Squidoo Tag Pages Have No SEO Benefit!
If you thought tagging was good for search engine traffic, you’d be wrong!
For a long time, it has been common wisdom that adding tags to your lens would help it rank better on the search engines. In theory, your lens would receive link juice from these pages, loaded with relevance and PageRank.
There’s plenty of advice on the subject: MrLewisSmile has done a very popular lens on tagging tricks, PotPieGirl did a blog post on how Squidoo tags are important, and CaptainSquid wrote how link juice flows from tag pages.
There are also several eBooks that people pay money for that include chapters on how tags help your SEO efforts. I was even about to write my own blog post explaining it further, until I discovered that the tags don’t work.
While Google has some tag pages in its index, these were all cached in 2007 or earlier – there are no new tag pages cached in 2008! Yahoo doesn’t have any tag pages at all in its index; not even one.
Why is this?
The problem is, all search engines are blocked from indexing the tag pages on Squidoo. The file robots.txt on the server has the line “Disallow: /tags/*” which tells the bots not to visit the tag pages. If the tag pages are not getting crawled by the bots, they won’t get indexed, and the lenses that use them won’t get credited with the backlinks.
This change was put in place on September 29th last year, although a typo meant it didn’t actually take effect until January 10th (source: Internet Archive). Since January, search engines have stopped crawling and indexing the tag pages. New tags are not included, and existing tag page are not updated.
The result of this is that the tags have absolutely no influence on how well a lens ranks on the search engines. This is a real pity, because tagging is a very powerful tool for telling search engines what your lens is about, and it spreads the PageRank around the site.
Tags are now only actually used for searching within Squidoo, and for the Discovery tool (i.e. explore related lenses). There’s even the possibility that the search engines will see a long list of tags, and penalise the page for keyword stuffing so that it doesn’t appear in the results at all.
Updated: The Discovery Tool was removed by Squidoo when they introduced the new themes, so now you will have to find some other way to connect related lenses to each other. [June 12th]
So, now what?
Knowing this, you could probably delete half of the tags on a lens. Those long keyphrases you added from your traffic stats aren’t any use (not that they ever were), and there’s no point having runtogetherwords either – no one will search for these on Squidoo. You don’t need to worry about orphan tags either.
Instead, you need to make sure that your lens is focused on the topic you are writing about. This means deciding on a key phrase and including it in your title, Introduction and throughout the content. Variations of your keyphrase will need to appear in other parts of the lens too, like module titles.
This also increases the importance of Lensrolls and Groups for linking related lenses together. Don’t be tempted to Lensroll all your own lenses together, or join large groups that accept anything – you need to connect with lenses that are directly related to your content! (Tip: the Featured Lenses module is great for this).
When you submit your lenses to social bookmarking sites, that is the time you need to be picking good tags. You also need to get backlinks from related websites and directories.
In an ideal world, Squidoo HQ will re-evaluate their blocking policy, and let the bots crawl the tags pages again. We will have to wait and see whether or not this will happen (I’m not holding my breath).
The End (of tagging)
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Oh my goodness,
I am new to squidoo, but I have been studying lots of squidoo info. and this post is very good. It makes sense.
Thanks
Thanks for this information, really helpful, have retweeted you
Diane
Now, this is info worth paying $5 for!
Nice post. Thanks for the info.
I note that some tag pages, such as this one, still have page rank: http://www.squidoo.com/tags/money (pr 5) and when I just checked the big G using site:squidoo.com/tags I got over 250k results.
You’re right about the disallow in the robots file, though. I checked dates on the cache results and a lot of them are from Mar ‘07, though some are later.
Weird stuff. I guess this means that the older tag pages are still in the index and will remain there, even if they’re not getting spidered?
Do the tag pages get any significant number of clickthrough visits? This would give value to the tags even if the spiders aren’t hitting them.
I wonder what squidoo’s reasoning is for having this in place?
Well, that is major disappointing! I just worked really hard to learn to do effective tags. So the traffic we do get from google and yahoo and other search engines comes only from our titles and module titles? Pinging must help some. Will be watching for your follow-up to this news. whew! Thankful you found that, tho!
I don’t even pretend to understand how all the SEO stuff works. In fact, on a scale of 1 to 10, I’m a 1 in that area. I do understand, though, that content is king and my Squidoo stats prove that. Now that I have this information, I will be more careful than ever to be cognizant of how I word things on my lenses. Thanks!
Thanks for the great post. Very interesting and explains a few things for me.
However, good writing and targetted keywords appears to still work.
Thank you. I have always tried to include correct tags because I was under the impression it helped. Squidoo leads you to think it helps because of the push for tagging that they give you. It’s nice to know that I can wittle those key words down without suffering in the ranks. I’m glad I follow you on twitter.
Personally I’m quite relieved. I don’t always have time to put in a lot of tags, but I know that I have great content. Since content is now speaking for itself, I feel it might let content-rich lenses stand out a little more. (I’m also hoping that spammers don’t realise this for a while and waste all their time stuffing the tag fields…)
Well, that’s one less thing to worry about I guess. Pity though.
Now I’ve been doing some experimenting with the squidoo searches. Here’s what I’ve found:
1) Squidoo does consider partial tag matches “polymer” will bring up lenses using “polymer clay” even though “polymer” isn’t used alone in a tag on the lenses brought up in a search.
2) Word order of tags doesn’t matter. “clay polymer” brings up the same lenses as “polymer clay”
3) Phrases not used as tags but contained in a combination of your tags will bring up your lens. “polymer clay sculpting animals” brings up lenses using the tags “polymer clay” and “sculpting animals”
What this tells me is that you still have to pick good relevant tags, but being repetitive in your tags will give you no benefit with internal Squidoo searches. Now I don’t know how much tags factor into being used as keywords for google, that’s not something I can easily test. I think the best course is to use good tags phrases that are keyword rich and likely to be used in searches. Which by the way would still be good practice even if the tag pages were indexed more readily.
so does the same apply to Hubpages?
Thanks for the update. Could this be why people say they no longer get the kind of traffic from Google they were getting?
Charly said : However, good writing and targeted keywords appears to still work.
Agreed. The meta keywords (targeted) is still very important. I’ve watched the way people tag their content and just shake my head. They think they have to stuff the field by repeating keywords. I guess they don’t understand how the proper use of keywords helps with cataloging the content.
Great post Fluff
Excellent info Fluff, does this mean that the only real benefit of tags is for internal squidoo searches? This could lead to further abuse of tags that have nothing to do with the lenses topic.
I’ve always been lead to believe that good writing with keywords sprinkled throughout headings and body copy work best and your very informative post supports this.
Somehow the masters of SEO such as the Googles of this world love to change the goal posts, so I think sticking to good basics is key!
Thanks for the post – great stuff.
This is a good catch, Fluff.
Still, it leaves me wondering about a few things.
The tags pages that are cached still help the older lenses that are listed on Google, and presumably the other search engines, right?
The tags we enter are shown in the keywords meta field, and it may be a good idea to prune those tags down to the keywords that best describe the content on the lens. Your mention of keyword stuffing could be a valid point for lensmasters who have tried to add as many tags as possible.
Adding the long-tail keywords from the stats never really seemed to be a good idea, but I was doing it about once per month. Now, I think I’ll go back and remove them as I pare down the tags on my most important lenses.
As long as the Squidoo robots.txt file excludes the tags pages, this will make it easier for those of us who constantly scratch our heads trying to think of better tags to add to our pages.
Thanks for blogging about this.
Act on your dream!
JD
$5 report to get super-duper SEO rankings in a few hours – RIP
Wait, there are several unsuspecting wanna-bes that will still get duped – sorry about them.
Google has long had the policy that they did not want sites to have search pages indexed – so perhaps squidoo is just taking that seriously?
Does it means, all what you advise on tagging in your ” lens health check ” is of no use?
This has my head spinning a little bit and I’m going to have to go back and delete some tags that I’ve added along the way.
On a slightly different note, if the tag page has been indexed on Squidoo, would it be beneficial to use that tag if it’s relevant to your lens? IE: http://www.squidoo.com/tags/weight+loss – My gut feeling states that it would be beneficial in a way, but in another way the weight+loss tag doesn’t have any PR to pass along anyways.
I’ll have to do some tag tweaking in the upcoming week. Thanks for the great blog post.
As always,
Great information
Thank you.
@ Bcarter – while “weight loss” has been indexed, it will never be updated, so if you add that tag to your lens you still won’t get any link juice from it.
@harryheys – HubPages.com allows bots to index their tag pages, so that’s good for hubs.
@roysumit – yes, the tag check is no longer useful, and I have disabled it.
I agree there aren’t new squidoo tag links indexed as I was one of those who bought the koolaid from the $5 report this weekend.
I will say that tags are somewhat helpful in ranking for longtail keywords though. My tags still seem to help in ranking for obscure long tail searches.
Your findings did explain a few things that just didn’t add up from that report I bought.
Thanks Fluff.
Ok – i’m not a SEA buff but i’m always thinking – where things are changed then there is always an opportunity to be found. Just can’t see where this might lead just yet but really useful discussion. Has anyone played around with off squidoo pages that list your lenses with tags etc.
Great info
Paul
Hey Fluff – this is very interesting finding indeed.
However, aren’t the tags still showing in the meta keywords? And certainly having the tags would never truly hurt your SEO, and if your finding is correct, but later changes then the tags can be ready for the new spiders.
So although I will trust your finding for now, I won’t take intelligent tagging out of my instructions for Squidoo Secrets members. And I would certainly not recommend people delete their tags.
Bob Jenkins
@Bob – having some good tags is still important for appearing in searches within Squidoo, but having too many tags could harm a lens’s position in the search engines results.
Well Fluff, this is quite interesting. Nice pick up =)
In fact, the entire robots.txt file was quite interesting.
Without expanding too much, I will say that I certainly hope they reconsider this. The SEO benefits are mis-placed, and the true reason behind tagging will be lost.
It’s all just a little odd, in my opinion.
Thanks for a great read!!
Jennifer
~PotPieGirl
My advice here would be: don’t panic and don’t remove all your tags too hastily.
They are definitely useful for traffic within Squidoo.
They definitely help people to find your lenses within Squidoo search.
I’m pretty surprised by this news Fluff (well spotted!) and it seems others are too. One of the great selling points of Squidoo is the chance to share some juice within the site.
i think this will make squidoo free from tag spamll
Thanks for this info, Fluff! Think I have a few tags to remove!
As Fluff said, there is a risk to having so many tags, especially variants of the same tag.
It may be a reason for the loss of position within the search engine SERPs for some lenses.
Great find Fluff!
I actually noticed I get better traffic when I have 25 to 30 tags, rather than all 40 tags, so I having been going back and deleting tags off of my lenses to test that theory. Reading this, seems like my theory was correct.
Thank you for sharing your research. The first five tags, the ones that show before the “more->” link seem to get recognition from search engines. I have some spelling variations in that group bringing traffic.
Yikes! It seems this info and #36 comments from Allan Wallace go back to SEO meta tips on limiting keyword data from the early days … yar, I remember, yar I was coding that long ago … looks like I will be distilling my tags today. Tweak, tweak, tweak
WOW. Awesome information. Thank you for sharing!
I will say, this is ridiculous. Now Squidoo is just a glorified article marketing site. It’s a shame the tags basically went away.
I must admit I assumed the tags were of no benefit for search engine rankings but were for internal Squidoo search purposes only but it was reallly useful to see some aspects of Squidoo tags clarified. Thanks. Ewan Kennedy.
Thank you, I spent a lot of time on that, what a relief. Again, thank you…
Very useful information thefluffanutta. Just recently I was trying to optimize my tags to soak up juice from tag pages. Back to the drawing board.. um, editing page.
Thank you so much for clarifying the tagging issues.
Hi,
Thanks for the great article. Folksonomic tagging can have other purposes internally, The RSS Feeds that you include in your lens are very important when the Feed is your own. Normal tagging on squidoo is still recommended, just make sure the words that you tag appear on the visible text of the page. I doubt that any current spam needs to be removed, but no harm for the paranoid.
Great post. Its good to know this information so the writing can be laser focused on who you are targeting. I still believe Squidoo is a great way to drive traffic since I have seen a definate increase in the 3 months of creating Squidoo Lenses. Keep up the good work.