You’ll hear a lot on forums about making money online from Blogspot blogs and Squidoo lens/blog pages mainly because they are completely free, (lot of cheap people trying to make money online :))

I rarely use Blogspot as a CMS since I prefer to use hosted WordPress blogs which means I buy a domain and host it (got 2 dedicated servers currently). This costs money (not a lot really, for me ~$1,500 a year for over 100 domains) and a hell of a lot of people who are supposedly serious about making money online are unwilling to spend any money!

Unfortunately (and as you might expect) anyone serious about making money online should be buying their own domains not ONLY using free hosting accounts like Blogspot blogs and Squidoo blogs to try to dominate the SERPs. That’s not to say don’t use Blogspot/Squidoo, but have them as supporting sites, not the be all and end all of your online money making empire.

Imagine spending months building up a nice network of sites using free blogs like Blogspot and Squidoo and they get deleted or something! That will never happen with your own hosted domains.

You have to speculate to accumulate…

There is a place for pages on free sites like Squidoo, from an SEO perspective a domain with aged backlinks is better than a newly registered domain (or a domain with no backlinks) with the same (brand new) backlinks to it: for a link to work it has to age, for full link benefit it has to be live over 9 months! So when I talk about aged backlinks I mean links that are basically a year plus old.

With a domain that’s got lots of aged backlinks it’s far easier to get a new page ranked well in Google than the same page on a new domain. Even if you add 1,000 links to the page on the new domain the page on the domain with aged backlinks would do better short/medium term!

Google Trusts Domains with Aged Backlinks like Squidoo

It doesn’t matter if the new page has many links to it, all that matters in the short term is it’s on a site with aged backlinks (and of course no penalties) because those aged backlinks give the domain what could be described as a Google trust factor: more/older the backlinks - more Google trusts the entire domain.

Lets call a domain with a lot of aged backlinks a trusted domain so I don’t have to say aged backlinks every second line!

The usefulness of this is when you add new content to a trusted domain it might jump right to the top of the SERPs for some semi competitive SERPs, can dominate the SERPs in some niches. What SERPs you get depends on how hard the niche and how trusted that domain is (more aged backlinks with high PR = more trusted).

Being on a trusted domain per se is highly unlikely to gain a new page really hard SERPs, (maybe if you got your new page on google.com you could dominate almost any SERP :)) but it will generate a LOT more traffic from semi competitive SERPs (and easy SERPs) than if the page was on a new domain which will only be able to gain easy SERPs in the short/medium term.

Do you Own a Squidoo like Trusted Domain? I do!

To give an example, my youngest son (with my help) wrote a short review on a Clickbank product at Warhammer Online Leveling Guide Review to try to make a little cash from Clickbank and as soon as Google indexed the new page it got some relevant semi competitive SERPs.

Do a search for derivatives of the pages title, (search for the whole title is a good start) he’s took some number 1 Google SERPs, even beating my review at Warhammer Online Leveling Guide Review!

I kind of shot myself in the foot a little there :)

He’s not had any sales yet, but I have a feeling that one page could make him $30 a week which will be all his (lot more pocket money than I had at 12 years old).

Update: Within 10 days of the page being indexed my little lads page had made $90 in sales :)

The home page of his site is only PR4, so it doesn’t have a load of backlinks, but they are near enough all aged backlinks and this is enough with some well optimised content (teaching him SEO) to take some nice semi competitive SERPs.

Had we put this page on a new domain (he has a newer domain as well for his art work: PR3 but not from aged backlinks yet) it probably wouldn’t be top 50 even if I added 100 new high quality links to it from some of my popular sites. Add those links and a wait a year and things could be different since the new backlinks would have aged.

And that brings me to Squidoo blogs and how sites like Squidoo can be used to dominate SERPs without having to break your back gaining backlinks.

Using Squidoo Blogs to Gain Organic Search Engine Traffic

Squidoo has a PR8 home page which means it’s got a LOT of backlinks and many of them are aged (over 9 months old). This makes it a VERY trusted domain that when a new page is added should result in lots of semi competitive SERPs.

The way to use Squidoo is as follows.

Create a Squidoo lens and link to your affiliate product etc…, keep SEO copyrighting in mind while creating the content. You don’t have full control over the page, so your SEO can’t be as good as when you create a new page in say WordPress, but it shouldn’t be too bad with a little thought.

When you’ve published the lens you’ll have to get it linked from somewhere since otherwise there’s no easy way for Google to find it in the first place.

I’ve created an example Squidoo lens at Warhammer Online Leveling Guide Review which is targeting the same SERPs as my sons and my review linked above. Since this article is going on a WordPress blog this might mean the Squidoo lens could gain several links from this, theoretically speaking one link should be enough.

Now we sit back and wait to see if this Squidoo lens page can compete with our two pages listed earlier. Will be interesting to see.

Problems with using Squidoo: it’s Hard to Dominate Squidoo

There are a few drawbacks with using Squidoo lenses this way, most obvious is you lack full control of your content.

If Squidoo employees dislike your content they could delete it.

You lack the ability to make money directly from your content (AdSense for example, Squidoo runs AdSense so they make that revenue) and because there are lots of links on Squidoo lens pages to related posts and other parts of Squidoo a lot of your link benefit is wasted.

The worst problem of all is there can be at best two Squidoo pages listed for a particular SERP, for example the “Warhammer Online Leveling Guide” SERP is currently held by a Squidoo page (not mine, but it’s just gone live so not indexed). Actually Squidoo is listed 1 and 2 for that SERP with the second listing being indented. So currently two people are in for a chance of traffic from that SERP due to making a Squidoo lens.

If a lot of people target a particular niche and they use Squidoo the probability of your Squidoo lens listing high is not very high at all. There could be 100+ people targeting the Warhammer Leveling Guide niche on Squidoo by the end of the year.

So great idea, but there’s so many people doing this I’m not sure of it’s true value. Lets give my new lens a few days and see how it goes, maybe better SEO will win the day, who knows.

I’m going to link to this Squidoo lens from my Digitalpoint sig, won’t pass a lot of SEO benefit, but it’s over 100 low quality backlinks.

Update: Within 12 hours of linking to the Squidoo lens it’s listed as the indented Google result for relevant SERPs. This means it’s currently considered the second most important page on Squidoo for relevant searches and that means on many relevant Google SERPs my Squidoo page is being shown as the indented result. Will be interesting to see how much traffic this generates.

If I didn’t own some well ranked sites already I could see this as a very good result, with no real backlink work, top ten from adding a page to Squidoo. I can see why a lot of people use Squidoo this way.

From another perspective however the original indented result has been knocked off over night by a brand new better SEO optimized page. Maybe with a little backlink work I could take number one (non indented result), time will tell.

Using Blogspot to Dominate Google SERPs

Unfortunately this does not work with Blogspot because a Blogspot blog is hosted on a sub-domain of blogspot.com. I’m afraid Google treats sub-domains as separate sites, so obtaining say http://warhammer-leveling-guide.blogspot.com and filling it with relevant leveling guide information is the same as registering a new domain and adding the same content to it.

Basically a newly registered sub-domain lacks aged backlinks and so won’t gain any benefit in the search engines.

This is also true for all sub-domains, so before you think about splitting a site into sub-domains remember each one will be treated as a separate site and they will all have to gain enough aged backlinks to be trusted in their own rights!

I used to create sub-domains before I discovered this through SEO testing, I no longer create sub-domains. I actually have a site with half a dozen sub-domains and some of the sub-domains are PR5 home pages with aged backlinks and good rankings (over 1,000 visitors a day each). I’m seriously considering moving the content to the main domain and 301 redirecting the sub-domain to a sub-folder to both recover the link benefit from the current links and benefit from all that PR/aged links hosted on one domain (not tried this concept yet, so have to think about it).

David Law

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