SquidU

That could be true, but his new dvd came out a while back and I only created this lens a month ago.

I'm just not understanding why it dropped completely out of Google!

Google is starting to have a hard time sifting through the web again, yes. I wonder when the next breakthrough will be?

Once upon a time, Altavista, Lycos and Yahoo had the best searches. Then Google came along and invented its new searching algorithm, which heavily rated links to sites as a measure of relevance, and a new web era was born.

I think we're on the cusp of another change, but I'm not sure what the solution is. We tend to forget -- the web has more text than the combined sum of most of the libraries and filing cabinets on the planet. Trying to index and sift through all of that is like trying to catalog all the grains of dust on the surface of the moon!

I used to be able to land pages on Google fairly reliably, but now, for example, my two-month-old Trireme lens isn't on Google -- even though there's rather few web pages on the Greek navy's reconstruction of an ancient Greek warship -- yet the Squoogle.com link to it shows up on Page 2. I don't know why Squoogle's abstract gets more Google love than the original lens, but ... at least it shows up that way!

Google is a funny, funny search engine.  Hard to figure out the rhyme or reason, but there IS rhyme and/or some sort of reason for doin' what they do.

Four things can change the results in the search engine result pages -

You change something to your web page or to the web (ie, links, etc)
Someone else in the same niche changes something to their web page or the web
Google changes the algorithm
Search patterns/Market changes

Squidoo is growing so fast.  One of the most common causes of a once-indexed lens suddenly being 'no where to be found' on Google is the fact that other lensmasters have entered your niche.  Google will only keep so many pages from a site within their index (or so I hear) and it is very possible that Google decided that other Squidoo pages were more relevant to the search query.

To try and correct this:

First:  query/search on Google for the EXACT url of your Squidoo lens (yes, even include the http:// part). 

-  If your lens is not found, you're not in the index
-  If your lens IS returned, then you ARE in the index, but Google is choosing to show other Squidoo pages for your relevant keywords.

Also, keep in mind that Google has many data centers meaning what *I* see for a Google search may not be the same as what YOU see.  To double check, get a squid-buddy to Google search for the url of your lens, too.

Know what?  This could be a very long post, and I just recently did a 3-part series on this very topic on my blog....

Can't remember, am I allowed to post links to my blog here?

Okie dokie, Crystal... I did some poking around....

First off, your Jeff Dunham lens is AWESOME!  Very, very nice! (5 starred it!)

That said, let's get down to business. 


Here is what I did to see if I can help you figure out what is going on...

First, I Googled your EXACT title in quotes with "on squidoo" like this:
"jeff durham" "on squidoo"

All indexed lenses have ...on Squidoo at the end of the title (<title> tag)

When I SHOULD have found your lens, this is what I found:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en& … tnG=Search

Google is picking two OTHER lenses as the best answer for that search.  Now, if you scroll down you will see places where you have linked to your lens.... but your actual lens is not there.

This can mean two things....

1.  Google is just making some changes as it does all the time, and your lens will be back soon, or

2.  When Google has to 'pick' two lenses to return for that search query, your lens isn't 'winning' and it is probably because of back links and Page Rank.

If the cause is #1, no worries - your lens will come back on its own.

However, I feel it might be the second reason.  Both of the other pages have Page Rank which yours does not (yet).  Page Rank is an indicator of back links - mainly the quality of said back links, but that is another novel...haha!

I did some checks and according to Yahoo, one of the other lenses has 6 back links, the other shows 0 (which is odd, but this just a quick Yahoo check.  Google doesn't like to share this information - imagine that!).  I could do a complete link analysis, but that isn't necessary.

Your lens is only showing one back link - and it is from this very forum 

Here is my advice....

Change your lens up enough to where you can get to squidutils.com and 'ping' it.

Make a few backlinks OFF of Squidoo with the exact title of your lens as the anchor text.  Digg is good for this, Lensroll.com, Squoogle, etc....   Don't go hog wild, just a few links with a ping to your lens.

Hopefully, Google will catch on, re-crawl your lens, and put it back where it belongs.

Hope this made sense - and my apologies for the length of this post!

Jennifer
"PotPieGirl"

Crystal - you are more than welcome!  While these are just my 'quickie' observations, I think it could definitely help your situation (sure can't hurt!)

As for a recent change in Google traffic...

Don't quote me because I do NOT know this for fact, but Google has indexed some parts of Squidoo by accident (with the whole server change thing).  I asked about this octosquid phenomena today in this forum and Gil assured me that it will all be cleared up very soon.  No worries!

As for the post series on my blog regarding Google issues, the first post can be found here (thank you for the FYI regarding urls)

Why Doesn't Google Send Traffic to My Squidoo Lens - Part 1

If anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask.  I feel that the better we all get at optimizing our lenses and having them found better within Google, the better the entire Squidoo site will be 

Jennifer

Last edited by PotPieGirl (04/22/2008 6:33 pm)

Greekgeek wrote:

Google is starting to have a hard time sifting through the web again, yes. I wonder when the next breakthrough will be?

Once upon a time, Altavista, Lycos and Yahoo had the best searches. Then Google came along and invented its new searching algorithm, which heavily rated links to sites as a measure of relevance, and a new web era was born.

I think we're on the cusp of another change, but I'm not sure what the solution is. We tend to forget -- the web has more text than the combined sum of most of the libraries and filing cabinets on the planet. Trying to index and sift through all of that is like trying to catalog all the grains of dust on the surface of the moon!

I used to be able to land pages on Google fairly reliably, but now, for example, my two-month-old Trireme lens isn't on Google -- even though there's rather few web pages on the Greek navy's reconstruction of an ancient Greek warship -- yet the Squoogle.com link to it shows up on Page 2. I don't know why Squoogle's abstract gets more Google love than the original lens, but ... at least it shows up that way!

Unfortunally, google owns the internet, there isn't a reliable competition, neither google or msn/live is competition. The others, are too small. Google it's a multi billion dollar company, google "rules" the internet, and if we do a good search, we're beginning to see the old talking of "Internet OS", and google it's the key.
Unfortunally, google it's not giving good results for most of squidoo lenses, but that doesn't mean we cannot get results with squidoo lenses, the problem is we need much more time and efforts, CONTENT IT'S NOT ENOUGHT!!! We need backlinks, lots and lots and lots of them. But how can we got links? for many of our lenses we need hundreds or thousands of links to rank well, many wordpress blogs block links to squidoo lenses, because of the askimet plugin (antispam plugin); that means less links for the lenses. Directories most, don't permit pages, and lenses are pages of squidoo.com, again less links. We can only create blogs, and link, we can do some social bookmarkign (asking our friends to bookmark), we can add the rss feed to feed directories (some at least). But it's not enought. Squidoo is still suffering from the old spam problem (fortunally resolved), and from the lost of QUICK LOVE (=quick rankings) that google gave us some time ago.

We need links, many links, more links, links, and again links! That's the key for the success, and of course, the content must be GOOD, but only the content it's not enought for google. Fortunally yahoo and live, have some love for squidoo now, and they give us some traffic, not much as google, but at least some.

PotPieGirl wrote:

Crystal - you are more than welcome!  While these are just my 'quickie' observations, I think it could definitely help your situation (sure can't hurt!)

As for a recent change in Google traffic...

Don't quote me because I do NOT know this for fact, but Google has indexed some parts of Squidoo by accident (with the whole server change thing).  I asked about this octosquid phenomena today in this forum and Gil assured me that it will all be cleared up very soon.  No worries!

As for the post series on my blog regarding Google issues, the first post can be found here (thank you for the FYI regarding urls)

Why Doesn't Google Send Traffic to My Squidoo Lens - Part 1

If anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask.  I feel that the better we all get at optimizing our lenses and having them found better within Google, the better the entire Squidoo site will be 

Jennifer

Thanks for the link! I'll check it out. And I'll take any suggestions on improving my lenses. You sound very knowledgable and I am grateful you took the time to help me out.

I hope that the problem with google can be explained by indexing the wrong part of Squidoo. If not, I'm in big trouble as my traffic continues to fall

I agree! The Squidoo staff does and awesome job and I stand by Squidoo 100%. I know they will eventually get everything back to normal and in the meantime...

I'll try not to panic

Captain Squid is one smart cookie!!!!

btw, Captain... I can't get a groove on HubPages, either... not sure what it is, but I go completely blank.

Squidoo has spoiled me ROTTEN!

Some interesting comments on this topic. I have noticed that new lenses I make are taking weeks to get indexed by Google where it used to only take a couple of days. I am working on getting backlinks but it takes time.

As for Google, it's a mysterious beast. No one but Google themselves really know how it works and they are not sharing with us. Sigh!

I have noticed that new lenses I make are taking weeks to get indexed by Google where it used to only take a couple of days.

Spuds.... I've noticed this, too.  Could be due to the fact that the Squidoo site is so much larger than it used to be... only so much they can crawl without putting major stress on the servers?  Thoughts?

Ok - I love this conversation...so let's keep going 

I guess you disagree with Google as well.

No.  The screenshots on my post show how Google IS handling links from tags to lenses - not what I think Google is doing/not doing or what I agree/disagree with.

I quoted Google's website.

Yes, you did - it was this quote -

Google wrote:

    Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links. Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links to your site are placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines. Some of these types of links (such as link schemes and doorway pages) are covered in our webmaster guidelines.

I, in no way, disagree with this.  However, I'm afraid that this quote is also open to interpretation.  Natural vs UnNatural links.

In my opinion, unnatural links are those as Google described within that quote - doorway pages and link schemes (ie, link farms).  Webmasters have been known to go to great effort to mass-create thousands of back links to a site thru the form of link farms and linking schemes.  These mass-created links are designed for no other reason than to trick Google into thinking that said site is more important than it really is.

There was a landmark situation with Google and a company that offered such services to website owners.  The company name was Traffic Power and they went as far as to cold call unsuspecting site owners and offered to get them to #1 in the SEs for large amounts of money.  This was accomplished by automated, mass-created link farms (and also involved invisible text on web pages...another BIG no-no...but that is another story).

What makes the Traffic Power story so interesting is that the Traffic Power site is the first site that Google banned from their index AND told the world WHY it was banned via Matt Cutts blog.

For the record, if your site is ever dropped from the Google index, Google will NOT tell you why.  It is up to you to figure out what you did wrong and then beg forgiveness for reinclusion.

From Matt Cutts blog:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/confirming-a-penalty/

Usually, Google doesn’t confirm or deny whether a company has been removed from our index. I started that precedent several years ago when a reporter asked whether a particular company was banned from Google for spamming, and I declined to confirm a spam penalty. That precedent has worked well at times in the past, but lately I’ve found that it can assist webmasters to give concrete examples of violations of our quality guidelines.

I’d like to address those two points. I can confirm that Google has removed traffic-power.com and domains promoted by Traffic Power from our index because of search engine optimization techniques that violated our webmaster guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. If you are a client or former client of Traffic Power and your site is not in Google, please see my previous advice on requesting reinclusion into Google’s index to learn what steps to take if you would like to be reincluded in Google’s index.

Yes, Google even removed sites that participated in the services that Traffic Power offered!  As far as I know, this is the only case where Google confirms, and gives reason for, banning a website from their index.  (please correct me if I am wrong)

Also, interesting to note:  The CEO of Traffic Power is now in jail.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/traffic-p … o-in-jail/

In my opinion, it is link building schemes such as this example that Google is referring to in the quote you gave... not those that are linking to their sites/lenses/blogs to promote visibility.

According to 'When Your Site is Ready', also straight from Google Webmaster Tools:
http://www.google.com/support/webmaster … swer=35769

When your site is ready:

    * Have other relevant sites link to yours.
    * Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
    * Submit a Sitemap as part of our Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.
    * Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.
    * Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

"Have other relevant sites link to yours" and "Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online".

My interpretation of those statements is to make sure there are links to my blog/lens/site where they would be of value or interest.  In my opinion, this is not 'un-natural' link building, nor is it a 'link scheme'.

Yes, having link WORTHY content is uber important... BUT if no one can FIND my content to link TO it, how will my web page ever build the links that Google demands in order to rank in their index and STAY in their index?


Whew!  That was long!

Ok, next.... you said....

Anyway, please elaborate, and show me a lens that is doing well that is
not niche, that doesn't have lots of quality backlinks and/or does not have
unique content.

This kinda confuses me...

I need you to define "doing well".  Doing well how?

Your turn 

Last edited by PotPieGirl (04/23/2008 12:49 pm)