Posts
I have read on various SEO blogs that building Squidoo farms back to your own website is a great tactic for increasing your PageRank, though the merits of doing so are debatable because Google (supposedly) doesn't rely very heavily on PageRank anymore.
At any result I noticed some people were writing game reviews on Squidoo and thought this would be an excellent place to embed my videos. I would build myself a 'Squidoo farm'-- a network of Squidoo lenses that would lead new audiences to my Youtube videos.
You might wonder what the value is in embedding your videos into blogs.
The answer is quite simple,
Search engines cannot data mine videos for text keywords.
Some don't even pay that much attention to the description section of a Youtube video. Blogs, however, can include a large number of text and sit on nice domains like blogger.com and squidoo.com, which have really high scores with the search engines.
"It shouldn't be too hard," I thought. "I just need to copypasta my episode scripts and embed the video at the top, like I do with all my other blogs."
Oh how wrong I was.
The folks at Squidoo are not stupid and realized people might try something like this. Within a day after publishing my "lenses" they have an army of mining bots scour the internet looking for cases of plagiarism, which led them to the paragraphs of my blog I had stuck into some of my Youtube videos to fill it with juicy keywords, or my tumblr and blogger posts which I also include snippets of my script along with the embedded video, for the same reason I was making the Squidoo pages.
Squidoo's automated process locked several of my articles after noticing these "plagiarism" cases. While I was able to overturn them all eventually by sending a nice email to the Squidoo team explaining the writing belonged to me, it still took a week or two for the lock on the lens to be lifted. This obviously was slowing things down, so I thought I would try to rewrite some of my scripts, but even that wasn't enough. If I used so much as a sentence that was the same as in my Youtube videos, Squidoo would recognize it and lock my lens.
I ended up focusing on making lenses for older videos which I hadn't posted the scripts anywhere else before, but this also meant I can't post those script into any other blogs either else my lens will get locked down.
It's been a few weeks since I started doing this, and I haven't received that much traffic to my lenses (around 100 visits total since I started doing this last month). So much for that plan.
However, what I find interesting is that the majority of views are coming from Google searches. I've also received some traffic from sites like reddit. I know the Facebook traffic is coming from having plugged some pages on my personal Facebook wall and Fan Pages, but I can't explain the other traffic as anything but the result of other people sharing the lenses.
The Google searches are the really great thing though; there aren't many of them but getting any traffic from Google within a few weeks of making a page is pretty good. I'm actually getting more weekly Google Search traffic to my Squidoo lenses than I've been receiving to my blogger and tumblr blogs, and I've been doing those for years.
Even if the Squidoo farm doesn't lead to massive amounts of traffic, at the very least I can include some links back to my website in the lenses. This does help improve my website's PageRank.
I suppose I could try to SEO my lenses and make them get more traffic, but I would think doing the same to my own website would provide better results.
Perhaps my thinking is wrong on this? I guess time will tell.
To be honest I've had barely any traffic to my channel from my tumblr and blogger accounts, http://www.rpgvideoreviews.net/ and http://www.rpgvideoreviews.com . I have several other domains as well with keywords I want to associate with my channel, such as www.rpgs.mobi .
I actually have a number of parked domains which aren't being used at the moment because I'm unsure of the best way to use them. I ended up turning www.therpgfanatic.com into a redirect to my Youtube channel itself. I suppose I should talk about this domain stuff in a different blog article devoted to it?
No comments:
Post a Comment