I was just reading Getting Google to Index Your Squidoo Lens and it sort of inspired me to write this post since I’m currently having trouble getting my squidoo lenses fully indexed.
I got into using Squidoo late. I bought a lens to help me get into the thick of things about a month ago and have created three of my own since.
The lens I bought is this one: http://www.squidoo.com/canong5
It’s doing OK in Google for some model specific longtail searches but I suspect it could do better with more links and promotion, as always. The good news is that Google is at least open to ranking it. Maybe it’s the age of it.
When using the date parameter in the advanced search interface it shows Nov 2007 as the age of the page.
The first one I created on my own is here: http://www.squidoo.com/stock-trading-for-beginners
I first published it at the end of April sometime. It got indexed quick and started ranking for longtail terms quickly. It then dropped for some of those terms but now it is on the climb again. It’s 8 for “trade stocks for beginners” which is related to one of the phrases I was targeting. So now since I know Google likes this page I can start adding to it and really try to get some longtail luv.
From here on it’s a sad story.
The last two lenses that I published have been indexed but they might as well not be. They don’t show up for ANY search terms. As was pointed out to me by thefluffanutta on the SquidU forums, you can see that they are clearly indexed by doing a info:[site urls here], but they show in the SERPs for anything, not for their own titles, not for unique quoted text fragments taken from the pages, not for anything.
Here are the two lenses:
http://www.squidoo.com/computer-security-software
http://www.squidoo.com/ink-cartridge-refills
I don’t know why this happening. Supposedly Google slapped Squidoo last year after some big spam attacks on the site. I don’t know if they are simply filtering some pages on the squidoo.com domain that aren’t largely based on on-page factors or what. One thing that makes me wonder is that I’ve been putting links to my Squidoo lenses in my signatures on web forums. I’ve been linking to all lenses right in a row in my sig. I’ve gotten the most links from Digital Point Forums, some from Sitepoint Forums, some from Squidu.com forums and few from other places. Maybe this looks suspicious to Google since Squidoo has been the focus of spammers in the past. I don’t know if I should remove the links and try to get some links from other domains, keep them there and try to get links from other domains, or just write them off and start creating my next lens and see if time fixes it.