Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization And Some Silly Personal Stuff…

Dry… Yet every falling drop melts my rage

Pale… Yet makes me miss those colorful feelings

Empty… Yet fills me with your unsaid commitments

Speechless… Yet trying to speak your love

Rains without you are dry, pale, empty and speechless.

Squidoo had become not-so-good portal recently. People stopped using squidoo because of getting lesser to NO traffic at all, because it took ages to get these lenses indexed, and the value of links couldn’t remain good anymore.

But recently, I noticed that now it takes no more than 3 days to get the lenses indexed in major search engines. Squidoo is getting back to its value and authority among webmasters and users. Of course, Google will not come to these pages and crawl by themselves. If you do the following, you can get full value of your lenses -

a) Get at least 600 words unique content on your lens and make sure it gives great value to the readers.

b) make good use of images with alt-tagging options.

c) Use anchor texts for backlinks and try to link some keyword with sites like wikipedia and other highend portals.

d) Submit to various squidoo lens directories so they get some backlinks.

e) Bookmark the lens to top bookmarking sites like digg, reddit, propeller etc.

f) Associate with popular squidoo groups and your lens there.

g) Share your lens with other squidoo members and on forums without spamming them. Be a quality contributor.

Thes steps will definitely help you get some strong backlinks out of your squidoo lens creation efforts.

You’re not alone who got slapped by this major Google algo change. Wondering you did everything good, no blackhat, no bad links, then what made this new Google kid slap your site?

Well, you probably did nothing wrong but the new algo might have regarded some link building methods as of high quality and some of poor quality. The speed of building links could have been another factor for drop in rankings.

As per our experiments for the last 2 months, these things would work -

1- Relax:

You need to relax first of all. No need to panic if the rankings are dropped all of a sudden and even if it was your only source of income.

Look at the recent methods you applied and try to remove all weak links if you can.

2- Forget mass social bookmarking

Now when you’re already hurt, you can not take risk anymore. Forget social bookmarking to 1000 sites would do any good. It’d rather harm and spam. Target top 20 – 25 bookmarking sites that have got real value. Digg, Reddit, Folkd, Propeller, Mixx, Sphinn, etc. are doing well. Don’t get excited with every new social bookmarking site added to your list. Relyonly upon old and reputed site for now.

3- Come out linkwheel myth

Those are truly spam links until and unless you have maintained these web 2.0 property pages for long. Just create these pages once and update them every week like a blog. Try to make some decent backlinks for them so that they bring some value to your site as well. It’s better to update and maintain your existing pages than creating new page with a spun content on every new site. Vox, livejournal, blogsline, ning, blogspot etc. are great to go.

4- Forum link building

Now, I’m not talking about spam postings and fake sig links. Create your own account at popular forums that allow do-follow sigs and contribute there. This would help you with slow link building and it WILL help you to recover your dropped rankings. Creating your own account may help if you have 1-2 sites but if you have more, you can purchase sig links from active and reputed members of these forums. Please note that these sig links will be helpful only if they are indexed.

5-  Unique Article Marketing – Target Only top 10

If your site is slapped and dropped, it’d be good if you go article marketing with only 2-3 articles per month. Try to get these articles written as good as possible. Submit them only to top 10 directories like ezinearticles, goarticles, Buzzle, ideamarketers etc. Try to rewrite the titles if possible. I will not recommend mass submission or multiple articles for now.

6- Beg, Borrow or Steal Method works always

But here you need to target only super quality stuff to beg, borrow or steal :p A friend in need is a friend indeed Try to get links from friendly sites, niche sites and high PR blogs. You can request them or pay if it is a nominal fee. 4-5 blogrolls a month would help you big time.

7- Clinging To Top portals like Hubpages, Suite101, PromotionWorld, InfoBarrel

If you get even one of your articles published every month on each of these big and happening portals every month, these would kickboost your dropped rankings. Google loves them and Google will spare those who get love from these portals. However, these sites demand and approve only superb quality content. So you’d need to hire a smartass writer.

Other than these steps, try to get some guest posts if possible on reputed blogs around (in your niche). And stay active on forums and search engine discussions. You’ll get lot of tips not to just to recover dropped rankings but to get #1.

See you again soon.

Cheers!