Religion and Spirituality lenses (and more)

This is partly an ‘I’m sorry I was wrong’ post.

It turns out that google does index and follow links on profile pages – even if there are more than a 100 links on that page. They said so themselves a bit after I blogged to watch out for this issue.
Apparently google doesn’t know what it does – or perhaps I should say Matt Cutts changed his mind? Here he says “If you end up with hundreds of links on a page, Google might choose not to follow or to index all those links.” Which is relevant for our profile pages, squidoo groups and our lensographies.

In other words: don’t worry about your profile, even your bottom lenses will be found by google (if you have enough links to your lenses overall). This does not mean that it’s a bad idea to create topical lensographies. It still is. After all: links count for more when they come from pages about the same topic as the lens in question. Here is a rough idea of what a quality link looks like:

A quality link has the following characteristics (or most)

- The page the link is on, has backlinks of its own. Those backlinks ideally come from the website the page is on AND from other websites.
- The page the link is on is not too new (unless it’s a blog with lots of backlinks).
- The website or domain the link is on is not too new (unless it’s a site that is so popular it already has quality backlinks).
- The page the link is on has content related to the topic of the page the link points to.
- The link is on topic with the text around the link.
- The page the link is on is indexed by google. Since you are usually going to find pages you want links on through google, this is not often an issue. However if you are considering buying directory links this really IS an issue: they may not even count… So go and check the google cache. [Google recently took out the advice to submit links to directories. This means at the very least the low quality directories probably don't help your lenses. However, these links are still the easiest links to get. Better something than nothing?]
- Has few other outgoing links. This is common sense really: would you rather be one of a hundred recommendations, or the only one on a page? The latter, obviously.

The reason why making topical lensographies (and you don’t have to call it a lensography) is such a good idea is that it creates a page that is on topic for several of your lenses – which means that the links from that page to those lenses counts for a lot. It is also easier to link build for a summary page. And link building for that one lens, will mean link building for all the lenses it links to.

More on SEO for Squidoo