I have two Squidoo lenses (about funny “LOST” parodies and bloopers and about food-loving comedian Jim Gaffigan) which I think are entertaining, but which don’t receive many visitors–hence, they are almost invisible on the Web. I think the reason for this is that (wanting to err on the side of caution) I have given them an “R” rating. Although they don’t contain much that would actually make your grandmother blush, the humor in them is the kind that you would see on any given night on a late night talk show or on Comedy Central.

I don’t think the dire warning that “This lens has been flagged as having adult or mature content” that one must click through to view these lenses is keeping the teeming hordes of potential visitors away. Instead, it’s probably merely that the search engine crawlers are indexing the “Adult Content” warning page, since–not being human–they are unable to click through to “read” (index) the actual lenses.

This “Adult Content” warning page doesn’t (currently) contain any keywords that are relevant to the content of my lenses, BUT (and this is a potential feature request for Squidoo) what if, when giving my own lens an “R” rating, I were to be presented with a text box into which I could display the text from my Introduction module or into which I could type some other custom text, which would allow me to present to visitors (and to search engines) a brief, keyword-rich (but sanitized) description of the lens within the “Adult Content” warning page. A further enhancement would be to permit me to select (from a canned list) reasons why I have rated the lens “R” (similar to those newspaper movie guides for parents); such as because it contains “strong language”, violence , et cetera. This way, visitors would be able to decide for themselves whether or not they wanted to continue through past the “Adult Content” warning to view the lens and the the search engines would also have something unique about it to index.

Anyway, it’s just a thought . . .

I can has cheezeburger?

-JasonE