I try to follow a few basic rules of thumb that work quite well for me.

1) add ‘rel=nofollow’ to affiliate links - Especially if they link to some crazy domain or something. Besides, you aren’t trying to build link equity for the manufacturer you are trying to rank for, are you?

2) Links to other authority sites on the topic - Yes, I feel including these in a Do Follow format is actually benificial for several reasons, the main one being it provides a much better user experience. Remember when ‘linkbait’ seemed to mean ‘the top 100 sites for..’ ? The simple fact is that people would rather talk about something that links to a lot of useful resources. Sure you lose some visitors to the other sites, but they are more likely to come back than if your lens is simply a ‘dead end’ with no other information to follow up on.

3) Links to reviews / Forum threads - For the same reasons stated above, these can provide traffic back to you as well as improve user experience.

If you visited a site about your lens topic, would you want access to more information if you were truly interested? Of course.

If that’s what people want, why not give it to them?

I want to expand a little bit more on a few of the ideas that Spirituality threw out there. Here’s a brief excerpt I want to talk about:

I’ve been thinking about this, because squidoo is a place where a lot of the links are dynamic: they stay up only as long as your lens has a high lensrank. Getting your lens into the top 100 for instance is great for several reasons – one of which is that it’s a great link to have. BUT it’s a temporary link if your lens doesn’t actually stay in the top 100.

The links to your lens through squidoo can update on a moment’s notice or they can update daily or over an even longer time period.  Squidoo is built on two or three primary drivers that help build links to individual pages.

The first factor built into Squidoo’s site architecture is Lensrank.  Lensrank controls the appearance of your lens on the top 100 lists, how high your lens appears on tag pages, and to a lesser extent, how often it appears on the ‘Explore Related Lenses’ box.

The second factor to consider with Squidoo’s on-site SEO is tagging. I wrote a huge tutorial on tagging with squidoo for a reason. Tags are directly controlled by the Lensmaster and they directly determine which tag pages your lens can appear on and which lenses your lens will show as a ‘related’ lens for.

The intersection of these two factors is that the order of the lenses that appear on tag pages are governed by Lensrank.

Now, when you have a lens that gets a good chunk of traffic, this can quickly become a self – reinforcing cycle. When your lens climbs the ranks it begins to appear on more tag pages which causes those tag page backlinks to increase in quality significantly, possibly sending you even more traffic.

However, if your lens is just starting out how do you get enough backlinks to catch the eyes of the search engines if you don’t already have the traffic? There are a few simple solutions.

Go after some ‘medium’ tags that only are used by 20-40 other lenses. These tag pages are awesome for lenses that need to get indexed because it’s easy to get on the front tag page for these terms within a day or two (usually).

Go after one or two ‘huge’ tags. The giant tags on squidoo like ‘music’ or ‘business’ can actually be helpful. I’ve noticed that the ‘explore related lenses’ area of lenses don’t always take the top lenses from the tags to display. Sometimes a few of the lenses will be from other lenses that are tagged similarly and have a Lensrank in the same range. This can get you a little more exposure on other lenses plus even the second and third page on some of those big tags can still get you a visit by the search engine.

What do you think of the Squidoo on-site SEO? What tips do you have for getting into the lensrank/tag cycle quickly?

Hi Captain,

What exactly is “No-follow your affiliate links”? Can I do that with my Amazon links for instance? Thanks for your great posts. Really worth reading.

No-Follow Links:

Adding ‘no follow’ to a link effectively tells the search engine spiders to stay away from that link and don’t give any ‘credit’ to the destination of that link. Google has announced on separate occasions that their preference is to have links that could be considered paid endorsements as no-follow. With affiliate links it is painfully obvious that the links are an endorsement of some kind because they usually go to nonsense domains with lots of consonants strung together. There’s no since in giving that domain a bunch of link juice!

This is the main reason that the links in the ‘money making’ modules (ebay, amazon, cafepress, etc) are ‘nofollow’.

Does it really make a difference?

A few months ago, I replaced the vast majority of my affiliate links on lenses to include ‘nofollow’. Since then, I’ve noticed an increase in traffic. whether this has to do with tagging the links correctly or from other factors it’s difficult to say.

I’m pretty certain that at the very least it doesn’t HURT anything.

How to add Nofollow:

regular links will look something like this:

< a href=”http://squidtop.com”>Squidtop – Blogging for Lensmasters</a>

to add nofollow, simply add ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ after the quotes around the URL like this:

< a href=”http://squidtop.com” rel=”nofollow”>Squidtop – Blogging for Lensmasters</a>

Try it out and let me know if it helps your lenses!

Until recently, tag pages consisted of the majority of link flow that could be influenced within squidoo. However, with the recent release of the ‘Discovery Tool’ on lenses (that blue box that has related lenses in it) the possibilities have increased significantly.

The Discovery box on Squidoo displays a subset of other lenses from across Squidoo. Many people have viewed this in a negative light, thinking that this would drive traffic away from their lenses. However, many people are overlooking two major benefits:

1. If you’ve tagged your lenses well it should very easily bring in more traffic than it sends out.
2. You can control all of the lenses in the Discovery box.

What you say? All the lenses? Yep.

You are manually allowed to enter up to three lenses in the Discovery box. Don’t even mess around with that unless it’s for a very specific purpose. Dynamic links can be much more powerful in many instances. Instead, use the Discovery tool algorithm to your advantage.

The Squidoo Discovery Tool Algorithm Deconstructed

From my calculations the discovery tool is based on many things, but a few factors that show through are the following:

• Primary Tags
• # of tags in common
• Category
• Lensrank

I’m not going to reveal which ones I think are the most important, because a Pirate Captain needs to keep a few secrets . But with a little testing you should be able to figure it out yourself.

The Discovery tool truly provides the third leg for controlling squidoo link flow. I hope this little series has been of use to you all and I’d love to hear any questions about it.

Now that we’ve established where the links from lenses go to, lets discuss a little bit about how those Squidoo tag pages I crow about so much play into the whole system.

About Tags on Squidoo

The next two diagrams I’m going to show you assume a few things about the tag page. The first is that multiple lenses use that tag (10+). The second is that you use that tag on your lens and that tag is relevant. Having a lens about lemurs and using the ‘marketing’ tag just because lots of lenses use that tag isn’t going to do any good. Unless, of course, your lens is about how to market to lemurs .

Where do Squidoo Tag Pages get their links?

Every lens that uses a tag creates a link back to the front page of the related tag page.

Where do Squidoo Tag Pages Link to?

The First tag page accumulates all the ‘link juice‘ or ‘votes‘ from all the lenses that use that tag. It then distributes these ‘votes‘ among the top ten lenses for that tag as well as to the deeper pages for that tag. For example, the tag ‘Affiliate Marketing‘ has over 2400 lenses that link to the front tag page. That main tag page then distributes all of it’s accumulated link mojo to the 10 lenses on that page as well as the 247 other ‘affiliate marketing’ tag pages. This means there is a ‘trickle down’ effect where those lower tag pages still get some link mojo to distribute to the lenses on each page after the first.

What Happens when you use uncommon tags on Squidoo?

If you use ‘unique tags‘ like ‘best place to buy a new purple rabbit‘ or some such nonsense, you will end up with a lot of tag pages like this one. A single link between the lens and the tag page. Look less exciting? That’s because it definitely is. There are many fewer ‘votes’, fewer paths for the bots to follow to discover your lens, and less exposure overall for your lens.

The lesson in Squidoo Tags:

Pay attention to what kind of tags you are using. If you have a lot of ‘dead end’ tags on your lens, it’s probably affecting your lens negatively.

Next up:

Squidoo Link flow and the Discovery tool OR Why the new Discovery tool Rocks my Socks

Let’s start off by looking at the 4 different ‘types’ of links that go into and out of Squidoo lenses.

Squidoo Link Flow Away from a Lens

As you can see, there are 4 major types of links out of a lens:

1. Tags – These link to tag pages within squidoo. You have complete control over which tag pages, but they will always go to tag pages.
2. Category - There is always a link to the Squidoo Category you chose when setting up your lens. You have control over this.
3. Discover lenses - This is a new addition and links out to other lenses on Squidoo. You have some ways to control these links as well, both directly and indirectly.
4. Modules - Any links you add to your lens in your modules or profile are completely under your control. These are the only links on your lens that lead out from squidoo.

Squidoo Link Flow Towards a Lens

Notice any similarities here? You have the exact same four sources of incoming links to your lens. These could also be called ‘backlinks’, those things everyone wants to have.

1. Tags - All the tag pages that you link to also link back to you in some form. The link to your lens might be on page 27 of ‘music’ though and your link to the tag page is to the first ‘music’ page….
2. Category – The same concept as tags. Your link points to the first page in the category but your link back is not necessarily from the front page.
3. Discover – Your lens will receive some links back to it from other lenses through the discover tool. These are ‘one-way’ links because you are not necessarily linking to the lens that links to you. There are some ways to control these links that could potentially make this very powerful.
4. External – These are the links that set you apart from other lenses. The toughest to get, they can make or break your lens if used correctly. There are a few Squidoo modules that allow you to automatically acquire external links to your lens as well…

Summary

So what does this mean? Squidoo allows you to control the links coming into your lens as well as the links leaving your lens when done correctly. The key is to use the ‘link infrastructure’ that’s in place to achieve your extra piratey goal…

Next up: Using Link flow from Tag and Category Pages to Improve your Rankings