Squidoo and SEO? (Update Jan.3, 2012)

Happy New Year to everybody!


This will end my experiment with Squidoo. The results were NEGATIVE.


Please note that what I've done did NOT prove anything, except one thing: Squidoo is not a "magic wand" for SEO purposes.


Here is the summary of my observations:

• Posting something to Squidoo does not bring it to Google, unless you place a link to it from somewhere. In other words, Google does not crawl the entire Squidoo in search for new pages ("lenses" as they call it).
• It takes too long for Google to reindex the page. A month after I changed my experimental lens' content, it still was not in Google; a special link I placed there was ignored by Google either (obviously because Google did not index that page again).
• Squidoo is a primitive, buggy and ugly tool built to spam search engines with junk content. It's definitely not a "Site For People", but a "Site For Search Engines". For some reason, "Mr. Panda" did not bring "Mr. Squidoo" down, so it can still work, but I decided that my time will be better spent somewhere else.

I deleted my experimental lens.

Thank you for your attention!

"To Use Squidoo for SEO?" : Dec.20 update

After my experimental lens was indexed by Google, I placed a special link in it, with an anchor text having two mistakes. Two days later, the search for that exact anchor text gives no results in Google. The link will stay there, and I am not going to place that text anywhere else, so if one day it appears in search, I will know that Google refreshed my lens' content in its index.

"Using Squidoo for SEO" : Dec.19 update

Nothing happened in Google/Bing so far. The phrase search for the words in subject still does not return any pages the page I made from the Squidoo site.

Let's place a link to the "lens":

Using Squidoo for SEO

I am aware of the low level of that article's content and design. This is done intentionally and is a part of  the experiment.

A side note: my first impression about Squidoo is: a large well-done piece of junk, a huge MFA ("Made For Advertising") website, which should have been demoted to zero by infamous Panda, together with all "article" websites. This impression is based on reading of a few articles in the "Giant Squids" area. I seriously doubt anyone goes there to read. A "writers'-only" website.


Update: the link worked immediately. Google shows this blog entry and my Squidoo lens as crawled at the same time.

My "final note" on using "article" websites for SEO

None of the test articles I submitted was recognized by Google as a link source (checked both in the "link:" search and in the Webmaster Tools).
Nobody came to the site through those links either.

EzineArticles - the verdict

The verdict is "NOT GUILTY!" :-)

Here is what I discovered during my little research:

• EzineArticles has a well-designed and carefully developed interface for submitting articles. Except for minor bugs, everything works.
• Submitted articles go through several stages of approval, starting from an automatic validation to the human-operated analysis of the content. (Disclaimer: my account was new. I do not know if the same level of validation is applied to the established authors)
• My attempts to submit a "just-for-links" article failed. My article was rejected 5 times, for various reasons, including the last one, which pointed out that the content was "not unique and not giving any new specific information to the readers". There was a policy about the links, too, so I could not "stuff" my text with the link spam.
• When I finally made a "real thing" (proud of myself :-), the article has been accepted. All the links in the article body had the "nofollow" tag (that means "ignored by Google"). Only the link in Author Profile (the article footer) did not have "nofollow".
• After one week, the content of my article could be found only on the EzineArticles site. Therefore I assume that there is no automatic distribution of the content to some "satellite" websites.

In my opinion, EzineArticles cannot be used as a place to get "easy links".

From EzineArticles to The Web

Here is an article submitted to EzineArticles.com 2 days ago:

Creating Your First Canvas Art Painting

By Daniel Blinman

http://ezinearticles.com/?Creating-Your-First-Canvas-Art-Painting&id=3662867

It's a typical "made-for-backlink" article. It links to http://www.artistry-pictures.co.uk/ for the "canvas art" phrase. Here is one more link for you, Daniel: Canvas Art

As of today, Google does not tell us there is a backlink to Artistry Pictures from Ezine Articles. Not enough time. Will see later.

However, there are several sites already having a copy of either the abstract of the whole article!
None of them have any attribution to Ezine Articles... Thieves? I do not know. Did not read the Terms of using EzineArticles' texts yet.

1. Creating Your First Canvas Art Painting

   2 days ago - Creating your first canvas painting can be a daunting task. There are so many things to consider; which canvas to use, whether to use oil or acrylic paints ...
   ezinearticles.com/?Creating-Your-First-Canvas-Art-Painting...

2. Everyone's Jumptags for Creating Your First Canvas Art Painting ...

   7 hours ago - Creating your first canvas painting can be a daunting task. There are so many things to consider; which canvas to use, whether to use oil or acrylic paints ...
   www.jumptags.com/item/4247E7F66ACA44138F97FF553974F330/ 

3. Creating Your First Canvas Art Painting « Bulk News – bulk.net

   1 day ago - Creating your first canvas painting can be a daunting task. There are so many things to consider; which canvas to use, whether to use oil or acrylic paints ...
   www.bulk.net/creating-your-first-canvas-art-painting/ 

4. Creating Your First Canvas Art Painting

   2 days ago - Creating your first canvas painting can be a daunting task. There are so many things to consider; which canvas to use, whether to use oil or acrylic paints ...
   dtcwebmedia.com/.../creating-your-first-canvas-art-painting-28232/

5. Become a Model

   3 days ago - Creating your first canvas painting can be a daunting task. There are so many things to consider; which canvas to use, whether to use oil or acrylic paints ...
   www.becomeamodel.us/

Testing EzineArticles.com

After the initial failure with one of the "Article Friendly", I went to http://ezinearticles.com

Here are my initial observations:

• The user interface looks very contemporary and professional
• Registration went smoothly
• Submitting the first article was not particularly easy, because there were many rules and restrictions. However, the "learning curve" was not too steep, and I managed to submit it. Now waiting for the approval.
• I did not have time to read everything, but my first impression about EzineArticles is very positive. It does NOT look like a born-to-spam website.

I am waiting now for the approval (or disapproval?) of my test article, and then will continue checking EzineArticles.

Automatic article distribution services

http://articleunited.com/ offers

We can submit your articles instantly to hundreds of Article Dashboard, ArticleMS, Article Friendly, Article Beach (aka your very own article directory) and Wordpress sites! Many of these sites average out to a PR5 in the google rankings, which can help your site gain in PR also.

http://www.articlemarketer.com/ is retired. Suggest moving accounts to two new services:

http://www.distributeyourarticles.com/
and
http://www.contentcrooner.com/

- both offer services similar to Article United.

DistributeYourArticles.com offers a "special":

Send unique titles, articles and summaries. Best of all, you can use a wide variety of anchor text links in your "about the author" resource box.
Most article submission services won't even you offer the option of multiple versions, even though many experts say this defeats Google's "Duplicate Content Penalty".

That's nice and clear! :-)

Research: "Articles" on the web

Goal: to find as many "submit your article" websites as possible, categorize and evaluate them.