This is a question I hear all the time. I think it stems from all the wordpress people who talk incessantly about how much Google loves WordPress because new posts create fresh content. Whether that’s the reason Google loves wordpress or not is debatable, but let’s talk about your lenses.
They don’t have an easy way to continually update them to keep “fresh content” huh?
It’s ok. They don’t need it.
The number and quality of backlinks you create pointing to your lens is way more important than having “fresh content”. Here’s a good example. My How to Create Backlinks lens hasn’t been updated in forever. In fact, the only thing I do to update it is take out the spam comments, (which I wouldn’t do if there weren’t so many dang spam comments!)
The content doesn’t change ~ unless I find a new product that is really relevant to the lens. For example, I added a banner add for the 5K backlinks package when it came out.
It consistently comes up #1 out of millions of results for a variety of keywords related to getting backlinks.
Here’s why:
The lens has almost 1000 links pointing to it. Did I build all those links ~ nope. Lots of them are people pointing to a great resource for backlinking.
Yeah but…
No one’s going to link to my product lens!
Yeah and…
That’s ok. Your lens keywords will have no where near the competition my backlink keywords do.
Another example: the Ironman Gravity 4000 Inversion Table lens.
It has 188 links ~ over half of those are from Squidoo itself (YAY discovery tool!) Only 78 of them are from places outside of Squidoo, AND a lot of them are links from the same domain (in other words they are blogroll/sidebar links on my own blogs)
So really… the linking I did was a few free ad blog posts ~ and a sidebar link on a couple of my blogs. There are a couple links from sites I don’t own, but it’s really those basic things I did. The site is currently ranking 5th on Google for the main keyword, and makes a few sales a month. I haven’t touched it since I created it.
Do you need fresh content?
The answer is no. You don’t. You’ll be fine if you follow the 3 step process for getting your lens ranked, and stop worrying about fussing with it to give it “fresh content”.
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I found this very useful. I’m new to squidoo and was wondering how people managed to keep over 100 lenses fresh but I guess they dont.
Rock@How to make a Mojito´s last blog ..Recipe For The Perfect Mojito updated Thu Jul 21 2011 4:11 pm CDT
Thanks Laura,
It was a link using the old blog url ~ thanks for letting me know. If you see any other broken links around please give me the heads up.
Hey Jackie, Not to add to your frustration but I noticed that your link is broken, the one that sais, “3 step process for getting your lens ranked” at the bottom of the article.
Laura
Hey Jackie – do you always leave the Discovery Tool on with your lenses? At some point I thought that it was better to have if off (can’t remember where I learned that). Most off my lenses have the tool turned off and I’m wondering if it would be beneficial to just take an hour and click them all on?
I almost always turn it off ~ however ~ most other “non marketie” type people don’t. So if I have a lens that is related to theirs mine may show up on their discovery tool giving me a link.
yes, I also let everyone comment. I’m trying to sell to everyone who comes to my lens ~ not just people who belong to Squidoo.
Also ~ new comments also count as “fresh content” so it’s always good to encourage comments.
That lens is #1 for a lot of terms. It gets a lot of traffic and the topic is BACKLINKING ~ so a lot of spammers finds it and try to leave a link back to their site.
I don’t get much spam at all on any of my other lenses.
How many lenses are you “keeping fresh” this way? It’s fine to do, but it’s not necessary and when you have hundreds of lenses it’s not really scalable.
I use this free one which has been pretty accurate for me.
http://www.backlinkwatch.com/index.php
How is that you get so many spam comments on your lens? Are you allowing everyone to leave a comment rather than just Squidoo members or what?
One thing that I have found to work for keeping a site “fresh” is to every once in a while just change a module or rewrite a little of the content and republish. I could be wrong here, but it does seem to work for me
Just what I needed. I got 2 answers:
1) I can set and forget my lens
2) I can make real money with Christmas cash lenses
Hi Jane,
just Google “backlink checker” there’s free ones. then copy and paste your website url in to the search facility.
yeah you can do that, but I haven’t found them to be very accurate. I go to yahoo site explorer ~ and enter my site url in the spot to check it. You’ll get a list of all the links ~ you can click the “inlinks” button and then choose exclude this domain to leave out links from squidoo.
I’ll do a whole post on it soon.
Jackie,
Could you explain how exactly we find out how many backlinks our lenses have? Do we need to be using Firefox for this to work?
As always – Thanks for the great info!!