Well I signed up with squidoo last year while it was in beta for another blog I had. Never got a useful back link for it and looking at its lens rank even with the weight I sent it - its really not doing much good at the moment?

But now everyone is talking about how great it is for SEO purposes….. Looking - it seems google does like anything on it thats long tail - much like other high PR sites which if like me you have been building sites for a long time will have anyway. If not blogger and articles will do you well and still are free - always use the free stuff. Also looking at how much people are making on squidoo it seems theres not much gold in those hills yet - don’t give up that day job. And as for links - well as I said I didn’t really get anything for my lens thats now over a year old. Traffic is in the low digits and I’m not sure if it is in any shape or form targetted. Seems more random - but thats the rub too - no real stats in your lens so its hard to tell - you can’t even use statcounter as no javascript can be used

So do watch out for those squidoo ebooks - they maybe just cashing in on the next ‘new old idea’. If I’m wrong do mail me here ‘info’ at this address.

I plan to explore it for 2007 along with a few other hubs and will have some fun adding a few lens on things I’ve found or the stuff I love to talk about - all those pennies help towards the million…

The Million Dollar Blogger Lens

I have just switched to statcounter for my traffic checking. I used a free couter before - but they have beome very unstable…. Statcounter is great, but the amount of space is very limited. I really don;t want to upgrade and so may have to make my own.

How will backlinks work in the future? See Google’s blog it seems google no longer likes link exchanges. Now I have a problem, they are saying that a ‘unrelated’ sites links won’t be counted maybe even count aginst you….. But what is an unrelated site? Lets take my network - they are releated - a site a day….. Theres a relationship. On another site I have links from the same area (Tunbridge Wells) - a very big spread of sites… I sort of understand why they are doing it, but it could backfire as relationships are a strange thing. Maybe google beta tool shows how they define relationships, I hope not none of my sites fit.

On my list of things to fix was how to link my sites togeather. By the end of the year there maybe close to 400 sites… As new sites come online I wanted to be able to tell google about them in addition to the directories, articles and general backlinking I’m doing byhand. Now I didn’t want to mangage it all by hand - the interlinking of sites - as some sites may die others may need more of a push. So my first line of thinking was a central MYSQL DB with script. Perhaps a database with weighting for certain sites, stats, ad types etc etc. I did a quick search and found a few - most with big price tags…. I could buy a lot of sites for that sort of money I could alos write it myself, my php and perl isn;t too bad, but I just don’t have time…. I’m still debugging the spider for my mobile phone site  

Anyway I had heard of a co-op service for webmasters being run at Digital Point 

I checked it out and it seems to be working well getting people into Gooogle with some pretty interesting Page Ranks via the backlinks and its FREE! Yes FREE. It also tries to keep out bad - doing Evil to google sites. So it isn’t a link farm or anything like that, but a nice way for webmasters to trade links for free on a 1 for 1 basis.

It seems to fix some of the problems I have, namely a way of linking my sites, a way of getting extra backlinks and it also stops my sites being tied too close togeather as the ads will be on other sites too. There are rumours (anyone know for sure?) that the big G doesn’t like small groups of sites that only link to each other *and* are on the same class C IP address. I’m worried about this and I’m thinking my next reseller account needs to be on a different C class… I guess this is a left over problem from link farms and the new current blog farms being used. 

So anyway I spent the morning playing - must set deadlines, must set deadlines…..

Its all set up and you can see it working at the bottom of this Blog. I’m not sure what format I like yet or where it will go, I may play with different types on different pages.

One other thing, if you use the link above I get a 10% traffic referal bonus - I’m struggling to get this site in google - so any help you can give will be put to good use.

Are there any other good schemes out there?