It seems like my Squidoo lenses will get great traffic for 3-5 days and then almost completely dropped. Does this happen to anyone else?
This happens to everyone - traffic should come back in a few days if Google thinks your lens is any good.
There's a ton of advice at www.squidu.com (plus a great forum) and also at www.squidoo.com/theanswerdeck/hq .
I've experienced the same with Squidoo lenses but get 7 times the traffic on HubPages for the same subjects. I recommend HubPages for traffic although you need to meet their stricter posting requirements.
I agree with you all both squidoo and hubpage are great source of backlinks. however, hubpages is very particular when it comes article content. They dont allow duplicated content and also your dofollow link depends on your score. I recommend both of them..
Hubpages look so damn ugly .... seriously, i find them hard to read and the pages are a mess and the very thought of writing unique content for a site for free makes me sick .... in return for what ? a link .... wooptee doo .... I am sick of these leeches who want their sites full of quality unique content and for free from members - and offer jackshit in return .... pay me 10 cents a word you toss bags (hubpages) and then I will create you unique articles .... Obviously they shit me to tears .... like many others who want free content and expect us to bend over backwards for them .... would you create free content for me if i gave you a page with PR0 aswell ?
hub pages is really the best answer nowdays but the strict policy of posting sometimes sucks...i can't really channel the traffic to my site/blog..seems that we create content and they don't want us to take the traffic to our site/blog i hope hub pages can be less strict about this lol...heck 5 sales already today
I am curious how many modules that you all put in your lenses? I have noticed that the ones I have with poll modules seem to do better as far as traffic.
Good rant. When I got tossed of Hubpages for being "overly promotional" I really was like wtf? Did they think I was bored and wanted to create great content for them and leave my site bare? Of course I was being promotional.
Yup thanks, I am sick to death of this "web2.0 we want good quality free content in return for 50% of earnings", but hey don't leach our traffic or drop your links here .... I understand that they need good content to remain a trusted site within Google and they wish to keep traffic within their site .... But why post your hard work there ? OK so you get a link back to your site - but it will be hidden and no-one will click it .... OK so make it stand out so it's visible .... oh wait you can't because that's "promotional". Better off posting it on your own site/blog and linking to your own pages - it's still classed as a link and if it gets PR you keep it on your site and you get a PR link back to a number of your own pages .... yes it still counts .... even from your own site .... put some ad's on it and hello!! you make money. Keeping the content on your site may not get you the kudos and slaps on the back from fellow members - who evidently are only commenting so you visit their work and pages. But it can be just as effective. Nowadays everyone is busting their nuts on other peoples sites .... and forgetting about their own - if they'd put in 50% of the effort that they do on other sites into their own - they'd be rich (instead of these real 2.0 leaches).
I am a latecomer to Squidoo having only set up my first lens this month (now I am up to 5). I am really very impressed with Squidoo. I had been working with hubpages for quite some time but I rarely saw any traffic coming from it. Now, for the site I promoted with my first Squidoo lens, I am getting a good flow of traffic. Here is what has happened so far with my first lens: I put it up on Sept 5. On Sept 6 it ranked 184 in category and 3486 overall By Sept 9 it has increased to 130 in category and 2484 overall Currently it is at 49 in category and 1056 overall Up until now I have had only 78 visits, 12 people rating it 5 stars and favorited by 5 people. Here is the latest lens I have created - http://www.squidoo.com/halloween-fun-and-history hopefully it will perform as well as my first one.
From a follow backlink perspective, Squidoo has been great. However, it has taken some time to figure out the strategy. We put up a page about 13 months ago and then forgot about it completely. We recently revisited it and it was PR2 with zero effort. It was getting very little traffic but the links were terrific so I started digging into pumping up the score. I found that adding and interlinking additional pages improves the score of all downstream pages. The more content, i.e. modules helps tremendously as well. And, revisiting and making a nominal change keeps rankings high. There seems to be a penalty for making a page and leaving it alone. Also, creating a group improves your rankings as well. A lot of people just create a group of their own lenses. Our original PR2 lens ranked well over 10,000 just three weeks ago and it has now been as low as 2800. I suspect that higher rankings may help with Google but that has yet to be seen. With that lens now pointing to all of my others, I am hoping that my little network will start paying off with valuable backlinks down the road. One of the modules reads RSS feeds. Since we have two blogs, I created a lens for each showing the feeds. Since the content frequently updates on its own, Squidoo seems to really like the lenses and it took almost no time to create. Since my lenses are not quite ready for prime time, PM me if you're interested in doing some interlinking. I have something like 11 lenses and 3 groups started. Thanks!
I used to love squidoo... never liked hubs much though (hated the layout and how everything was to the left), now squidoo isn't so great anymore either. It brings in some traffic from SERPS butnot that much and like anything you have to keep updating it, promoting it to make it rank/get traffic. Anyway, you're free to place your link on my lens: http://www.squidoo.com/Trading-Forex-the-Easy-Way =)
It isnt a good idea to post comments on Squidoo lenses just for the sake of adding a link to your lens in the comment field. People tend to delete comments like that especially when the lens you are trying to post a link to has nothing to do with the lens you are commenting on.
I havent really done anything much to promote them. I added a link in a profile I have on a certain article directory and posted an announcement about them on my forum (but very few people read the announcements section) This lens and all my others have content that I wrote myself. I think I chose a popular subject and that probably helped the most.