Because I was not really active on Squidoo these past months, I realized recently that I missed a few things that would help my lenses to be found. Eh... Since the new dashboard design, I never thought of the keywords and other settings available in our backoffice.
It was brought to my attention by a lensmaster/friend who is expert in SEO and driving traffic to lenses. I want to thank her once again for the heads up!
What did happen? When Squidoo removed the former keyword form and introduced the new one, all my primary keywords were switched into the default category ones.
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| From the old dashboard to the new one, primary keywords changed |
For example, my "growing strawberries..." lens' primary keyword became "vegetable gardening" or something like that. My "mermaid prom dress" became "prom dresses". And so on.
Thus I had to change 104 lenses' primary keywords so as to make them indexed by search engines in regards of their actual keyword/keyword phrase and not for Squidoo's default categories.
I know this is my fault as I haven't paid enough attention to the latest "improvements" done on the site. But in all cases, I think HQ should have let us know that our primary keywords would change with the dashboard switch.
Anyways, changes have been made. I took advantage of doing so to remove the love lens and bookmark widgets from the lenses, update some products that were out of stock or those of which Amazon and other affiliate programs changed the links to.
Things were running smoothly as I updated the pages until two of my best content lenses were hit by the filters.
Best family vacation destinations seems to have too much "duplicate content". Indeed I added a bunch of touristic information links, Google maps, etc. So yes there's surely some content that is duplicate - the links introductions for example. There was never a problem and I don't earn enough from this lens for me to make any change. It's nowadays almost in the abysses of the site rankings, so I don't see a benefit for me to modify this lens.
Instead I'm going to rewrite everything, split it into 5 different pages and move them to my sites. My readers will enjoy getting Italy, Spain, Greece and other countries information for them to spend their holidays.
Then my Friends TV show lens was hit as well for... er... words that aren't allowed to be published on Squidoo. Now that is a first for me! What kind of words a lens like that would use that is so bad to tell that the filter hit it like a silver bullet?
Unless my Friends lens is bound to disappear and leave room for lower quality lenses using the same title?
As I often noticed that, whether on Squidoo or other platforms, if a topic works pretty well, some other smart guys will copy the topic and try to build a page that they think is a good one on the subject. They then will promote it like fools and get more traffic to it than the original one.
Copycats are legion on such platforms and that is something I definitely hate with a passion. If you carefully study these sites you'll quickly see that some people who aren't absolutely not accustomed to write about some topics took them over or literaly stole them from their actual owner whose involved in the topic entirely.
Ah well that is the Internet. At least I could update my lenses, provide them with good keywords and will keep you updated on how good they are doing since then or how bad they are doing.
See you soon :)
Posted by Holly Day
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