Friday, May 14, 2010

Reflection: Don't Let the Party Dress Fool You

Don't be fooled by the party dress and mary jane shoes! The Squidoo web page that that picture appears on has willpower like you wouldn't believe.

There has been a thread going on Squidoo about how having an eBay module on a webpage may cause the page to fall out of the Google index or be ranked very low. Some say this is an unintentional bug (that the eBay module is generating some kind of weird code). Someone did an experiment and removed the eBay module to find the page rise again. Anyway, A Paper Doll Childhood is one of several of my pages that took a hit Google-wise and took something of a dip in terms of visitors. By the time I removed its eBay module this morning, it had fallen fell a few thousand spots in the internal ranking system.

But here's wear it gets curious. When I looked in on it this morning, its stats were kind of paltry in terms of visitors, but it had risen back up a few thousand places in the internal ranking system -- and was once more seated at the top of my personal 62 lens Squidoo stack. (Yup, find the line, "This member's top ranked page is ______" and there you will find the page with the paper dolls smiling out in its little pink dress and patent leather shoes.) Hmm, how does it do it? Maybe the page got an "angel blessing" -- something that can raise Squidoo rankings. Sometimes, though, I am hard pressed to explain just how that page manages to be so successful. Sometimes I think it has a will of its own. (Perhaps it is reading the Law of Attraction?)

Anyway, the larger lesson is one I frequently return to: Appearances can definitely belie intenal strength.