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!

squidoo-google-05082008

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.

21 Comments

  1. 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

  3. I 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.

  4. PotPieGirl says:

    { 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!

  5. Hi 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

  6. PotPieGirl says:

    { 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.

  8. The 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

  9. Wow, 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;)

  10. Glad 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

  11. PPG,

    Great thread! I’ve found (as what has long been true) that content rules. I think what you are saying pretty much leans in that direction as well. In other words, just a little passion goes a long way.

    One of my sites, http://www.theofficialpigeonforgecabinguide.com (feel free to remove the URL if you don’t want it here-no problem) sat for a long time without much happening on it. I just really started focusing on writing about things I was really interested in and two things happened…

    One, it became easier and easier to write because I liked the subjects and I had a sincere interest in them and;

    Two, My pages began to get much more traffic from the “Big G”.

    So, I think the bottom line is that we all (as site owners seeking traffic) need to start from the gates with something we are truly interested in. It will be easier to sit down and write and the whole process will begin to evolve naturally and lead to traffic.

    Thanks for a great little site Miss PPG 🙂

    JW

    JWs last blog post..Luxury Cabins Pigeon Forge Tennessee & Luxury Gatlinburg Cabins

  12. quickcutters says:

    Thank you for all the good info. I’m going to go back to my lens after i have read a little more, and i am hopeful that it will take off better then it has.

    Thank you much

    quickcutterss last blog post..Uo dated some info

  13. Thanks for the great information you give. I used my second blogpost (done way back in 2006) to make a lens on Squidoo. I cannot remember now if I did something on Squidoo to get my lens indexed, but I did put a link to it in my blog’s sidebar. If I google the title/keywords, my lens is actually no 1 and my blogpost no 2 in the index, whereas the blogpost always showed up in no 1 position.

    On the other hand, I have about 6 months’ of salt dough posts on my blog. Could this have any effect on my squidoo lens showing up in first position for these keywords/phrases?

    Elsie

    Elsies last blog post..The Gift of Being a Woman

  14. Cool tip, I just pinged my squidoo lens, so hopefully it gets indexed…. sigh, how annoying 🙁

  15. This is great information. I’ve never had trouble getting my hub pages indexed and grabbing traffic from them, but was never successful with squidoo. Starting to ping my lens right after I create them. Hope it works

  16. Getting Squidoo lenses indexed quickly was easy a couple of years ago, it’s getting tougher all the time. And like you say if a topic has been over emphasized Google seems to ignore new ones, for the most part.

    I think it’s Google’s way of saying to change topics and try something new.

    I haven’t done a lot with Squidoo over the past year. I just have too many other things on the go which seem to have a greater priority.

    But now that it’s on my mind again I think I will create a few more lenses and see what happens to them.

    James Manns last blog post..The Pros And Cons of Using NoFollow

  17. Ken Saint says:

    Hi PotPie Girl (funny name).
    Very interesting Lens…I had a new lens on the first page of goog for about 3 days and it was clicking well, all of a sudden it completly disapears,cant even find it in quotes ” ” I would like to know why and how to get it back, but there is no one I know that will advise or answer any emails.
    Very frustrated Internet Marketer
    Regards
    Ken Saint

Comments are closed.