Religion and Spirituality lenses (and more)

I finally did it. I started my own self hosted blog. Check out All Considering.

I’ve already posted about

• Loving your neighbours
• Dreaming your life - or living it?
• My spiritual path: pondering (or jnana yoga)
• Can a person live on a vegan diet?
• And on: being personal - or impersonal

I plan to write about ‘The Secret’, black magic and more.
I plan to do interviews (you can still apply for getting interviewed by suggestion a question here)
and weekly commentary on something H.P. Blavatsky wrote. Tomorrow: Jesus and Krishna washing feet.

English is my second language. Dutch being my mother tongue. Because I read a lot, technical texts are easy for me. But when it comes to discussing the weather, or fruit, or birds or medicine - I’m often lost. But squidoo comes to the rescue (a bit) - and I made a lens on that: how squidoo helps me with my English.

I’ve been waiting for a clear response by the search engines to having less automatically posted internal squidoo links (aka: links in the ‘explore related lenses‘ section). Can’t say I see a pattern. It’s been only 11 days - so perhaps I’m too quick to report on stats, but here goes.

My lens on spiritual scientist David Bohm went up in rankings and is now found for the term ‘David Bohm’. Which is great. But since it has links coming in and going out through the related lenses feature it doesn’t prove that feature is bad for SEO.

Consistent with that my lens on spiritual quotes has not gone up in google at all. It’s still being found mainly through yahoo - not a drop from google. Weirdly enough it still has a large amount of visitors from within squidoo. In fact I’d say the traffic from within squidoo has gone up. Whether that’s due to the new lensmaster page or because people do really use internal squidoo search I wouldn’t know. Perhaps the tag pages themselves get actual traffic? As in people click on them?

My bible quotes lens was never as big a traffic puller as my spiritual quotes - but it still had nice rising visitor numbers till google pulled the plug. It is one of the lenses where I decided to quit using the ‘related lens’ feature. Whether because of that or for other reasons: it has gotten back some google traffic. As in 6 visitors a day. Not the 36 it had on it’s best day so far, but still - not bad. Again: the total volume is nothing compared to my spiritual quotes lens: it still gets around 30 visitors a day.
This one suggests that getting rid of those extra links may help. But given the other two lenses I discussed - it could be something else entirely.

I like comparing these quotes lenses, because they interlink (form a group for google) and I turned off ‘related lenses’ on each of them. My Love Quotes lens did as well (or as bad) as my spiritual quotes lens: a bit of traffic from yahoo, some from within squidoo, but none from google. Totaling a whopping 4 visitors a day. Again: not bad compared to some, not very impressive either.

Conclusion? It doesn’t seem to make any difference whether you turn the related lenses feature on or off. Which on balance just means: turn it off when you think it looks bad. Turn it on when squidoo is your only source of traffic for a lens (like my squidoo help lenses). For new lenses - I guess I’d turn it on. But I’ll keep the experiment going to see what happens.

Either the perfect lens on reading food labels hasn’t been made yet (hint), or it’s just too complicated a subject to fit into one lens. I’m not sure which it is. anyhow, here are two lenses that do actually help, some.

The first is In your food: food additives. It discusses food additives that are in most if not all our processed foods and that aren’t helping our kids stay focused at all (to say the least).

Since the reason I was looking into this was really that I wanted to see if I needed to make a lens on hydrogenated fats, I’m glad I ran into this lens: There should be a ban on dietary partially hydrogenated fats a debate run by sara08852. As you can guess by the title, it’s a hey monkeybrain debate which deals with this issue. Hydrogenated fats are really very bad for the body. They are killing us all slowly. The body can’t do anything about them. Unlike for instance animal fats: not good for the heart, but still - the body knows what they are, and what to do with them.

What started me on this is that I found to my shock that cheap dutch bread actually had these hydrogenated oils in them. This means that even in The Netherlands (where I thought this could never be necessary) EVERYBODY SHOULD READ food labels. Not just vegetarians, or people with allergies. We all should. It’s vital for our health.

Anyhow. I think I’ve made my point

As you’ve all heard I’m thinking of starting my own blog. This means that I am also researching what promotion methods I should expand on. One of these, possibly, is twitter. I’m not sure I’m up for the distraction, but I have heard that it works for others. So I’ve signed up: spirituality - aka Katinka Hesselink - aka kh7 on twitter.

Anyhow. Here are some of the best lenses on the topic.

There’s a video showcase which has some fun video’s about twitter.

This lovely and beautiful guide to twitter.

Lensmasters at twitter. Add yourself

And indispensably: how to use twitter responsibly as an online marketer.

Just for starters, read the best twitter feeds EVER (that’s right, on the ever project).

More good tips on the do’s and don’ts of twitter. Geared towards artists using twitter, but really informative for others as well.

I woke up this morning all sick and tired of squidoo. A lot of it seems to be a popularity contest, and I’ve always hated those. So I was all prepared to write a sarcastic blogpost about it and say good bye to you all. But see the power of squidoo: I actually created a lens about the subject… and I think it just might become a popular one

Here it is: If you want to become popular on squidoo….

I plan to go to India again in a few years, and thought I’d try and lighten my summer up by familiarizing myself with their music. I’ve studied India (its history, culture, religion and philosophy) a lot over the past few years - but their music is still pretty much virgin territory for me.

So to give myself an assignment, I made a lens about Indian Music - a video showcase.

In doing the research for this on youtube, I found that bollywood video’s have inspired a whole genre of funny video’s. Hence the Funny Indian Videos Showcase

There is every indication that google ranks sites based on all kinds of things: one of them being whether it ‘trusts’ a site.

Google trust is composed of several aspects (some of these are speculation):

1. age of the site
2. trusted links to that site
3. type of domain (.com , .org, .info, .tk)
4. amount of links to that site
5. signs of spammy content

The question is: is squidoo.com a trusted domain? I’d say the evidence suggests that it’s (still) on the border of being considered spammy.

There was the sudden loss of google rankings in 2007 which clearly meant that at that time squidoo was considered spammy by google. Rankings recovered to some extent after that so I’d say squidoo is on the upside again. There are too many lenses that do rank decently… I don’t think google considers this a spam domain that much anymore.

BUT there is one sign that it’s still in the neighbourhood of spammy: the serp changes. Lenses that rank well may loose their rankings quickly (and vice versa). As I said yesterday: more quickly than on most other sites. This could be due to the dynamic nature of many of squidoo internal links - but it could also be due to the domain not being quite as trusted.

Most of my points yesterday were about the kinds of links that stay put: they are the most valuable for long term SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Short term fresh links matter too.

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 same goes for tag pages: they change as the competition grows, and only the top 10 of the lenses using that tag get significant advantage for that link.

The same goes once again for the links on our maxed lenses that have ‘explore related pages‘ turned on. Those links (at least the dynamic links) again refer mostly to high ranking lenses using some of the same tags you do.

This is fine as long as your lenses rank highly - but when they DO NOT you don’t really get the benefit: you end up sponsoring the higher ranking lenses in your topic.

I think all these dynamic internal links (links within squidoo that change) are one reason why lenses can go up and down in the serps so much. Squidoo lenses are quite unstable in that respect, compared to pages on my own website.

On my own website what happens is much more stable. Pages do get shuffled in the serps, but that just means they go from position 1 to 3, or from position 22 to 15 or something. This means a small increase or decrease in traffic (well going from 1 to 3 makes a big difference). But it’s not what you see on squidoo.

Squidoo lenses habitually go from 1 to 30 or something. They go from having 100 google visitors in a week to 0 without a blink of an eye. In other words: the ups are higher and the downs are lower.

Tomorrow I’ll discuss another possible reason for this.

Links are powerful for search engine optimization (especially google).

• They’re the reason why lensographies are important.
• They’re the reason why I do think having only one profile is preferable to having several

But links aren’t created equal. Some links are more powerful than others.

Powerful links are:

• Links that have been around for a while. The longer the better. (Every link starts out young, obviously, but as it ages it becomes more influential
• Links that are on powerful pages. That is: pages google considers ‘authority’ on a subject.

The second bit can be elaborated even more. What’s a powerful page?

• Age : older pages have more authority
• Links to that page: pages with more links are more powerful, especially if they are links from powerful pages themselves
• The domain: pages get taken more seriously if they are on a domain (www.squidoo.com is a domain) that is powerful. Wikipedia is a domain that is very powerful at present.

You’ll notice that freshness doesn’t really come into it. This is not entirely true: a new link gives a page a small boost for a while. After that, it will help that page a bit as time goes on. long term though: those small boosts add up more than the one time boost did.

It seems this is turning into a series. More tomorrow on what this means for internal squidoo links.