I Had a Mini-Stroke

I’ve been away for 10 days on vacation and came back a week ago. I didn’t have access to a computer while I was away so I couldn’t update any of my Squidoo lenses. Actually, if I’m being honest, I probably wouldn’t have done so anyway – I was too busy enjoying my vacation.

I have just four lenses that are in the top thousand regularly. In fact, these sometimes get into the top 200 at times so I’m very keen to update them to maintain their position. When I came back, all four were hovering on the edge of falling out of the top 2000. I went into overdrive – I had to update them and fast.

The top one is I Had a Mini-Stroke and What Happened After so that was the one I updated first. I then updated the other three on the same day. When lens rank was recalculated a few hours later, the updating of the lenses had no positive effect. If anything, all four had dropped slightly. This has happened before so I wasn’t worried. About 24 hours later, lens rank was again recalculated and all four had made it into the top 1000 lenses. I’ll keep working on them, making sure they are fresh because I’m sure it helps with Google too because all four get good traffic from there. I also hope to get them back into the top 200 Squidoo lenses.

I have a continuous program of updating my lenses and usually do several each day. Sometimes I make big changes, sometimes they are only small ones. I’ve even found typos on old lenses that I’ve missed many, many times.

What’s the point of all this, you might ask? I’m telling you that updating web pages works. In a way, Squidoo lens rank is the least important part of doing it. The lenses I update most often are the ones with the highest traffic, clickouts, affiliate sales and they are the ones that get the most traffic from Google and other search engines. Even ones that I had given up hope of ever getting decent numbers of visitors have had improved traffic as I’ve regularly updated them.

My recommendation is that you update lenses regularly. It’s not worth bothering too much with seasonal ones like Christmas, Thanksgiving or Easter. Just start updating those 3 to 4 months before the event. Update your most popular pages but don’t neglect the less popular ones either. Taking a fresh look at them from time to time might inspire you to make improvements. If you make major changes, you can send out a Squidcast telling people about them. You can blog about the changes, you might also be inspired to find more places for backlinks for them too.