Passive Link Building with YouTube from CaptainSquid

Captain Squid is one of my favorite Squidoo bloggers. His Squidoo tips blog always has the BEST information and tools for lensmasters. Naturally, inviting Captain Squid to be a guest blogger here at PotPieGirl was a no-brainer! Today, Captain Squid will be sharing a cool tip about using YouTube to build back links to your Squidoo lenses.

A BIG welcome to Captain Squid!

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Passive Link Building with YouTube

Arrr, This is the Captain here. PotPieGirl asked if I could sail over from Captain Squid and write a little about Squidoo for you. As I think that PotPieGirl is a fine upstanding Squidooer in general and Pirate in particular, I was happy to oblige.

I wanted to spend my few words talking about the YouTube module on Squidoo and how 3 seconds of your time can build multiple high PR backlinks to your lens with zero additional effort.

I know, I know it sounds like a scam… but it really is that easy.

Here’s how:

This is what the YouTube Module edit screen looks like:

1) Set your videos to ‘Let YouTube Pick’ – When this setting is selected a video is picked from YouTube that matches your ‘tags’ (step 3).

2) Show Full Size Video – You don’t want people leaving your lens to watch the video! You just want to get the backlink from YouTube.

3) Enter Tags – Enter tags that are fairly specific to your lens. You don’t want to have a random video that is not applicable popping up. If you keep getting random videos, try searching on YouTube until you find a series of search terms that allow you to return the video you want.

How this Works –

When you have a YouTube module, every time the video is ‘watched’ on your lens, you get a ‘click’ that counts towards a backlink to that video. The top 5 pages in ‘click #’ are linked to by the video.

Example:

This is off of a random PR1 YouTube video where one of my lenses has ‘Star Wars Boy’ in the ‘Tags’ section. As you can see, I have the top two spots and so I get a little link juice from YouTube.

Ok, that explains why YouTube is good, but why is letting Youtube pick the video good?

For this reason right here:

This is a view of my backlinks from Squidaholic (a new SEO tool for lenses that I’m Sure PotPieGirl has told you about and will link to her post right about here 😉 ).

As you can see, Youtube Videos are 3 of the top 5 backlinks for this lens. Over time, as YouTube rotates videos because of changes in their video listings, you build up ‘clicks’ on all the ones your visitors see. Not only does this keep your lens fresh for google, it also passively builds backlinks.

See, that didn’t hurt at all now did it? Now go be Piratey and build some lenses! The Captain Says so!

Captain Squid

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Thank you, Captain! What a great Squidoo tip! Want more Squidoo video training and tips? Head on over to www.CaptainSquid.com today.

12 Comments

  1. This is a great tip – I’d not used a YouTube module before. I added a video module to my lens following the directions above (including letting YouTube pick) and the first video that has come up is one that has embedding disabled. So, when you click to play, it shows “Video no longer available” and when you double click to go to the site, it will actually show you the video but it indicates that embedding has been disabled.

    Is there a way to filter out this kind of video? Is this a Squidoo thing? A YouTube search results thing. I’ve reloaded my lens a couple of times and this video always comes up. Do you know how often YouTube (or Squidoo) refreshes its selections? There are at least 20 videos with my search criteria.

    Thanks so much for any troubleshooting help!

    Cheers .. Kate

  2. Hi Jennifer,

    In addition to this great tip you’ve shared, I discovered this information by accident myself as well last week when reviewing my squidoo lens search results for one of my lenses.

    These links can also make there way into the ‘actual’ search results as well…go figure. Yippiee!

  3. i’m just getting into the whole squidoo thing, and it’s a little more involved than i first thought. 4 of my 5 lenses are WIP or whatever that is, so I think the fact that they’re not being featured hurts them. i guess i gotta promote them to get them up? don’t know…anyway, thx for the youtube tip.

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  4. These sound like cool tips. Thanks.

    I published my first lens today on Squidoo so I’m brand spanking new to it. And according to your steps I’ve done everything completely wrong. Ha ha.

    I didn’t link people in a new browser (just a personal preference) and I picked the videos myself (as I’m not too trusting in Youtubes search doo-hickey).

    I think I have a lot to learn. I’m off now to read Pot Pie’s Squidaholic post and then I’ll check out some of your video tutorials (I love video tutorials).

  5. I’m not sure this works any more? The YouTube page I looked at had rel=nofollow stamped all over the links. Might get some traffic but not PR sadly.

  6. I really like your lens and your topics. I have a little difficulty believing “Captain Squid.” I think that whether you have Youtube pick your vids or your pick them yourself Google only gives your lens 1 link. That it. Rotate them all you want and you still get just 1 link.

    The trick is to pick the videos you want to use and isolate them into a channel. You use specific keywords to find them then isolate them. Now “you” choose those vids. If you let Youtube choose you will end up with all kinds of junk.

    Here is the bottom line in my opinion. You get 1 link from Youtube, ebay, Wikipedia and Amazon. These have high PRs and will give your lens lots of juice!

    With all of these you get a high PR link and you get specific keywords for your niche. All of this is great Google Juice!

  7. Got to agree with swaps – it’s a nofollow link from Youtube so not authority or link value passed there.

  8. I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.

  9. Very well written. This is the kind of information that is useful to those want to increase their SERP’s. Keep up the good work.

  10. This is a really good tip. I have to admit, I’ve always used the thumbnail/group setting which looked nice, but I can see why that isn’t the best choice. Even if these aren’t solid to get juice from Google, I’ve found the “nofollow” links still help MSN and Yahoo rankings, so I’ll take whatever search engine traffic comes. Thanks for the tips!

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