In my writings here on Captain Squid, you will often hear me mention the term ‘evergreen modules‘. I wanted to dedicate a post defining evergreen modules and what it means when I am talking about them so everyone is on the same page.

Evergreen Module – A squidoo module that can be updated either automatically or by interaction on a lens without entering the workshop. In addition, an evergreen module is indexable by bots/crawlers/spiders even if they can’t read javascript.

What does this mean?

If a squidoo module can provide ‘fresh’ updated contact on your lens that you don’t have to physically add yourself and the search engines can see those changes, I call it evergreen.

Examples -

  • Google Blog Search
  • RSS mashup
  • Amazon Plexo (even if nothing can be added, Yes, changing the order of products counts!)
  • Featured Lens module (set to ‘random’ with more than 5 lenses)
  • Yelp
  • Hometown Stats
  • Twitter Search
NOT Evergreen -
  • RSS
  • Twitter Storm
  • Ebay
  • Amazon Search
this is by NO means a complete list but it should give you a general idea.
How to tell if a module is evergreen -
When you are looking at the lens, right click and select ‘view source’ to view the source code for the page. If you can’t see the content of the module in the source code, then the search engines cant see it either (probably).

Any Questions?