How to Get your Squidoo Lens in Google SERPs Part 1 - Links
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I’ve seen a lot of questions lately on getting your lens indexed in Google and keeping there. I’m no stranger to having my lenses dropped out of Google search results after a few days, or never getting indexed at all. From what I can tell there are several major factors that play a role in Google’s results.
This is a pretty in depth topic, so I might take a few posts to cover it fully. For now, we’ll call this part 1 and discuss links.
Links
Links are obviously important for getting noticed by both real people and the search engines. Of course, Google has made billions of dollars by turning linking into a science as well as an art form. Squidoo can be very powerful for generating internal links (links to other squidoo pages) and is optimized very well for ‘on-page’ SEO elements. Here are some ideas to tip the scales in your favor even more.
Link Freshness- If your lens has some new links pointing at it every few days or weeks, it gives google a new ‘path’ to find your lens by. There are some automatic tools I use like Zimbio to accomplish this on a basic level, but there is always more that can be done.
Link volume - The more links you have, the more likely Google is to find one, follow it to your page, and index it. This can backfire if you just spam your link to poor directories and other ’shady’ neighborhoods. Sites with a good internal linking structure (Lensroll.com is a great example of good linking structure) can actually provide you with multiple links to your lens through various categories, user pages, etc.
Link Quality / Power A few really great links are all you really need to get indexed and start climbing the results. Unfortunately, this is much easier said than done. This is where creativity can really help you out. Do you know the market leader in your niche? What sites are people that view your lens also going to? Do you have a link plexo or link list that points to relevant sites? If those sites have any kind of social interaction (blogs, forums, etc.) then it’s an easy step to join in there conversation and contribute some valuable content to them (as comments and posts) with a link back to your lens. Again, providing something valuable is critical here, as spammy actions could wreck your reputation with those sites, as well as google. A relevant link with relevant anchor text is well worth the work and will reward you with organic traffic from the link as well as improved results in google. As Seth is fond of saying, Make it Remarkable and they will come 
That should provide a good foundation for you to begin to build your outside links. In the next part, I’ll show you some ways that I use different options available on your lens to build more links and more importantly, more powerful links from within squidoo.
Please feel free to ask any questions about this in the comments.
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Comments
Hi Captain,
need your advise here..here’s my story
example - Probably had this lens listed in google’s first page for close to a year..but this past month lens rank continually dropped - and visits were dropping from over 1000 .. to 500 now - AND Now i’m out of the google’s first page
over the year with this lens- i’ve used article marketing, blog/squidoo comments for targeted keyword inbound links Consistently, zimbio, gather….and tagging using social bookmarks…and i’ve always updated my lens accordingly
The strange thing i see is - 1 other squidoo lens (whom i’ve been monitoring)on the same topic listed on google 1st page, with very little inbound links(using yahoo site explorer results) - and very little updating on the lens… and i’m falling BADLY in both lens rank and out of google
So what gives?? It’s killing me.
And worst yet , my other lens(close to year old) that were highly ranked before are all disappearing from google as well and with very bad lens ranks too
All poor results have been this past month..
advise much appreciated…
A few really great links is certainly easier said that done, however you are right, it is completely worth it.
[...] In the first part of this series, I talked about what different kind of links there were and some basic ideas on using these link types to get indexed and ranked by google quickly. [...]
Thanks a lot, some great information here. I just wonder how updated this is now? Does this still work and give the same effect? It seems harder and harder to get your lenses indexed.
the concepts in this post definitely still apply today. I’m still using the same basic concepts to get lenses (and other webpages) indexed and ranking.
Great information, I’m relatively new to Squidoo but learning fast.
I love it - will definately implement these tips - actually I’ve already started
Thanks and keep up the good work
[...] Why Links Matter for Indexing - A broad brush overview of what exactly links are and why they are important in getting you noticed on a very basic level. [...]
Leave a comment
Hiya Cpt Squid
Yesterday I was reading an article on Site Pro News called, ‘Google Everflux: Just What We Needed, Google on Speed,’ By Titus Hoskins (c) 2008
The article caught my eye because I had noticed something funky going on with my own sites. (I am new to squidoo but not to the web in general.)
Basicly what the article is saying is that it appears that Google is now refreshing it’s index every single day rather then the once or twice a month it had been doing before. This all started a couple/few months ago.
Like in all procedure changes out here on the web, this has its positives and negatives.
One positive that I have witnessed is that some people who are savvy in the ways of keywords - finding niches with only minor attention - and who use wordpress, squidoo and other highly valued sites and platforms, can get on the first page of google within a few hours of posting. Yup, the same darn day in some cases…
The down side is that those same posts can come right back off the next and sometimes do.
Google’s choice to refresh its index daily seems to leave us with the option of adding tiny bits of content or single link backs almost daily. One way to accomplish this is to simply make one single post with a link back every day or two. (Blogs are great for this purpose, if it is high traffic blog) More work to stay ranked I suppose but in smaller chunks.
Anyway, thanks for all the wonderful content you provide about Squidoo. Very useful for a newbie like me and probably everyone else.
Happy Trails
Kat