Google Losing Lenses, Lensroll Gains Traffic

On a recent visit to the SquidU forums I noticed a few threads from lensmasters concerned about Google dropping their lenses from the serp’s and that other sites like Redgage and Lensroll were ranking in their place.

So off to Google to see what’s going on. Upon doing a search for Rio Coloring Books I wasn’t that surprized to see the directory ranking well for the term.

What did surprise me was that doing an exact  search for “Squidoo Rio Coloring Books” did NOT return the lens. It certainly should have.

In it’s place are links from Redgage, SquidUtils, Squidom, the lensmaster profile page, SquidUp, Zimbo……and the list goes on. The lens actually never shows up verbatim but instead shows up as references in text or tags.

I’m of the thinking that it might have something to do with the depth of the lens. By depth I mean how far into the sites hierarchy the page sits.

Take a look at the image above. The lens I did a search on never shows up, instead a confusing jumble of  info with an unclear destination.

This shows up at #6 in Google but the lens can’t be found anywhere. Checking index status Google has clearly indexed the page. First thing that jumps out to me is how deep the category is into the site. At least six layers from what I can tell.

This is crazy. Where is the link taking me? It look to me like the scenic route instead of a straight line.

Fast forward

It is defiantly strange in the world of search over the past months.

I’ve noticed a huge jump in traffic coming from the search engines since Panda poo. Now it’s true that Google stated there would be traffic changes, but most of the changes reported that search traffic went down.

This got me to thinking about recent changes we’ve done to the site. We did a complete redesign, added a few social applications  like Facebook Connect module and the ability to put your Twitter feed to your profile page .

We also started using Twitter and a Facebook fan page as general feeds into the engines. These are also supported by Fluffanutta’s Friendfeed as well as random bookmarking, tweets and the like.

All of this together should account from some increase in traffic but a 130% increase is a little surprising.

First conclusion:

IMHO I think the problem with other sites out ranking the lens may lie in the breadcrumb navigation that Squidoo is trying to accomplish. That combined with the cross linking of lenses and categories has Google throughly confused.

I’m sure it will work itself out and Google will figure what Squidoo is doing but in the interim it sure is causing pain for some.

Category: Squidoo