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.