Squidoo for Traffic & Link Building - SEO Tip Week 32
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Update October 29, 2007: Well, after a brief few months my first Squidoo pages have acheived PR values of 5 and 4. My Jean Grey Squidoo Lens is a PR5. So as a high PR link building service Squidoo works quite well.
As an search engine optimization consultant I sometimes have a hard time deciding what is the best use of my time. Research, link building, writing or what have you. Well, this week I did more research than usual and found a site that I had heard about, but had yet to fully explore: Squidoo. What is Squidoo? Well, to put it simply, it is a collection of web pages that users can build on any topic, and I mean any topic that you can imagine. And if you can’t find it, you can create a new page on Squidoo yourself. Squidoo says you can do it in under 5 minutes, but you’ll want to take longer to build a respectable page, or “lens” as they call it.
Once you do you can add modules that let you make money from affiliate sales to online stores such as Amazon and Overstock. I don’t know how much of a money making opportunity it is and I would dare say you can’t make a lot of money with Squidoo, but it did give me some ideas on how to use it for SEO purposes. As a business owner and website owner, you can use Squidoo for two important tasks to help your website: link building and visitor traffic.Testing SquidooI decided to test this out and I built two lenses for fun. I like smoothies, so I tried my hand at creating a smoothie drink lens to support my personal smoothie recipe blog. It was simple to build and I followed the advice for getting the word out and then spent the next 4 days investing a few spare moments here and there, adding new content and pulling information from my smoothie recipe blog and now I have a fairly large lens, compared to most. As of today (8/12/2007) there were over 213,000 lenses on Squidoo. My smoothie lens was ranked #132 and at times has been as high as 128 with less than 8 hours of work total over one week. The second lens is for a favorite comic book character, Jean Grey (Phoenix) from the X-men and has done for pure entertainment and even that has achieved a rank as high as #376. The lenses were fun to build and I enjoyed both immensely.
Getting Traffic from Squidoo
Okay, big deal on my “success” within Squidoo, it hasn’t earned a single cent yet and might not ever. I have many links on my smoothie lens pointing to my smoothie blog and the good news is that these links have driven more traffic to my smoothie blog in the last week than all other incoming site traffic combined. The reason it has been successful is the fact that the Squidoo lens I created is already showing up in the search results, after less than a week, for terms related to smoothie recipes. (See results.) So it is driving traffic to my smoothie blog and could be doing the same for your business. If you sell toys you may want to create a Squidoo lens one of your products like yo-yos. The idea is to create a lens about something specific so your lens can rank for it and then link to your site. Which brings me to my other reason for creating a lens. My SEO heart practically skips a beat.
Link Building with Squidoo
As any SEO company can tell you, link building is the most time-consuming and hardest part of our jobs. Everything come down to link building. That is what increases your rankings, helps people find you and so forth. If you have an SEO company working for you now and they aren’t putting forth a majority of their time finding and placing links for you, it is time to move on. With Squidoo you get an awesome link building resource where you control the anchor text in the link, where the link points to, where it lives on the page and what is written around it. It also comes from a high PR site. It is almost the exact definition of my idea of the perfect link. If you look at my smoothie lens you can see dozens of links pointing to my smoothie blog. And not links just to the homepage, but deep linking to internal pages which are important links very difficult to get usually. Well, with Squidoo you can make many deep links which will help your site’s search engine visibility and increase rankings to those deep pages. One-way, keyword-rich, high-quality links are all made easy with Squidoo. If you spend a little time with your lens you may soon see it increase to a PR 4 or PR 5 webpage on its own and we know how hard PR 4 and 5 links can be to get on our own.
Google & Squidoo
Of course, with all good things there come people who look to ruin it by misuse. Well, the same can be said of Squidoo. Many spammers have tried and are trying to create a glut of spammy pages on Squidoo for the purposes of SEO. Google saw this and minimized the importance of Squidoo but in return Squidoo has made spamming harder and set the bar higher for a Squidoo lens in hopes of getting more quality lenses. It looks as though Squidoo may have weathered the fury of Google and for the time I would recommend highly creating a quality Squidoo lens to help your own site. Heck, create more than one if you need it, but be good stewards if you do and create lenses that have weight of their own and are not a pure marketing ploy. Those lenses will be the most effective in the long run and help Squidoo remain a useful tool in your marketing tool belt.
Final Thoughts on Squidoo
Give it a try, it will only take an hour or so, despite the 5 minute promise from Squidoo, and then see what you think. We will be including it as part of our work for our clients, as we do with all new strategies that can help. Of course, Google could decide they don’t appreciate the work being done by Squidoo members, Squidoo could decide to make all links not SEO-friendly (nofollow or redirects) or any number of SEO killing decisions, but until then I personally think it is a good use of a few hours.
YouTube Video about Squidoo Marketing
You can find many videos on how to use Squidoo and here is one of the better ones I watched. If the video isn’t playing, you can go right to youtube.com and watch the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiR5BIX-_RQ
Want to know what Shell is doing?
67 Responses to “Squidoo for Traffic & Link Building - SEO Tip Week 32”
By Kimberly Dawn Wells (1 comments.) on Aug 13, 2007 | Reply
Glad to see you’re having fun with Squidoo. Keep up the great work!
By Shell Harris (162 comments.) on Aug 13, 2007 | Reply
Hi, Kimberly (never Kim).
Thanks for visiting my blog and I’m flattered that you took notice of my post. I am enjoying Squidoo and lenses such as your are a reason why. Keep up the great work as well.
By Xavier (1 comments.) on Aug 14, 2007 | Reply
I’m enjoying reading this post! Thanks!
By Martin (1 comments.) on Aug 15, 2007 | Reply
Hello, can somebody tell my where i can find a seo tool which can show me the positions from a website (5, 10, 20 Keywords)? Please give feedback to me. bye
By Louiss (1 comments.) on Aug 15, 2007 | Reply
Thanks for this weeks tips. I have try to do links from Squidoo, but I still cannot see the effect, do I miss out anything? I just need at least get some backlink from them. That’s all. Hope you can help me fix it up. my squidoo is here: http://www.squidoo.com/bloggingsecret
By SEO Beginner's Blog (1 comments.) on Aug 16, 2007 | Reply
Hi, very informative blog. Thanks for visiting SEO Practices Blog for beginners, we are a guide to the best search engine optimization and marketing resources.
I’m on squidoo, my user is seopractices, I have add some affiliate links from books on amazon, I’m waiting to see the results.
By Andrew Christiansen (1 comments.) on Aug 17, 2007 | Reply
nice read
By Hobo (1 comments.) on Aug 17, 2007 | Reply
Nice article Shell. I used it for citation purposes a while back, but not to your extent.
Shaun
By Inkode (2 comments.) on Aug 19, 2007 | Reply
Thank you so much for such a great article about using Squidoo for SEO. Goin to give it a go right now for marketing a clients site. But like you said, I can imagine it won’t be long till people “ruin it by misuse”. Cheers
By Shell Harris (162 comments.) on Aug 19, 2007 | Reply
Martin, we use two tools that can both do what I think you are asking. One is Web Position Gold, $150 (http://www.web-positiongold.com/standard-web-position-gold.html) and the other is Internet Business Promoter, $250 (http://www.ibusinesspromoter.com/download/index.htm). Both do a lot more than just show ranking results. But they both have free demos to try. Good luck.
By Shell Harris (162 comments.) on Aug 19, 2007 | Reply
Hi, Shaun. I always know I’ve done something good when you comment. Thanks for the compliment. Feel free to post a link to your Squidoo article.
By Angie Hartford (3 comments.) on Aug 25, 2007 | Reply
This sounds so very cool! I can think of a couple of clients who could really benefit from this. Thank you.
By Andy (1 comments.) on Oct 31, 2007 | Reply
http://services-seo.net/pagerank-calculator/index.php?do=1
check how to get good PR.
By just a guy (5 comments.) on Nov 10, 2007 | Reply
Shell, I’ve been putting this off for a while because I didn’t really understand the whole Squidoo thing. However, tonight I took the plunge and launched my Going to Seminary Squidoo lens. We’ll see how it all pans out. Thanks for the tip.
By Shell Harris (162 comments.) on Nov 11, 2007 | Reply
Just a Guy,
I took a look at your lens and that is a good start! Be sure to put a few more modules up and put some more content on the lens. You are linking to your outside site correctly, although I would make all the links to the full url (www.domain.com rather than domain.com). Keep an eye on your site’s traffic. You may see a nice jump in visits from your Squidoo lens.
By just a guy (5 comments.) on Nov 12, 2007 | Reply
Thanks for the advice. I’ll make the changes tonight. I was trying to figure out how to increase the pagerank of the lens. Any advice there? I’ve joined some groups that have good PR and posted blurbs with links to my squidoo lens. Any other ideas?
By Shell Harris (162 comments.) on Nov 12, 2007 | Reply
You are doing all the right things. Google just did a PR update at the end of October so you will have to wait a while to see it change again. A good squidoo marketing (group submissions and commenting on other lenses) effort should be enough to achieve a PR4 or PR3, but PR is only a number not a declaration of your page’s importance.
By quiel on Jan 12, 2008 | Reply
Wow! Amazing, your article gave me an idea about squidoo. Thanks! You’re a big help! I think I’m going to try it in the near future to introduce myself and promote the site that I’m currently working on. I think I’m excited to create my own squidoo lens(page) after watching the video.
By Suchmaschinenoptimierung (1 comments.) on Jan 16, 2008 | Reply
Great article, and great information, i got all my information about squidoo through your article thanks. But the video no longer exists
By Shell Harris (162 comments.) on Jan 16, 2008 | Reply
I just checked and the video is playing fine for me. Just in case here is the actual url:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiR5BIX-_RQ
By Just a Guy (1 comments.) on Jan 23, 2008 | Reply
Shell,
Just an FYI. After taking your squidoo tips my seminary and photography web hosting squidoo pages both have PR 3. Also, using a lot of the tips from your blog my Going to Seminary website has a PR 4.
As you say, “PR is only a number” but it feels good to see the effort pay off in such a short time.
Thanks!
By Dave @ Seo Blog (3 comments.) on Jan 23, 2008 | Reply
Maybe a little late for a reply (when checking the original date of posting) but I would like to know if you still think the same way about squidoo and if your test is still running, how about the traffic, did it change and how about the conversions ?
It looks like squidoo is till doing fine in Google and they still didn’t implemented the nofollow tag so it still looks like a good Seo technique to use to get deeplinks to your site.
Thanks !
Dave
By Shell Harris (162 comments.) on Jan 24, 2008 | Reply
Dave - Traffic on all my Squidoo lenses dropped off about 20% on average, but as high as 50% my Jean Grey Lens which is currently ranked #45 overall. I get about 30 visitors per day. From my 13 lenses I get about $80 per month, but I don’t update them anymore. But they all have achieved PageRank and the links from the Squidoo lenses are the real reason I created them, which support the “main” sites. Google traffic was the biggest decrease of all sources so I believe Google isn’t ranking the lenses nearly as well anymore.
Overall, still worth the 2-4 hours it can take to build a simple lens, especially for the deep links you can create.
By Dave @ Seo Blog (3 comments.) on Jan 24, 2008 | Reply
Thxs for the response Shell !
Interesting the traffic dropped that much…it also looks like it are not really ‘buyers’ that are being redirected to your money site..guess the links are the only reason to create some Squidoo pages
these days.
Dave
By Domain (2 comments.) on Jan 29, 2008 | Reply
Thanks for this information, it`s very useful
By Pizza Köln (1 comments.) on Feb 19, 2008 | Reply
Thanks for your great information. very very good.
By edwin (1 comments.) on Feb 27, 2008 | Reply
I made my own lens a week ago, it is worth the effort, but don’t make the mistake thinking its a small effort. Building a well ranked lens takes some time. And there is the risk of Google forcing nofollow upon squidoo in the long run.
By Shell Harris (162 comments.) on Feb 27, 2008 | Reply
We put at least 4 - 8 hours in making a decent lens. Yes, one day the dreaded nofollow tag may be inflicted, but I don’t think so. Squidoo makes their money on increasing the page count and therefor increasing viewership. Adding nofollow might cripple the number pages being built and reduce traffic. I feel they’ll keep the nofollow out of the equation. Of course if a 800lb. Gorilla asks you to add it, you probably will.
By Squidoo Marketer (1 comments.) on Mar 6, 2008 | Reply
I typically spend about 3 hours making each lens on Squidoo, $10-20 in social bookmarking services, and then I watch the traffic pour in through Google. Once Squidoo imposes a nofollow tag I will simply take my content elsewhere and continue to make money, but once there are mandatory nofollow it will cease to be a profitable company in my honest opinion.
By Jeremy (1 comments.) on Mar 9, 2008 | Reply
After reading your review of Squidoo and the process of setting up a lense i figured it was time to revisit Squidoo and try out making a lense. I’ve noticed lenses in google results occasionally but there doesn’t seem to be a flood of them so it does seem like you need a pretty popular lense or a fairly niche topic. So i setup, ‘Australian web design’ and shall see how it goes: http://www.squidoo.com/australianwebdesign
By Yaprak Dökümü Fan Sitesi (1 comments.) on Apr 1, 2008 | Reply
Great thank you very very much. Great Article. Keep up your great work!
By Joel (2 comments.) on May 3, 2008 | Reply
They still use nofollow on some of the lenses I created. Is the same for everyone?
Nofollow everywhere on the lenses!
By Jan (1 comments.) on May 3, 2008 | Reply
Very helpful information, ya squidoo really is very good for seo page rank and can drive great traffic.
But i have seen people saying they are making great money on squidoo though. i have recently start my lens on squidoo i hope it work for me.
one think more did you know that squidoo has about 2,000,000 daily visitors wow surly it can drive much traffic to your site if you have a niche lens.
By Bill (1 comments.) on May 28, 2008 | Reply
We have definitely found the two sites pretty good for driving traffic from a trusted source
By Hello (3 comments.) on Jun 10, 2008 | Reply
Great article. We are in the process of creating our Squidoo info after we read this article. Great stuff. Keep the tips coming.
By Bill Gassett (1 comments.) on Jun 22, 2008 | Reply
I am a big fan of Squidoo and have used the site as a link builder for my blog and website and also as a stand alone site which does pretty well in the serps on it’s own.
By Aurelius Tjin (1 comments.) on Jun 27, 2008 | Reply
Great post! You really gave me valuable information. Thanks for sharing it!
By fx online trading (1 comments.) on Jul 16, 2008 | Reply
Ya i am a link builder and new in this field and your information is really useful for me.
By SEOdoll (1 comments.) on Aug 5, 2008 | Reply
Great post! You can get visitors and links from Squidoo, and you can earn some money too, but what is important is to build quality lenses.
By iziWalter (1 comments.) on Aug 16, 2008 | Reply
I started squidoo page recently and Search Status plugin for Firefox shows all links as nofollows for squidoo pages, so the opportunity for some free links are over.
By Ryan Liao (1 comments.) on Aug 17, 2008 | Reply
I came upon your site while on google searching for something strange about squidoo. Indeed, like what you have written about squidoo the links for my lens are all “nofollow”.
I have a question, would it be possible to set links in my text module to nofollow? The problem with my lens is that the links that I set to nofollow does not seems to work.
Thanks in advance =) Keep up the good work.
By Lenin Nair (1 comments.) on Aug 29, 2008 | Reply
Link building techniques, I believe, can always be revamped. I think, you can come up with more ways every time. Particularly, I liked your suggestion of submission of squidoo lenses for links.
However, I always believed that persuasion links are the best in the long run. You need the links to remain rather than be taken away right. Also, no nofollow links should be there. It is a lovely article you have written. Good work.
Lenin Nair
Ten most effective tips for link building
By Paula (1 comments.) on Aug 30, 2008 | Reply
Squidoo seems to have a love-hate relationship with Google. One minute they are in their good books and next minute they are nowhere to be seen. I don’t think Squidoo works as well as it once did but it is still an excellent way to get links and to drive traffic to your website or blog.
By LR (1 comments.) on Sep 3, 2008 | Reply
Hello, can someone tell me where I see the video? The link doesn´t work! Thanks in advance!
By Shell Harris (162 comments.) on Sep 3, 2008 | Reply
LR, I just tried it and the video played for me. Just in case, here is the direct link on Youtube.com: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiR5BIX-_RQ
By Chris (1 comments.) on Sep 20, 2008 | Reply
Thanks for the new videolink. Now I also can watch this useful video.
Great help!
By Marcus (1 comments.) on Oct 2, 2008 | Reply
I will give Sqidoo a try - thanks for the tipp and your opinion on the service
By Andrew Goulding (1 comments.) on Oct 7, 2008 | Reply
I find I get about 50-100 Squidoo a week from my Squidoo Lens for interesting videos.
Andrew Goulding
By Ficken (1 comments.) on Oct 14, 2008 | Reply
Great way to publish information… I’m just starting with squidoo now!
By Anonymous (2 comments.) on Oct 17, 2008 | Reply
This is an awesome post i had read about squidoo on another SEO blog and it didn’t sink in. My time for the last several years has been spent focusing on on-site page elements and i am just starting to learn link building. Thanks for the GREAT information.
By Wellness (1 comments.) on Oct 20, 2008 | Reply
Great post! You can get visitors and links from Squidoo, and you can earn some money too, but what is important is to build quality lenses.
Greets Wellness
By Beratung (1 comments.) on Oct 20, 2008 | Reply
Great article, and great information. I´ got all my information about squidoo through your article thanks…
By Issac (1 comments.) on Oct 21, 2008 | Reply
Great article. I’ll try these link building tips on my usenet tutorials site.
Thank you ~ Issac
By Chris (1 comments.) on Oct 21, 2008 | Reply
This is an excellent post thank you very much for your effort. I do have one question though.
I looked at your lens and decided to create my own to see the benefits. However the links on my lens are nofollowed whereas the links on yours are not? How did you get them as dofollow’s?
My lens is totally on topic, not spammy in anyway and out of the 500+ words on the page only a few are links back to my site.
I only created this a few hours ago so maybe this is something Squidoo changes as the lens becomes more popular?
Hope someone can shed some light on this?
Cheer, Chris x
By sandy2008 on Oct 29, 2008 | Reply
Squidoo is a website designed to make it easy for anyone, for free, to set up a single page on a topic he or she knows or cares a lot about. Advertising revenue is shared with these content creators, and some of it is given to charity.
By Dan DelMain (1 comments.) on Nov 8, 2008 | Reply
Thanks for the insight. I always appreciate advice on a user website from an unbiased source (as in not the actual site you’re signing up for). After reading your article, I went and created my own Squidoo page for Sea Salt. I am looking forward to receiving feedback from what others think. Cheers.
By freshwater pearl jewelry on Nov 24, 2008 | Reply
I have been looking into Squidoo for quite a while but until now havent forced myself to sit down and get into it, I am glad your smoothie blog has done well I cant think of a single person that doesnt love them.
thanks for the great post and explanation, you would of thought seth of all people would of made it just a little more clear.
By Great eBay Auctions on Dec 26, 2008 | Reply
Great article. I have seen a definate increase in traffic since creating a couple Squidoo Lenses 2 months ago. Great way to drive traffic to your sites and blogs.
Nice video as well.
By Graham Head on Jan 21, 2009 | Reply
Great article, It has encouraged me to start building a few lenses as I didnt have much luck before.
If you would be so kind would you be able to point me in the right direction as I have created one but it doesnt seem to do it for me.
I think you have my email now.
Thanks
G
By Life is Colourful on Jan 29, 2009 | Reply
I know that sucks to have too many spammers, but I would in this situation still keep the website for these reasons -
1. I still would like to give rewards to my legitimate users
2. Even they leave good comments, they are not for only holy reasons of reading your posts and leave comments religiously, they also want something back.
3. Out of such “expecting” legitimate users, it’s easy to build a community and exclude the spammers out of it
By Make $250+ Per Day With Google (1 comments.) on Mar 5, 2009 | Reply
I have just started to use Squidoo for traffic. While I haven’t seen that much results, I am going to wait one day to see if anything comes up. I must say though, that squidoo is VERY powerful, and the main index page of squidoo is 7. Anway, I just digged in my blog’s archive and pulled out all of the blog post url and uploaded them using the link feature in Squidoo. I have link 50 solid anchor links on at least 5 of my squidoo pages. Cool.
By Ron (1 comments.) on Apr 6, 2009 | Reply
Thanks for the tips on Squidoo, I’ve set my lens and am targeting as you suggested….stay tuned.
By SEO/webdesign=1.prioritet (7 comments.) on May 31, 2009 | Reply
Wow this site sound very seo friendly, I´m gonna try this one as well
By Eoin (1 comments.) on May 31, 2009 | Reply
Thanks for posting this articlem, as someone fairly new to SEO this helped a great deal!
By michael sommer (1 comments.) on Jun 8, 2009 | Reply
Thanks for post, i´m gonna try this the next time.
By Anonymous (1 comments.) on Jun 9, 2009 | Reply
Thanks for sharing mate, I also use squidoo to rank quickly for keywords. Web 2.0 are already authority sites, so getting links from high PR pages from authority sites equals quicker SEO results.
By Suchmaschinenoptimierung Stuttgart(new comment) on Jun 30, 2009 | Reply
I don`t really like the vid… it is kind of boring