I reported in my Honest Way Blog about the sudden loss of page rank that nearly all of my previously ranked Squidoo lenses had suffered, but never got to the bottom of exactly why they lost their Page Rank. So I thought it would be proper to report it here at Make Money too.

Here’s the Make Money take on things: What makes it quite the mystery is that the Squidoo lenses were only recently given the page rank and haven’t exactly changed much since then except for the addition of a little more original and topic relevant content where I had time to do so. They don’t exactly make money hand over fist, there are no paid links in any of them and certainly no paid reviews, as those sites don’t allow anything other than true blogs to take part in their activities to make money.

I was baffled then.

All I could think of was that they had maybe been sabotaged by some jealous make money competitor to the themes I had created the Squidoo lenses for.

Now this sort of thing is not actually unheard of in some circles. In fact a make money Internet marketing friend of mine has been the subject of some truly nasty sabotaging of his articles at Ezine Articles, by a person deliberately and consistently going in there and giving each of his articles a bad vote, thereby diminishing the popularity of his articles and thereby reducing his ability to make money online.

That’s nasty, small minded and unnecessary, but all the same it is happening.

Could such a thing happen with Squidoo lenses? I wonder.

I checked all my Squidoo lenses (all niches including the make money ones) thoroughly today and found in some of them something I didn’t like the look of. One of the modules you are able to add to a Squidoo lens is what is known as a “links plexo”. This module allows you to add links to outside sites, such as your own and then other people can vote for them if they think they’re worthy of a vote. It doesn’t mean much unless your Squidoo lens gets a lot of traffic and then it can help to drive traffic to your more popular sites in order to make money from them.

What these links plexos also allow is for other people to add links to the list. I didn’t realize that anyone would bother doing that with my Squidoo lenses, because of course they were all PR0, weren’t really geared up to make money and who would bother to get a link from a PR0 Squidoo lens that didn’t make money?

Well, that was before some of them got their PR3.

Then I guess some clever sneaky people must have cottoned on, saw a way to make money from them and added some of their own links to some of my Squidoo lenses. Not many, just one or two here and there so as not to peak my suspicions.

Well, as I said I didn’t like the look of other people adding links to their sites from my Squidoo lenses, so I naturally went in and deleted them. That was before I’d noticed the loss of PR.

Now I’m wondering if those links (which I know I should have checked out but didn’t because I was in a rush) were not to legit make money or make money online sites, but to bad neighbourhood sites? That might have gotten my Squidoo lenses tracked on Google’s radar and zapped!

Maybe.

I don’t know but if I get time I will check with Google and see what their take on this is. I’d be interested to know one way or the other.

Terry Didcott
Make Money

I’ve mentioned Squidoo on a number of occasions mainly due to the fact that I’ve created eighteen lenses over there at the last count on various niche topics.

There is even a Make Money online lens that I put up to complement this blog and website and at the present time it is actually one of my top lenses. It managed to attract a PR3 in the recent Google shakeup and also attracts some traffic - not as much as this blog, but enough to make it worth my while keeping it up to date.

It’s also a good provider of one-way links to my sites, which I’ve always maintained is reason enough to go create a few lenses and make full use of them as a promotional adjunct to any internet marketing business.

Keeping them fresh and up to date means they’ll rise up through Squidoo’s own ranking system which will mean more traffic from within Squidoo itself. It also keeps the search engines happy meaning that if you pick the right niche, you’ll stand a good chance of some search engine exposure too.

All good reasons to get busy and become an active lensmaster!

Terry Didcott
Make Money

Here’s a nice trick to make money using good old Squidoo.

It’s fairly easy to do, although there’s a lot of work involved, so if you’re not up to writing a lot of content in a short space of time, then it’s probably not for you.

However, if you’ve nothing better to do and want to set up another income stream using the search engine’s favourite, Squidoo, read on…

First you’ll need to think of a niche that not too many other Internet Marketers are bothered with. The best way is to sit down with your favourite keyword search tool and start searching through some long tail (and maybe not so long tail) keywords to find a viable market to sell some affiliate products.

Once you have your keywords, you need to check the availability of affiliate products to sell. Clickbank is ok, but it has a lot of affiliates already hammering its products to death, so better to look around at some alternatives. Commission Junction is a good place to start, then get back on to Google and check out some sites with products to sell in your new-found niche. Chances are they’ll have their own affiliate program, which you should be able to sign-up for free.

Now that you have some products to market, its time to create your Squidoo lens. Its important to use your main keywords in the title of the lens, for SEO.

You’ll need to write at least three good reviews of the products in separate text modules. Include your keywords in the reviews. Add some other modules like a guestbook, maybe an Amazon list (keep it short)… if you know Squidoo, you’ll know what to add to make the lens visitable and publish-able.

Next you’ll need to create some blogs - use free servers for this as you want to spread them around different servers. Two or three will do fine to start with. They should be created with your main keywords in the title and then write some posts with your keywords in the content (but don’t keyword stuff them) about your products and highlight your lens with some links back to it.

Next, write two or three (unique) articles about your products, the lens and the blogs (with link back to your blogs - not your lens, just yet) and submit them to high PR ezine sites, like ezine articles (for a list of article directories, I have a lens with a huge links plexo of them at: Article Directory List)

Then while you’re waiting for things to happen, write some more modules for your lens and keep it up to date, write for your blogs and ping them often and very soon, once the search engine spiders find your articles (which they will quickly on high PR ezines) they will follow your links back to your blogs and in turn to your lens, pushing it up high in the search engine pages (assuming you did your keyword homework right).

Now wait for the search engines to start sending traffic to your lens and make money from theaffiliate sales you’re going to get!

Here’s to your success!

Terry Didcott
MAKE MONEY