt regarding placement of Amazon modules.

It is clear that Squidoo powers-that-be are determined to establish parameters for the site that will bring the quality back to where it should be and kick out the most blatant scammers and gamers. And this is all for the good. Squidoo’s success in the wake of the initial Panda and Penguin filters run by Google created a situation that caused a glut of scammers to use it for their own purposes, vastly diluting the Squidoo brand.

It seems that Squidoo is currently running the new filter on sections of site at a time. Not all accounts have been scanned by the new filter, but I expect that the goal is to run it on the entire site by end of March. When the ban on lens transfers came out, they did say that March was going to be used to clean up the site. I expect that most lensmasters will find that some of their lenses do not pass muster under the new standards. Many of our lenses were written in a time that different standards applied.

Giants have 3 weeks to fix their lenses, and non-giants have only 1 week. This is presumably because non-giants have fewer lenses. If your lenses do get hit by the filter, then I recommend that you fix them as soon as possible because it could happen that your lens is one of the few that throws a false positive. From the experience of the lensmasters that I have heard, here are some things that you can look for to get past the new filter.

Your introduction is not long enough.
Your Amazon modules do not have enough text in them.
You have too many sales items compared to text content.
You have too many links going to the same item.

If you think that the lens has been filtered wrongly, you can ask for a hand review. Remember that filters are not human and can misinterpret the data that they are “seeing” when they run. If you have any more hints that can help fellow lensmasters work through this time more efficiently, please post them in comments here.

I expect that Google will see the changes in the Squidoo site fairly rapidly, and we will see the results of this in the next few months.

Image by mckaysavage on flickr

Integrity in Writing and Changes in Expectations

lakeerieartists — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 14:33:42 +0000

In the last couple of weeks there have been several changes and announcments on Squidoo, which you can read yourself in the HQ blog. On Tuesday, there was a conference call with Seth Godin, Gil Hildebrand, and Bonnie Diczhazy which was recorded so that anyone could listen.

What came out of this to my mind is that Squidoo has seen that Google is clearly downgrading pages that are made through automation, and upgrading pages that are made by real people. In other words, the days of cookie cutter pages, automated systems of writing, and spun content are gone. Lensmasters have been watching Squidoo’s traffic over the last few months and seen a drop. Squidoo HQ is responding to the drop in traffic by getting rid of undesirable pages and behavior at the same time.

To understand this better you may want to read how Google is fighting spam. Spam is defined both by repetition of junk, and worthless pages of junk that fill the internet. While we can usually define spam when it hits our email inbox, some of us cannot determine whether what we are creating on Squidoo is considered spam, so Squidoo is helping us find that definition.

What does this mean for us lensmasters?

First off, if you have been using any kind of automated system to update your pages, or create lenses, or get likes, stop right now. This is wrong, and is just a way to game the system. Squidoo is treating these behaviors harshly. Lenses and accounts are being locked.

If you have thin content pages, which many of us do, it is time to beef them up. You can do this when you update your pages. Add personal touches, more text, and your voice to thin pages. If by chance, one of your lenses does get caught in the filter due to thin or questionable content, you will have one week to improve this lens. Giant Squids will have three weeks.

And when creating new lenses, use your voice to create them.

To show you what I mean, I have just created a new lens today about Passover food. Passover begins Monday night, and I have been thinking about this topic for the last two weeks, and decided to create a lens about it. To be clear, I do consider this a sales lens. However, as you can see I have added my own personal voice to this page by talking about my own experience. I am not privy to the discussions at HQ, however, I believe that this is the kind of page they are looking for, a page that is in a person’s voice.

While HQ cleans up the big problems, we can clean up our own accounts to bring them up to the new standards that Google is looking for. This will increase traffic for both your own account and the entire site. This is good for everyone including our readers who will be able to get information and advice from our lenses.

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Incoming search terms:

Featured

Adding Content to Your Sales Pages

lakeerieartists — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 17:08:45 +0000

Squidoo has asked us to take a look at our thin content pages, and add content to them. At the very least it means that we need to add content to our sales pages and to our sales modules, Amazon, Ebay, etc.

What kind of content is valuable to for both us and our readers? If we are going to make the effort to do this, we should add content that will help the reader understand what we are writing about, and help us get more readers and earn more on each lens.

Giant squids were sent an email on Monday March 4, 2013 to give us an idea of what Squidoo is trying to do and to help us figure out what we need to do to improve our lenses under the new standards. However, this news is for everyone, and you should read it to make sure that all your new lenses meet the requirements.

The first thing is that Squidoo is looking for spun content. If you do have spun content on your lenses, then you need to replace it with your own writing. If you don’t, then you are fine here.

The next step is looking for keyword stuffing. This is a gray area and until the filter is run, it is hard to define exactly. However, one good clue is if your lens uses your keywords so much that it sounds unnatural. This is not actually necessary, and you can change some of these to synonyms to make it sound better. If your lens content sounds like a regular person talking then you are okay on the keyword stuffing area.

Thin content is the next area that most of us probably need to work on, at least on some of our lenses. Squidoo is asking us to beef up our content. That is fine but we still don’t have any guidelines to tell us how much beefing we need to do. For the time being, it will help if you have at least 400 words on your lens (titles don’t count), an intro that is big enough to fill up the space beside your intro picture, and some content that you have written in each sales module. I recommend doing this as you update your lenses routinely. If you are like me, there is no way to get to all your lenses and fix this, or even check to see if you need to fix this in the next week.

Anyone who has been on the site for some time has thin content lenses. This is because standards have changed over the years. Thin content doesn’t mean bad, but it is clear that Squidoo thinks that it is affecting their traffic and earnings. Since it is their platform, we need to comply going forward. Don’t get the idea that sales pages are bad either. They aren’t.

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Squidoo Content and Traffic Woes

lakeerieartists — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 14:47:35 +0000

In the last two days, Squidoo HQ posted two articles regarding spamming and changes on Squidoo which you should read, Are you selling or spamming?, and Spun content and the need to be human. Without getting into how these posts were presented, I suggest that you read through them and some of the comments, then come back here.

As any longtime writer online, I am well aware that there are many, many people on the internet looking for a fast buck and some of those people have always found their way to Squidoo to use the platform as a way to do so. As Greekgeek so admirably puts in her response to the first post, thin content is nothing new on Squidoo. Greekgeek always backs up her points with evidence and she does so quite well in this post.

Depending on what your definition of thin content is, I think that there is a place on the internet for thin content. If you are shopping online for a specific item, then you really don’t have time or want to read through a person’s memoir to find it. Sales pages have their place, and since they generate more income than straight content pages which include 700 or more words of text, it is not surprising that they gain a lot of traffic and therefore are generated more than other types of content. I, myself, prefer creating sales pages because that is my forte and I like to sell and make money.

However, since Squidoo has come through the last year or so of new Google filters, namely Panda and Penguin, relatively unscathed compared to other content sites, there has been an influx of “Squidoo converts” who are blatantly trying to squeeze any penny they can out of Squidoo with blatant spamming and gaming. There are several forms of this including plagiarizing Squidoo articles on other sites, liking clubs on Squidoo, and blasting Squidoo with duplicated content through automated bots. You can buy lenses and likes on sites like Fiverr for $5, for example.

Squidoo has suffered in the last few months in traffic loss which has affected the site as a whole and some lensmasters’ accounts more than others. This is a concern and Squidoo HQ has decided to do something about this problem. I am glad that they are taking a stand before traffic is decimated. Keeping their site traffic worthy is important to all of us that write on Squidoo. I would like to see them take the steps to disallow lens liking schemes and automated gaming. I know that they do much more behind the scenes than we are aware of.

The first step they have taken is to temporarily ban lens transfers for 4 weeks as they start to deal with the problem. That they are taking this step makes me believe that they have seen a pattern in lens transfers that is problematic that we do not have the ability to see. They have asked us as a community to comment on lens transferring and what our opinion is. I recommend that you take the time to do this by filling out this form. In the form, I also suggest that you give them ideas of what you think should be done to help alleviate the problems that you are seeing on Squidoo. While your opinions are important, if you have evidence that backs your opinion up, you should include that too. It is much easier for Squidoo to act on problems with actual evidence.

If transferring lenses is a big part of what you do on Squidoo, this may be a 4 week hiatus to try something new. I have been recommending diversification for quite a while. This might be the time to set up your own WordPress site or try out Wizzley or Zujava. Remember that while Squidoo is a valuable site, it is not the only way to make money online, and it is important to spread out your risk for situations just like this, when things change. If you have questions or comments on this issue, I would love to hear them here and will do my best to answer them.

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