Two months ago, when lensroll disappeared, I had the following exchange with Megan Casey about Squidoo SEO Policy:
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.
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]
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I have noticed that my lensographies and groups (which are really a form of lensography) have suffered especially hard in recent weeks. They were never my highest ranking lenses, but now they are well out of the range of making even tier 3 payouts.
I am sad to change my Featured Lenses modules to link lists because although they are stronger from an SEO perspective, they are not as visually appealing from a human perspective. I like the thumbnails we are given in the Featured Lenses module.
I have never used the My Lenses module, but I do use the featured lenses module on almost every one of my lenses. I also use the sidebar module for featured lenses and add links to the introduction module. I always add relevant lenses.
I have only used the My Lenses module once, and that was to find my most recent lenses when it was suggested that would help those who are making return visits and want to immediately pick out what’s new when they visit the bio page.
Since I was quoted at length at BarbRad in this blog, I’d like to state I was pretty discouraged with Squidoo when I wrote that. All but two of my best lenses have fallen into the third tier, and way too many are now below that. Sales are now about the only way to make any money on Squidoo, and I shudder to think of what this month’s payout — if there is one — will be.
It seems Squidoo likes to keep us busy with quests, which I have no time for, and challenges and assignments on subjects I’m not interested in writing about. I’m more interested in making cash than getting leveled up. I’m trying to do the Rocket Moms summer session just because I want to stay in touch there, but it means there’s no time for what I really do want to write. I think many of these assignments, which usually involve writing yet another lensography, are read mostly by those in Squidoo — not the people from outside who might actually buy something. I love my fellow squids, and I love reading non-sales lenses they write on subjects that interest me. But I’d rather be writing something I’m passionate about than just doing assignments. Fortunately, for most of the Rocket Moms lenses for this session I’ve been able to find an angle I can put my heart in.
I’m not adding any new featured lenses modules to these new lenses, but I am filling in the discovery section of the introduction. I’m not gong back to redo all my old lenses until some of the dust settles from these policies and I know more.
Yet another Squidoo Surprise. Thanks for detecting this, Katinka, as it may explain some traffic drops.
Jimmie, it is time-consuming and slow, so like Katinka I’m hesitant to advice other people to do this. But personally, I have been creating HTML-coded imitation Featured Lenses modules complete with lens icons to provide links for search engines and visual incentive for human visitors to click.
You can find the 100×100 image of a lens logo by right-clicking the lens image, then changing -1 in that long URL to 100. Then plant it in a text module with HTML and make it clickable.
Yeah. A ton of work.
Another possibility I’m using on lenses in a series of lenses is as follows. At the bottom of each lens in the series, I’ve got:
– BIG ARROW LINK pointing to the lensography with a phrase like, “Go to INDEX of My [topic] Pages”
– Guestbook
– Featured Lenses module for human visitors to click on
Then, on the INDEX page, I’m hard-coding text links to each of the lenses in the series. Again, I’m using my fake featured lenses module trick to get both search engines and human visitors to see the lens.
This technique doesn’t help with interlinking, since it’s created a link system of all the “lens series” lenses pointing to an index, and that index pointing back to them, rather than any inter-linking between the lenses in the series. (I’m using tags for interlinking to mitigate the problem.)
But it’s less time-consuming than having to hand-code interlinks between every single lens.
Wow – that’s the kind of work I’d never be willing to put in.
Given that this issue is actually breaking Google guidelines, I do feel it is likely that HQ will fix this.
Though obviously they now have other things on their minds with the whole server thing going on: I can get few changes to stick when editing lenses at all.
Thank you for this katinka. I am so glad you let me know via squidoo facebook community. I haven’t been in the forum much this week and hadn’t seen your thread there. This is just the last straw for me with my backlinks (I’ve had some terrible lensrank and traffic drops in the last couple weeks). From now on I will just do it by hand. Enjoy your vacation.
GeekGreek, thank you for the fake featured lens module. It seems like a good alternative for me. I will be making the changes as I update.
wow, not good news at all, and I was wondering about this. Thank you for clarifying!
I had no idea Featured Lens modules were invisible to Google. That’s a shame. I guess it’s time to switch to Link List or even regular Text Module.
It’s pretty new: a year ago these modules were definitely visible to Google. It seems part of Squidoo’s quest for faster page loads.
Katinka, I am back here to get the link for this post to add to a planned article for Squidlog.
The latest news seems to be that Gil is considering reverting some of the effects of Lazyload, so that the modules are once again visible to Google. So my advice would be, at this point in time, dont remove anything from a lens, in the way of Featured lens modules etc, just add some links in the form of anchored text or a link list.
Are you sure? It’s a week later and these modules are still not visible to Google. Of course Gil helped launch magazines and subdomains in the meantime, so he’s probably busy enough.
Personally I’ll keep transforming my lenses and featured lenses modules into link lists and links in text-modules slowly as long as this is the case. It can’t hurt after all.
Thanks for the link, once it comes
I last read on SquidU on one of the threads that featured lenses might work if you specify 1-4 instead of ALL, is that still true?
That was never true, it was a pipe dream from the start. I started that rumor, unfortunately.
What a great, very important info about the changes! I have a question– I can see that links on Comments on Squidoo are dofollow. Do these links help the lens which they are linked to in Google?
Links to squidoo profiles are followed in the comments, links IN comments are not followed.
So, for SEO purposes getting a comment approved on a high profile lens does help a bit in getting your profile noticed by google.
Missed this when you first published and have only just caught up – but it explains a lot re changes.
Any news on what has happened since ?
The ‘my lenses’ and ‘featured lenses’ modules are still coded in a way that’s invisible to search engines. Don’t expect that to change: make sure you link to related lenses in link list modules or text modules.
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