I have it on good authority, and through a lot of trial and error, that one of the main facets of Squidoo’s lens rank system is based on outgoing links. One of the few places you can create custom A Tag links is within the text module. The text module is probably my favorite, because you can also add a graphic and use a few other HTML tags. Links you create yourself, as opposed to outgoing links from Flickr, Amazon or Superstore modules, account for the lion’s share of the ranking algorithm.

To see this in practice, visit the lens I created for one of my favorite bands, the Happy Mondays, and scroll down to the trivia section at the very bottom. After I gathered the content, using HTML I manually linked to sites related to the individual questions. Although this lens is quite good, it was buried in the rankings for weeks. After I added all the outgoing links it shot up thousands to it’s current rank of #250. The proof is in the pudding.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 6th, 2006 at 6:56 pm and is filed under Text Modules. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.