Religion and Spirituality lenses (and more)

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.