Jul 13 2008

Why I Like Squidoo A Little Bit Less Today

EDIT** I haven’t had alot of sleep this past week so didn’t fully check to confirm what I was writing about in this post :( Turns out it was only half right – but some helpful commenters corrected me so please see below for that.

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This last week I’ve been following on with my theme of going back to the drawing board… doing the things that alot of you guys will be doing in trying to start YOUR own online business and passive income stream… only it’s AGAIN for me.

Remember the next case study I told you all I was going to start? Well it’s in progress right now! I’m posting it regularly for our Firepow members.

But more about that soon.

Today I just wanted to let anyone who’s interested know a dirty little secret about Squidoo.

Alot of people use squidoo to help promote their sites. Either by directly creating “lenses” that they try to get to rank for certain keywords, or by using their lenses to link to their main blogs, to improve the blog’s rankings.

Well…

Stupidly… and I can’t believe I never even bothered to check this… the Firepow team and I realized yesterday that the in content links you place in Squidoo lenses – like when you create a text module and add an article and put a link to your website? It’s a NO FOLLOW link!

Sneaky Squidoo wanted to lessen their page rank bleed and so (I don’t know whether right from the start or not) snuk their no follow tag into any outgoing links in text modules that you insert.

Come to think of it, I didn’t check whether all other links on the lens you create are no follow too, like a link to a blog from an RSS Feed Module, but I can only imagine they are.

The bottom line for those of you who don’t know is… any links you put in your squidoo lens are null and void in the search engines eyes. You might pull a visitor or two if you manage to get traffic to your lens, but in terms of benefit from adding that link to your blog/site – nada.

So if you’ve been using this strategy – you might want to reconsider, or at least change your approach.

Just thought I’d share that with y’all :)

  • 8 Comments

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8 Comments... What are your thoughts?

  1. It doesn’t seem to be true of all lenses. Here are two I checked at random (they’re not mine, no idea whose they are):

    http://www.squidoo.com/ToiletSeats
    http://www.squidoo.com/grape-arbors

    A “view source” on these looks like the links are regular links.

  2. A little more Googling gave me this article; is the problem perhaps that the lens is “grey”, not “green”?

    A little secret about Squidoo

  3. Hi Andrew,

    I see what you mean about the text box links. I’m sure it was implemented to deter overzealous linkers . But, I did notice that the RSS feeds and the ‘about author’ box links do follow.

    Good Luck with your FirePow software!

    Cheers!
    Harmony

  4. Actually, links are only tagged with ‘nofollow’ if your lens is in WIP (Work in Progress). Once your lens becomes ‘Featured’, the nofollow tags will be removed from all your links, except for the affiliate modules (Amazon, CafePress, etc). PageRank will get passed to any blogs or sites that you link to.

    Also, RSS Modules will not be seen by search engines, because they are loaded in to the browser with Javascript. Therefore, make sure you add a manual link to your blog in the description section of the RSS module.

    :) thefluffanutta

  5. how do u see it?? i use the search status plugin and the seoquake plugin.. links from text boxes are still do follow in my browser :S

  6. Hi Andrew.
    Looking at a few of my lenses, the only nofollow I found were for the SBSites.
    All other links were dofollow.

    How did you go about finding what you wrote about, please?

    Thank you…Lu

  7. Thank you, thefluffanutta.

    I was confused by a comment made on another blog, that squidoo link’s were Nofollow, which did not seem to be true on any of the pages I looked it. It makes sense that it would be just the WIP pages. That would be why I didn’t see Nofollow on the pages I looked at.

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