Web 2.0 Websites and the Pagerank Myth

How often do you see something along the lines of "Squidoo has a pagerank 8. Create a lens to get high quality backlinks." Actually, it doesn’t have to be Squidoo, it could be Hubpages or USFreeAds. I’ve heard it said about a lot of websites.

There are a lot of reasons for using Squidoo which I’ll write about later (with my extensive experience ;)) However, don’t think that you are going to get a PR8 backlink without any effort.

On Squidoo you can take a look at the top lenses. These lenses have had a whole bunch of work put into them (not to mention the effort put into the owners’ other lenses and profiles) and they rank at either PR4 or PR5 - good but not a PR8. The front page gives PR8 links and there are some deep links within it that also have a good pagerank but I’m afraid your newly created lens has a PR0.

So to summarize, if you think that PR8 links are free to every Tom, Dick and Harry on the internet, well, they’re not. And that is a good thing.

Lens	Pagerank	Traffic
http://www.squidoo.com/lcd-televisions	4	1,885
http://www.squidoo.com/robert_pattinson	4	6,157
http://www.squidoo.com/workathomewithsquidoo	5	881
http://www.squidoo.com/squidoo-twitterdrive-for-charity	5	312
http://www.squidoo.com/Panini-sandwich-recipes	5	7,635

Pagerank is a trademark owned by Google.

PR checked with the prchecker tool.

First Statistics From Squidoo and EzineArticles

I finally have some statistics. I’ve created four Squidoo lenses, one group and one ezine article that has been published. Have I managed to get any traffic?

Two of my lenses appear in the google index. My article, which was published two days ago, refers to one of those lenses (my primary lens). Over the last 7 days the lens with the article referrer received 10 visits and 9 of those where from the ezine article.

Traffic

The article itself received 21 visitors on the first day, 17 on the second and 8 today. I’m fairly curious to see how the traffic tails off but unfortunately I won’t be able to monitor it over the next few days. With such a small amount of traffic I suspect it isn’t significant.

Lens A: 13 (12 from article)
Lens B:  2 (referred from Lens A)
Lens C:  3
Lens D:  2

Lens A and B are both related as are C are D.

Google Ranking

Both the article and Lens A are targetting the same long tail keyword with around 3,500 competitors. The article is at 16th place (2nd page) for the quoted phrase and the lens is at 21st place (3rd page).

Update (31st): The lens is now on the second page at position 19 and the ezine article is nowhere to be found.

For the unquoted expression the article is at position 21 and the lens is at 34. The phrase gets just a little traffic. It may be worth trying to boost the lens and/or the article onto the first page to see if it gets any traffic directly from google.

The article was indexed by google almost immediately as was Lens A. Lens C was indexed about one week after creation and I have no idea why the other lenses are not indexed.

Lens Rank

Lenses A C and D had a lens rank of between 105,000 and 125,000 when created. Lens B has a lens rank of greater than 165,000. Lens A has been promoted several times and now has a lens rank of better than 20,000. I suspect the increase in lensrank for lens A is due to the traffic I “bought” with my time writing the article.

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So, overall, the results are pretty interesting. In this specific case the article handily beats the lens and was much easier to write. Both article and lens have received more traffic than this blog which has had a handful of visitors over its entire life. All pages are indexed in google and the spiders visit fairly frequently.

My First Squidoo Success

You know something, there might be something to this "Google Loves Squidoo" thing. I made my third lens recently based on a three word keyword phrase that has around 25 searches a month. There are approximately 2,700 results for the quoted phrase.

Well, surprise surprise, my dinky little lens is listed at number 20 (34 for the unquoted phrase) less than 24 hours after I created it. My previous two lenses are still unlisted and to be honest, prior to this lens I was starting to doubt the power of the squid.

Even with the minimal competition 20th place isn’t that great, but remember this is without any promotion or external backlinks.

I created a Squidoo group at the same time as the lens and the results were even better. The group was the first listed page of 757 on Squidoo for the far more competitive two keyword phrase (1,180,000 results listed on Google).

I need to do some analysis to see what the differences between this lens and the previous ones are.

The First Six Week Plan

So I’ve done it again - despite vowing not to buy any more make money ebooks I bought another one costing $47. This brings my outlay to $120 for domains and $160 on ebooks. Damn! Okay, this time no more spending until I’ve earned (and hopefully learned) something.

The latest ebook is a book on Squidoo. Why squidoo? The primary reason is simple - I won’t have to spend anything on hosting and domains for any experiments. I’ve decided that I am going to give this one my best shot to the exclusion of any other money making plans.

Six weeks will take me through to the start of February next year and I am hoping to spend at least 10 hours a week that will give me 60 hours to play with. What can I hope to achieve in that time?

My primary goal is to create at least 30 lenses and get some traffic. As each of the two lenses I have created so far have taken at least an hour and a half (and are still not complete), I have to get much quicker. Some of these lenses will point at my blog and some will sell affiliate products.

There are Squidoo related activities other than writing lenses I need to get involved with - joining groups, reviewing other lenses in my area, setting up my bio, updating current lenses.

I hope to write at least one post for my blog every three days which over 42 days is 14 posts. Currently it takes me around 30 minutes to write a post so that is another seven hours. I want to get started with article writing and a target of six articles, 1 per week, seems reasonable.

Do I have any monetary goals at the moment? Let’s say I want to sell on average one product per week. If I sell all six in the final week, that is fine, but any fewer than that and I will be a little disappointed.

Squidoo Tags Were Nerfed Ages Ago

So, Squidoo Tags were nerfed, and a long time ago at that. That is extremely disappointing news. I had read that Squidoo Loves Google but I suspect a lot of that was down to the tags pages.

My understanding is that the most popular tag pages used to have a lot of page rank. Adding 40 relevant popular tags to a new lens meant that it was born with 40 high quality backlinks which will no longer be the case. This change happened on Jan 10 2008. The fact that it is listed as a recommended technique in The Secret Cash Machine on Squidoo (copyright 2008) does not give me much confidence in the rest of the ebook.

I am going to continue with Squidoo for now. The new recommended technique for getting lenses listed in google seems to be to link to them from your blog. As I was hoping that Squidoo would provide good links for my blog and reciprocal links are discouraged that isn’t going to work for me. I will need to find another way.

To Start With, I Choose Squidoo

It is time to start. I could spend hours reading and preparing but in the end, only action will make a difference. So, what is the plan? I’m very close to exhausting my initial $300 budget already so I want to look at free or at least very low cost methods of marketing.

I found an interesting thread on the warrior forum when I was looking into Squidoo. It lists a number of free websites that can be used for running a campaign. The sites that appeal to me particularly are Squidoo, the articles directories and perhaps blogger depending on the terms and conditions.

Of these three, Squidoo appeals as they are not anti-affiliate marketing and everything is completely free. They have a high page rank and links from there should be fairly valuable. They also get a lot of traffic although according to Alexa, the amount in the last three months has dropped by almost 20%.

On the other hand, as anyone can use it (and that must attract spammers), surely Google would automatically devalue links. As always, when working with free sites you are making the effort to improve someone else’s property. The site could be gone forever tomorrow. Of course, with your own site if tomorrow Google decide they don’t like you, your site may as well have gone forever anyway!

I decided to buy The Secret Cash Machine on Squidoo. Together with the earlier purchases, unfortunately that blows the budget and means that I won’t be buying any other material until I’ve earned something from this project. The guide was extensive - I will write more about it after I have put the recommendations into practise.