Status Icons are New Squidoo Dashboard Feature

Another new cool feature has been added to Squidoo and it really helps you to see what is going on with your lenses and shows you what is need to be done. Status icons on your dashboard show you statuses of your lenses  - green lenses, WIP lenses, locked lenses and lenses with warnings. Check out the screenshot below.

How are these icons going to help you? They help you to do your TO DO list for Squidoo and see what is need to be done. You want most (the best is all) of your lenses marked green in order to have the best Squidoo experience and make money from every lens. Green lenses are features lenses and these are the lenses that make you money on Squidoo.

WIP Lenses

WIP lenses are Work in Progress Lenses. These are Squidoo lenses that are still under construction or lenses that need to be approved by Squidoo team if they get caught in Squidoo spam filter.These lenses are marked with red on your Squidoo dashboard. More lenses you have marked with red the more lenses need to be turned into green!

Locked Lenses

Squidoo lock lenses if they are considered spam, over promotional or maybe just copied content from somewhere else. Once a lens is locked you can still save your lens from being deleted and this new icon will kindly reminds you how many lenses need an urgent modification and edit!

Read the official Squdioo announcement about this new feature and express your opinion about these icons in the comment section below! Do you think this will help you?

Happy Halloween is a new Squidoo Magazine

Squidoo has a new magazine and few lensmasters received a message yesterday that some of our lenses were moved to this cool new magazine. Happy Halloween magazine is all about Halloween, it's a blog-like page and it's a very cool move made by Squidoo in time of preparation for this holiday. Affiliate marketing earnings sykrock during Halloween and Christmas and therefore this move is really nice decision and it will surely benefit for many lensmasters and bring more money in their accouts.

Go to Happy Halloween magazine and see it for yourself. The page has a really nice design, is well structured, easy to browse and it already have a lot of relevant and cool content. So I guess this will benefit for our rankings too.

Below are some highlihts of this magazine. Things that I personally love and miss on this new Squidoo feature. Hope they'll add these things in the future :)

Things I like on Happy Halloween magazine

• Design
• Advertising placement
• Facebook connection

Things I miss on Happy Halloween magazine

• Lensrank information on the lens

My Squidoo lenses on Happy Halloween magazine

• Donnie Darko Halloween Costume
• Sexy Cop Costumes

Google +1 button is now live on all featured lenses

Great news for wall Squidoo lensmasters who are not in the Giant Squid club yet! Squidoo recently added almighty Google +1 button to all featured lenses so this cool little button is now live on your lenses marked green! That's surely a great news and a great new feature!

Read the official announcement here.

So, what so you have to say about this new update? Do you think this new feature will bring more traffic to your lenses? Will you +1 your favorite lenses? I really want to see what you have to say about this cool new update...

Google +1 Button is now live on Squidoo!

Google recently offered bloggers and sites to add its +1 Button to their articles and content. Google +1 button is a simple bookmarking button, very similar to Facebook Like Button, that can help both bloggers and users to promote and explore good content. If you want to know more about this new Google feature please read my article Google +1 Button for Bloggers on my blog Blog of Zoso.

Google +1 Button is currently available just for Giant Squids.You can read the official announcement about this new feature and testing on Squidoo HQ Blog.

How Can This Improve My Lenses?

If you +1 a lens it will be recommended to your community and friends. So if your friends search for a specific keyword related to your lens, your lens will appear higher in search results and Google will show your recommendations to your friends and your network. This can help you to increase your traffic and gain some quality readers that are interested in the topics you're covering. People will more likely to check out something that someone has recommended to them.

What Google says
Here’s what Google has said about their goals and how this might positively affect SEO:

Content recommended by friends and acquaintances is often more relevant than content from strangers. For example, a movie review from an expert is useful, but a movie review from a friend who shares your tastes can be even better. Because of this, +1′s from friends and contacts can be a useful signal to Google when determining the relevance of your page to a user’s query. This is just one of many signals Google may use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking, and we’re constantly tweaking and improving our algorithm to improve overall search quality. For +1′s, as with any new ranking signal, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how those signals affect search quality.

Example
You’ll see the +1 button on Giant Squid lenses, next to the existing Facebook and Twitter social sharing buttons. New button looks like this:

The Google +1 button on a Giant Squid's lens

What do you think about this new feature? Do you think this new button will help to grow your traffic and rankings? Share your thoughts in comments.

Big redesign of Squidoo Lenses

Squidoo made some big changes this week and they redesigned the look of the lenses, added some new feautures and removed some previous features. You can read the official announcement of these changes in their blog post.

The majority of changes don't really affect anything, some new features are really great but some cool things has been removed. Below you can see what new and what's not there anymore.

New feaures on Squidoo Lenses:

• Tweet button and Facebook Share button are added to lenses
• 3 brand new (and really nice) templates

R.I.P. features on Squidoo:

• Fan clubs are gone
• You can no longer add lenses to your favorites
• Some html attributes are no longer allowed in custom bio on your lenses
• Lensrolling is no more

Will these changes really affect SEO, traffic and overall rankings? Maybe. We can't say this yet. I really like new sharing buttons and overall look of lenses. I'll sure miss fan clubs and favirte lenses. But one things is for sure - we need some time to accpet new changes, Squidoo is still an awesome site!

And now I want to hear from you! What do you think about new design and features on Squidoo lenses? Do you like them? Do you miss something? Would you recommend something to Squidoo? Share you comments!