Two months ago, when lensroll disappeared, I had the following exchange with Megan Casey about Squidoo SEO Policy:
Katinka Hesselink
Disabling lensroll means a big change in the SEO structure of squidoo: that is, people will have to feature lenses they want to promote or use a link list, instead of being able to just link to something through lensroll. I realize it didn’t send traffic, but that doesn’t mean the links were meaningless.
Megan Casey, Cofounder
Lensrolled links were not a critical part of our SEO strategy or structure.
Yes, people should continue to use various modules like the Featured Lenses or My Lenses module, and the Featured Lenses sidebar widget, and the Related Lenses tool, to cross promote lenses.
Katinka Hesselink
I don’t really care about your strategy, nor does Google. What I know is that those lensroll links were visible to Google, and thus made an impact, and that removing them will impact the site structure in that sense.
I have to repeat that last comment in altered form: I don’t really care about your strategy, nor does Google. What I know is that featured lenses and my lenses module links were visible to Google, and thus made an impact, and that removing them will impact the site structure in that sense.
What am I talking about? Over this weekend I discovered that the modules and widgets most of us use to interlink our own content, are in fact at present not seen by Google at all. I don’t know whether this was already in place when Megan and I had that conversation. I noticed loading issues with the My Lenses module and Featured lenses widget about a month ago. I suspect the changes to them were made around that time.
Take a moment to digest that – it took me a weekend, so I’ll give you all some time too: when you feature a lens, your own or someone elses, that link is only seen by visitors, not by search engines. So you’re not helping that lens rank at all. This makes most lensographies moot as a link building tactic, for instance. It also explains why some of my lensographies, which ranked last year, don’t do so this year. The content that helped them rank isn’t even visible this right now.
That’s today’s newsflash, though I started a conversation about it on squidu on Friday, so it’s not new for the attentive.
Given that the above quote from Megan, I have some hope of this technical change having been taken without HQ realizing the SEO impact.
Hubpages made it a policy to stimulate hubbers to interlink their content – and in fact link to places all over their site – through measuring ‘hub karma’: how much people were linking out from their hubs to other pages on the site. My hubkarma is rather low (49 or something) because I only link to my own hubs.
What’s the point? They actively WANT people to link from one hub to another.
Judging by it’s actions (always louder than words, though in this case enacted silently and without official announcement) Squidoo HQ does NOT want us to interlink our content.
Never mind that in the past I’ve seen lenses suddenly rank after I’d featured them somewhere (yes, that was when a feature still meant a link in Google’s eyes).
Never mind that Google loves editorial links. That is: links put up by an actual human, because they liked the content.
In practical terms:
The only linking module in Squidoo I trust my links to at present is the link list module. It loads very fast, so it’s not at danger of being hidden from search engines. The link plexo is a tempting alternative, but it’s had too many technical difficulties over the years for me to recommend it. Anyhow, I’m not sure that it’s indexed these days.
I’m not looking forward to going in and changing every one of my over 700 lenses. Yet that will have to be done if this isn’t changed. I can’t ignore Squidoo as a platform as I make the majority of my online income there. However, I fully understand any one moving away from the platform for this reason: one change too many (well, more than one).
As a teacher this move silences me – I’m seriously at a loss for words about dealing with this myself, let alone advising others on how to deal with this.
What do I tell newbies? There’s a not-yet-squid I’m looking forward to mentoring and this is not the kind of thing I want her having to face in the first days of attempting to create content not merely for humans (which she does instinctively) but for search engines as well.
When we discussed this issue on Squidu, Barbrad said:
I guess I just don’t have time to keep up with all this. I click on related lenses from featured lenses, my lenses, etc., when the links interest me. It seems that it’s easier to follow Google’s advice to write for people, not search engines, and that’s what I plan to do. That doesn’t mean I will ignore search engines. I will try to stick my key words into the lenses in appropriate places, especially into titles and subtitles. I’m not going to go back and redo all these modules to please search engines. If what you’ve said about lensographies is true, they may count as link farms and do Squidoo more harm than good. I have never seem much point in them except to help one get organized. It would really be interesting to see what Google thinks of both the lensographies, plexos, and even specialized lenses with lots of links such as angel blessing lenses and purple star lens compilations, etc. It would be pretty sad if Google saw Squidoo as a giant link farm because so many lenses are full of almost nothing but links — even if they are all interlinks on Squidoo.
I totally understand where she’s coming from. I really think the platform should avoid getting in the way – it should just make it as easy as possible to instinctively do SEO reasonably well. Squidoo has never gotten close to that ideal when it comes to interlinking. This recent step is a step in the wrong direction. How will I teach this to newbies? This move is so totally counter intuitive!
Barbrad’s post needs a reply: it’s an example, IMO, of how paranoid we can become when we start thinking everything we would normally do is suspect. I’ll repeat what I said in the thread:
Link lists can easily rank in Google – some of mine on other sites do.
As long as you make sure each lens has it’s own unique content, having links to other lenses on the topic is a help to visitors AND helps for Google’s sake.
Lensographies are no exception: some of mine even rank seriously in their niche. In each case they contain more than just featured lenses modules.
As long as you don’t ignore what would work for people there’s no reason to ignore what works for search engines.
Google LOVES editorial links – links hand picked as great quality by an actual human who doesn’t link to just anything. So angel blessing lenses and purple star compilations aren’t a problem, though unless they’re keyword researched they aren’t likely to rank themselves. However, when the featured lenses module is indexed, such lenses should be a help to any lens listed ON them. In fact that’s one of the reasons I make those.
Google loves editorial links. That’s the main point here.
I suspect this change was made to make Squidoo as fast as possible. As I said in the thread, I can somewhat understand when it comes to the My Lenses module: I would not have created it in the first place.
Another important consideration is that Squidoo seems to have made it a habit of simply hiding from Google any content it doesn’t know how to serve up fast enough. The amazon module is another example.
In the Google webmaster guidelines it says:
Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors.
The policy hiding content in certain modules from Google definitely breaks that guideline. Squidoo is effectively hiding content with javascript.
In my mental hierarchy of Google guidelines this one is a way more imp0rtant consideration than page speed. But I really don’t understand why Squidoo can’t make an amazon, featured lenses and my lenses module that loads fast AND is seen by search engines.
As you can see in the thread I am not too positive about the My Lenses module. I understand hiding it. However, given that it does exist, I think it really deserves to be indexed by Google. The Featured Lenses module is an even clearer case: those are editorial links, links a lensmaster wanted to share with the world. Google expressly WANTS to see such links.
What I’d suggest for both is as follows:
- The featured lenses module and widget should no longer offer the option of showing lenses in random order. That was a fun idea, but nobody really enjoyed it anyhow. After all – who’s going to ask a user to refresh a lens to see the rest of the content in a featured lenses module? We used to do that on Squidoo groups, but it never worked.
Getting rid of the ‘random’ aspect of the module should help save coding space.
- Both the featured lenses and the my lenses module should only update their content on two occasions: on republish of the lens and on lensrank update. In between the content should be cashed.
- And yes, both modules should be coded in such a way that their content IS visible to search engines and people on alternative browsers.
The most disturbing thing about this whole business is that the advice given by Megan two months ago is already outdated. Never mind that mine is too.
I am going on holiday soon, so I can’t keep up to date on this issue for you all. The way the My lenses and Featured lenses modules are at present so clearly against Google guidelines, that I have some hope of HQ reversing this decision. My recommendation to individual lensmasters is to not go out of your way to replace either with a link list just yet – but when you do go in and edit a lens, make this part of the to-do routine. That is – till we know what HQ does about this, if anything.
[edit] I just checked the link-plexo. It too is no longer visible to search engines. [/edit]
