I was stunned this week when an experiment I carried out confirmed a suspicion that I had in relation to an easy way to get high page rank backlinks easily and for free.
On the 8th July, 2012 I created a lens at Squidoo called Seo Ireland | Search Engine Optimisation for Small Irish Business. On the 3rd of August, 2012, some three/four weeks later this lens has a page rank of 3. (You can check this for yourself by installing any page rank extension or tool in whatever browser you use)
There are a couple of really significant points about this:
- It only took me about a half hour to create the lens and
- Getting your own website pages, any of them, to achieve a page rank of 3 takes a lot of time and effort.
This is no fluke and I suspected that this would happen because I had noticed this high page rank attribution on Squidoo lenses before July 2012 but decided to set out to test how easy it would be for myself.
Additionally I made two other lenses around the same time. On the 11th July, 2012 I made a lens called Broadford, Kildare, Ireland, My Irish Village and it achieved page rank 2 status by 3rd August, three weeks later.
What I really like about the Broadford lens will be apparent when you take a look at it as you will see that it is simply a series of photographs I took on my evening walk when I come home from work. (I got a new Galaxy S3 phone recently!) I simply uploaded these photos to this new Squidoo lens, put in a couple of sentences in each module and hey presto, I have a page rank 2 web property three weeks later.
The other lens I created at the same time has stunned me because it has achieved page rank 4 in a matter of weeks. I cannot disclose the identity of this one as it is quite controversial and will lead to unwanted hassle for me which I could not be bothered dealing with.
(I also created the solicitors Dublin (now page rank 3) and the hurling in Ireland lens (now page rank 2) a couple of months ago and just forgot about them)
The key takeaway though from this experiment is that in a few short weeks these 3 web pages on Squidoo have Google page rank of 2, 3 and 4 and as controller of these pages I can insert backlinks to other websites that I own to pass on some good link juice and boost my own sites. (Or I can sell links from these lenses to other webmasters who wish to boost their own websites’ rankings-please use the contact form for details and rates)
Web properties with page rank, and the higher the better, have some serious value. Only this week I sold a link from a page rank 0 web page for $75 to a US based educational institution.
And if you engage the services of search engine optimisation companies to try to improve your website rankings the bulk of their work will be in obtaining backlinks to your site. However on many occasions these backlinks are worthless..unlike the Squidoo lenses referenced above. (Read the dangers of outsourcing your seo and how to use Squidoo to get backlinks)
Filed under Search Engine Optimisaton Ireland 
Squidoo is one of the top “Web 2.0” websites on the internet and is well worth taking a look at to help promote your website as you can get great quality back links quickly and easily provided you use Squidoo correctly.
Getting good quality backlinks is a continual requirement if you want your website to rank well in Google and the other search engines for your target keyphrases and Squidoo can be a source of great high page rank backlinks if you use it correctly. (You might also like 9 sources of backlinks to improve your off page seo)
Squidoo.com, like it’s closest comparator Hubpages.com allows you to build a page, called a lens, about anything that interests you.
And it is free to join.
This page on www.Squidoo.com offers a great beginners guide to Squidoo and a free ebook which you can download but from my experience the best way to approach Squidoo is to build your first lens (page), follow their guidelines and take it from there..you can always edit or delete and go again if you wish and build as many lenses as you like provided you follow their guidelines.
Backlink power
Recently I built a lens for Web Design Dublin which did not take me very long as I took a lot of the existing content and video that I have already created and “curated” it and published it on Squidoo.
I thought no more about it and did no promotion or backlinking of the lens but was astounded to check back in to Squidoo about 2 weeks later and discover that the Web Design Dublin lens had a page rank of 2.
This one webpage with a page rank of 2, and which will probably grow over time, can be edited by me at any time which will allow me to insert a hyperlink/backlink to any site I choose for any keyword phrase I choose to boost one of my own sites or any webpages on my own sites.
This offers enormous potential for linkbuilding for your primary or main small business website as it could take you a considerable period of time to build your own network of websites with page rank with the purpose of getting good backlinks for your main site.
The potential offered by such a quick acquisition of page rank and link juice, and they are dofollow links, is huge because remember you can build a lens about anything.
The easy acquisition of page rank is obtained because Squidoo.com is so highly regarded by Google with a page rank of 5 for it’s home page and a huge number of internal pages with high page rank as well.
So if you follow Squidoo’s guidelines and best practice and tag your lens well and comment on other lenses your lens will benefit greatly from the existing page rank built up on Squidoo by other lensmasters.
You can also earn some money on Squidoo and gain lots of visitors who you can ultimately be led to your main website. However if you never earned a cent nor attracted visitors the ease with which you can built a web property which will ultimately gain page rank quickly and easily and allow you to boost your own website makes your time spent on Squidoo very well spent.
And remember that you can build an army of lenses which be used to leverage the power of Squidoo to ultimately boost the rankings of pages on your own website for your target keyphrases.
Update July 2012
We also created a lens about hurling in Ireland on Squidoo. This also now has a page rank of 2 with no effort on our behalf. This “link juice” can now be passed on to websites that we own or control or sites belonging to our clients.
To recap, getting good quality links can be a chore and expensive. However creating a “lens” (aka a page) on Squidoo should result in your lens acquiring some nice page rank within weeks.
And the links are do follow and there is no limit on the number of lenses you can make or the topics your lens covers.
The potential of this Squidoo strategy is enormous, particularly when you are trying to rank sites for competitive key phrases and need some serious, white hat link juice.
Filed under Search Engine Optimisaton Ireland
