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!

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

Along those lines, you can also use tags on your squidoo lens to create some very awesome backlinks. I’ve recently done an about face on how I use tagging on Squidoo and have noticed some great results.

Since each tag has it’s own page on Squidoo, you are creating an instant backlink to your lens each time you create a tag. Similarly, every time you change a tag, your link goes from one tag page to another…

Here’s the trick,

You want your lens to show up on highly relevant tags that that have multiple lenses pointing to them. You also want to be on the very first page if there are more than one page of results for that tag.

Example:

For a lens about polar bears I might have used to use the following tags:

• Polar Bear christmas card designs
• arctic polar bear habitats
• Polar Bear clothes and shirts
• Polar Bear Pictures and videos

etc.

But now I’ll set my tags to look more like this:

• Polar Bear
• animals
• arctic bears
• iceberg

etc.

Tags that are highly relevant and have multiple lenses linking to them will get you indexed faster and ranked higher.

By doing this, and practicing Primary Tag domination, you build up a nucleus of high ranking mini-sites that connect to each other in loads of different ways.

And that’s a good thing

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.