Getting Google to Index Your Squidoo Lens
This post about getting Google to index your new Squidoo lens could easily have an alternate title of “How to Get Your Dog to Do Tricks on Command”, or “How to Get Your Three Year Old To Do That Cute Thing She Does For Your Guests”. Dogs, Kids, and Google… I can’t count on any of them to do what I want… WHEN I want.
“Crawl It! You Might Like It!!”
Any of y’all having a booger of a time getting the Big G to take a crawl of your new lenses on Squidoo? It’s been hit or miss for me. Some lenses take right away… and others make me want to beat my head against the wall. Thing is, I am usually pretty creative and effective at encouraging Google to take a run through my lens. I place links out there in highly visible locations, but the bottom line is, You can lead Google to content, but you can’t make it crawl!
Thing is, Squidoo has gotten SO big and many, many topics are not only covered, but they are OVER covered. I have noticed that when I make a lens that isn’t really unique to the Squidoo site, Google just doesn’t seem interested. I just want to shake that search engine and scream, “Crawl it! You Might Like It!!!”
Tonight, I made two new lenses. Get this, lens #538,237 and #538,465 for the Squidoo website. Pretty amazing isn’t it? Google is showing 420,000 pages from Squidoo in their index! That’s a lot of web pages!
Looks like Squidoo is getting to a tipping point of sorts and we’re gonna have to find new methods to our madness. I have learned (the hard way, naturally) to NOT promote my lens within the Squidoo site until AFTER Google gets the lens in their index. Let me clarify that -
Yes, I will add the new lens to groups, but no, I will not leave a link to the lens in the guest book of another lens, nor will I lensroll the new lens. I have found that these other lenses will start coming up for the query/search term my NEW lens is focused on..and my new lens is left in the proverbial dirt. So, I have changed my ways a bit and now ONLY promote a new, un-indexed lens AWAY from the Squidoo site until the Big G graces me with my new lens in the index.
Testing Ways to Get Squidoo Lenses Indexed FAST
I am testing the most effective ways to get a new Squidoo lens indexed and now I am down to one very simple concept - Blog about your new lens.
For these two new Squidoo lenses I created tonight, I am going to simply blog about them right here. Google is in this blog FAST… I mean REALLY fast. Sometimes, I publish a post, start to do a once over, last check for typos, and find out Google has already been and gone before I can do any last minute editing. That’s crazy! However, it’s time to see if I can use that to my advantage.
The only two links out of this post will be optimized anchor links to my pages on Squidoo. I want to see if this works for me better than my other methods.
So, please bear with me while I test this theory.
Introducing, Squidoo Lens #538,237 - Low Cost Web Hosting is a cool little lens that talks about things you need to know when picking out a web hosting account and five great hosting companies that are great, reliable, AND affordable. I also disclose MY web hosting company of choice.
Squidoo Lens #538,465 was a ton of fun to make. I was curious… How much does it cost to advertise on TV? I found a neat online company that breaks the myth that small business owners can’t afford to run TV commercials. I was amazed to see, that for my test commercial spot campaign, that TV commercials can cost $10 a piece - maybe even less! And it all can be set up right from your computer in about 30 minutes. Pretty impressive!
Take a peak at the new lenses if you’d like… I’ll let you know the results of my testing.
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Something that I think might help (but I’m not 100% sure) is to ping your lens just after you publish it for the first time. This ‘ping’ will notify a bunch of blog syndication networks, and also Google, Yahoo and Live blog searches. This isn’t quite the same as notifying the regular search engines, but it does get their bots crawling your lens.
thefluffanutta
May 8th, 2008 at 7:56 amHi PotpieGirl, thanks for posting this tips. I will try it! I’m just curious, I blog about a lens http://www.squidoo.com/Lose-Weight-In-Healthy-Way however, it don’t get any traffic from SE and don’t indexed in google. However, my other lens, get Lots traffic from Google, http://www.squidoo.com/download-free-powerpoint-templates although I only promote it via digg.
May 8th, 2008 at 12:08 pmI usually ping mine too, not sure if it really helps & I submit them to Google. They’ll usually pick them up for a short time, drop them, then pick them up again a few weeks (or months) later. I think blogging about my lenses is a big help, I can’t wait to see the results of your test.
May 8th, 2008 at 12:20 pm{ From PotPieGirl }
Update: Both Google Blogs and Google Web crawled and indexed this post 8 hours ago… which was about 20 minutes after I published. As of this moment, neither lens is showing in the Google index.
@Fluffanutta - Yes, I use the ping tool at Squidutils.com very often. Only thing is (was) that these two lenses were so new that they didn’t even have the lovely green check next to them yet. As of this morning, they both are within Squidoos index so they should also be listed on my SquidUtils dashboard.
@ Linette - Yes, Google can be a very fickle creature, thats for sure!
May 8th, 2008 at 2:47 pmHi Jen,
What a relief to see you writing about this. I thought it was just me wanting to just crack over this mystery. My most recent experience was G indexing my lense quickly and successfully. The lense ranked on the first page of G right up there with a few very large sites like about.com and askmen dot com for a long tail mothers day holiday keywords.
The traffic was awesome to say the least and then the whammy came exactly one week later. Talk about a bummer. The site is no longer appearing anywhere in the results on its own. Except for a few relevant theme lenses where I left an appropriate comment is all that shows up within the serps relating to the squidoo sphere for this lense.
One of my web2.0 article submission sites does show up with this squidoo lense in it but not the squidoo lense itself. I really do think in the case of heavy web2.0 promotion, G may be cracking down on the quick rankings by way of digg, delicious, etc. According to an article I read recently, they want to get back to a more natural order of things with respect to their organic serps.
On a more upbeat note, I really appreciate the insight you share about Squidoo. I’ve learned quite a bit from your knowledge over the last 2 months.
Sunshine
May 8th, 2008 at 4:23 pm{ From PotPieGirl }
Hiya Sunshine!
So glad you’re reading and getting something out of this blog. I do tend to ramble on and on…and on =)
The article you referred to - about getting back to a more natural order of things - would be a good read. Any way you could share the url?
I think this post deserves an update/follow up….
Time to ramble some more! Stay tuned.
May 8th, 2008 at 4:40 pmHey Jen,
Here is the article I referenced earlier. http://promote-my-site.com/index.php/myBlog/Page-4.html
May 8th, 2008 at 10:25 pmThe links to your lenses in the blog post are masked with your blog forwarding set up thingamajig. Instead of the squidoo URL. This does not matter?
Lewis
May 8th, 2008 at 10:34 pmWow, you are intense Pot Girlie, I usually wait like for two or tree weeks to see my squidoo pages on Google, and I thought it was fast, not anymore;)
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:00 pmGlad you find the pinger useful.
The other thing that might work for you is to create a link to your lens from another site that is getting crawled. So, let’s say your digg profile page is getting crawled - point a link to your squidoo page. Bingo, in the primary index.
Shameless self promotion alert: If you are interested in using social media to promote your site, we have a beta test of our Social Suite tool with Digg Analytics and Automation that is in beta - come drop us an email and we’ll give you a beta slot.
-OT
Oliver Tacos last blog post..How and Why to Blast your Posts onto a Huge Number of Social Networks
June 5th, 2008 at 1:50 pm