Viewing Google Pagerank For Your Lenses
I don’t often worry about Google Pagerank for my lenses, but once in a while I’m curious and I like to know. Usually this curiousity rears it’s ugly head when I’m in one of my time wasting modes which get me absolutely nowhere, but I digress. There are two ways to view the Google Pagerank on your lens that I’m aware of and if you have more please feel free to comment below.
The first way is to download and install the SEO Toolbar for Firefox at SEObook.com and visit each of your lenses, take a look at the PR indicator within the toolbar and see what your PR is. You can also do this with the Google Toolbar, but I choose not to use it because my screen is only so big and the SEO Toolbar is better.
The second way to view the Pagerank for your lenses is much easier and only takes 5 seconds once it’s all set up. The first thing you’ll want to do is download the Webmaster2 Firefox extention at 3n9.org, make sure you install it or you won’t do any good. Once you’ve installed this Firefox extension, visit Squidutils.com, login and then go to the “Advanced Dashboard”. Once you’re in the dashboard, click the W² in the lower right corner of your browser and the PR will show for all of the links on your page including your lenses. That’s all there is to it.
One thing you’ll really want to watch out for is getting into a rut of worrying about PR. Just worry about getting traffic that is interested in what you have to say to your lens and money, fame, or whatever you look to get from your lenses will follow.
Tags: Google Pagerank, squidoo google PR, squidoo pagerank
Beware of Tweeting a New Squidoo Lens
I am a huge fan of One Week Marketing by Pot Pie Girl and have just recently gone back to working through her step by step instructions once again. I can delve more into what else I’ve been doing later on, but that’s not what this post is about.
One thing I have noticed is that it’s becoming more difficult to get a new lens indexed. I can go more into this later, but I believe that part of my problem may be due to my auto-Tweeting of lens updates. About six months ago when I signed up for Twitter, I had set up an auto-feed to Twitter by generating a lensmaster feed at Squidutils and then importing the feed at twitterfeed so Twitter would update every time I published a new lens or updated an existing one. You would think this is good, but lately it has been backfiring.
In One Week Marketing, there is a warning about leaving a link to your new lens on a guestbook before the lens is indexed because the lens you left your link on may become indexed instead of your lens. I noticed the other day when I was searching for one of my new lenses, that my Twitter update was ranking on page one for my lens URL and the lens URL was nowhere to be found. This is the same sort of phenomenon as it seems that Google has been crawling Twitter updates and found my update before the lens, so my “Tweet” was indexed instead. Not good.
Starting today, I am turning off the auto feed at Twitterfeed and only Tweeting lens updates on those lenses which are aged and indexed already. I hope this will help the problem I’ve been having and I’ll keep you posted on the results.
Meanwhile, I have a lot of work and catching up to do. For me, April is all about back to basics, starting with this post.
Tags: indexing a new lens, tweeting squidoo lens, Twitter
Have You Updated Your New Lensmaster Profile?
Two Days ago, Squidoo introduced the new lensmaster profile. I have made some changes and added some links, but I am definitely far from done.
When you go to edit your profile, you will find all kinds of options for you to add your blog, and another blog, and another blog. Then you may want to add another website. They also have an option where you can add your Twitter profile, (I’m bcarter, look me up), eBay store, and facebook profile. 
All of these special links show up on the left side of your Squidoo profile so you will no longer need to add these links to your profile manually with HTML. In the same section where you add your websites, you will also notice a section to highlight your favorite lenses. These range from the lens you REALLY, REALLY, REALLY want to be lens of the day to your favorite movie lens. You can feature your own lenses here or lenses from your favorite lensmasters; that is totally up to you. Captain Squid was going to rent these spaces out for $25 a month, but has since decided against it. He is now having a lens of the week contest to have your lens featured on his sidebar. Visit his blog to find out more information.
Tags: Squidoo Profile Layout, Squidoo Profile Page
Give a Fellow Lensmaster a Little Boost
I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but cash earned from a sale on Squidoo seems to give a lens a little boost in lensrank for about a week. Squidoo isn’t just about making money, but it’s also about community and helping others. So, if you’d like to help a fellow lensmaster out next time you’re going to make a purchase at Amazon
- Find a lensmaster that you like and hopefully they have a lens supporting a charity you like.
- Click through one of their Amazon or other Squidoo module links. It doesn’t matter if they have featured the item you are looking for, just click through one of the links.
- Find what you are looking for and complete your purchase.
- The earnings will show up on the lensmasters dashboard within a couple of days from shipment and they will experience a boost in lensrank for a short period of time and a little extra cash when Squidoo pays out.
That’s all you have to do, it’s simple, easy to do and a way to give back to your favorite lensmaster, charity and the whole community.
Tags: helping others, lensrank, Squidoo
When to split a lens
I’ve been toying with the idea of splitting my Nintendo DS Skins lens into multiple parts for a couple of weeks now. The whole goal of this lens is to make the eBay shopping experience more manageable and as of this morning I have 27 categories of DS Skins on this lens which has made it become quite unmanageable when loading. My biggest fear with splitting this lens is that I’ll be competing with the main lens which is ranked pretty well in Google right now. I think I can overcome this by placing a link for the Pokemon Nintendo DS Skins lens in the table of contents for visitors to click on. If this goes well, I may split the DS Skins lens further, but for now I’m going to experiment with just one new lens and see what pans out. I’ll keep you posted with the results.
Let me know what you think, when do you decide to split a lens?
