Improved Tag Pages at Squidoo
Recently, Squidoo updated their tag pages to be more useful to visitors and search engines.
If you’re not familiar with tag pages, these are pages that list lenses that use a particular tag. Have a look at the Lensography tag page for an example. There are hundreds of thousands of tags on Squidoo, providing an additional method of navigating and linking between related lenses.
Here’s a summary of the main improvements:
- 20 lenses are displayed (it used to be only 10), with snippets from the Introductions. This will make the tag pages a lot more ‘content rich’, which the search engines will appreciate. The title of the page is also improved.
- Priority is given to the lenses that use the tag as their primary tag, so that those lenses will be listed first, followed by the other lenses that use that tag. This means it’s more important than ever to pick a good Primary Tag.
- Tag pages link to other related tag pages, based on the lenses that use them. This provides the perfect system for navigating through the tags to find the right ones to add to your lens. But, remember: less is more when it comes to tags, so choose your tags wisely – limit yourself to just 10 – 15.
- Finally, in stark contrast to my sensational post this time last year, tag pages are once again indexable by search engines. As a result, your lenses will get a share of the PageRank and search traffic that these pages get. With any luck, this will also boost the overall authority and traffic to Squidoo.
In other news:
The Discovery Tool is back! Well, kinda…
Related lenses are shown to first-time searchers, in a scrollable box on the right-hand side. This placement is much better than where it used to be under the Introduction, and is an interface visitors will be familar with.
If you visit a lens while logged in, or via a link from another website, you won’t see them. Search engines won’t see them either (but this may change in future).
And finally, eBay no longer allows you put affiliate links on your lens (see blog post from Squidoo). You don’t need to worry about this if you’re using the official eBay module, or the eBay RSS Feeds from SquidUtils, as these will still earn revenue for your lenses. If you’ve used your own affiliate links or feeds from eBay, you will need to remove them.
Related posts:
This is a great improvement — and I was wondering about the placement because of that primary keyword. It just keeps getting betterer and betterer — pretty soon it will be well purrfect!
Great post and thanks. Another thing to go over. I have posted about your article on Squidlog.
Thank you for another article about tags.
So it’s time to re-work tags on my Squidoo lenses.
Thanks for the extra links, will have something to read today.
Interesting about the using only 10-15 tags. I bought a book about making Squidoo lenses and the author recommended using all 40 tags. I wonder if that’s doing more harm than good. Might start using the 10-15 and see how it goes.
Thanks for the update on how Squidoo is handling tag pages now. I think it’s great that they removed the nofollow attributes from the links. That should help all of us. Act on your dream! JD
Great post. This is an area where I have difficulty. This has helped clarify a few things for me. Thanks.
I have been using squidoo since march and I have just found out about tag pages.
thanks great post
Thanks for the bullets on the main improvements. Especially on the importance of choosing the right tags. Priceless.
This is great news! After tag pages were excluded from Google, I payed less attention to them. I guess I have some work to do…..
These things seem to go in circles! remember the big ‘Tag and Ping’ thing a couple of years back?
The information about tags is a good read. It’s nice to hear another opinion and experiences.
I am a newbie in Internet marketing. I just did my first lens on Thursday. This is a big help to me!
Thank You