Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category
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
Keeping track of Lens Changes
My lens, Nintendo DS Skins, has just taken off in the Google rankings and while I am extremely happy about this, I can’t put my finger on any actions that I took to help this happen. While I could just give it up to luck, I’m sure that this is not the case. I am a person that needs to know the reason why, so I’ve decided to do something about it.
In order to avoid confusion and questioning the next time something great like this occurs, I have decided to keep track of all the changes I’ve made to a lens and backlinks that I’ve created on a spreadsheet. This spreadsheet is nothing complex, just a simple setup with the name of the lens at the top and the date it was created. The next row is my URL and a couple of rows down my 4 column titles of Date, Update to Lens, Backlink Title, and URL of where the link was placed. 
I know I can download and XML file of my lens after it’s updated, but that still won’t solve the problem of tracking my links, which are very important for SEO. This spreadsheet is very new and will evolve as time goes on; as this happens, I’ll keep you posted.
Do you keep track of changes and promotions for your lenses? Feel free to share your methods, if you don’t mind.
Tags: Lens Backlinks, Promotion, Squidoo
