Squidoo instability in the serps (search engine rankings in google)
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.
8 Comments »
poddys said :
August 14, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Very interesting and nicely explained.
I’m still trying to find the secret of getting and keeping lenses in high traffic mode.
katinka - spirituality said :
August 14, 2008 at 1:55 pm
You and me both.
Fundamentally the issue is how to get quality links to those pages. Some of these things come down to quality PR (as in Public Relations). Which is a very different skill from being able to make decent lenses.
mulberry said :
August 14, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Interesting. I’ve been unable to detect a pattern so I’m going to keep reading your posts hoping you can explain it all!
linkingclever.info » Blog Archive » Squidoo instability in the serps (search engine rankings in google) said :
August 14, 2008 at 9:50 pm
[...] Original post: Squidoo instability in the serps (search engine rankings in google) [...]
spirituality said :
August 15, 2008 at 3:05 am
Hey – this post actually got quoted by another blog
that’s a first…
SEO and Ranking Flux for Squidoo Lenses | Captain Squid said :
August 15, 2008 at 7:34 am
[...] Arr… This Be The Captain! Thanks for Stopping by to check out my piratey bag of Squidoo Tricks! If you are new here, you might want to get free updates and squidoo tricks delivered straight to you via RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!I’ve been meaning to write a post about this for a while and I noticed that Spirituality wrote an awesome post on her blog yesterday about all the Dynamic Links in Squidoo and how it affects Search Rankings. [...]
Religion and Spirituality lenses (and more) » Blog Archive » SEO for squidoo update: do related links help? said :
August 25, 2008 at 3:49 am
[...] 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. [...]
User links about "instability" on iLinkShare said :
October 1, 2008 at 4:03 pm
[...] | user-saved public links | iLinkShare 4 votesSquidoo instability in the serps (search engine rankings in google)>> saved by bauernkerl 2 days ago1 votesSay Goodnight, Pervez>> saved by Wolfexile 2 days ago4 [...]