A couple of reports across the net suggest that Seth Godin’s Squidoo is being penalized by Google, most likely due to spam on Squidoo pages.
The reports indicate that some Squidoo pages have seen a 75% drop in traffic, and in other cases have either been removed from high ranking positions on Google, or removed all together.
The service, described last year by Michael Arrington as being Godin’s Purple Albatross, has long been a favorite of black-hat SEO’s looking to drive traffic and gain Google juice for their sites. In more recent times the spam issue has been highlighted by Jason Calacanis, who has written multiple posts on the subject.
Squidoo has recently responded to the issue, however given Google’s crackdown it would appear that Squidoo’s response may be a case of too little, too late. Anyone remotely involved with, or following the SEO community for the last 12-18 months would have been fully aware of the issue (or as some see it, the potential), so if Google is punishing or removing Squidoo pages, Squidoo has no one other than themselves to blame for the situation. Squidoo may also now be on borrowed time; being removed from Google or penalized by Google kills traffic, and Squidoo as a content creator would rely heavily on traffic from Google.
So that’s the difference to be a content creator or a service-provider. Like delicious, even if delicious is penalized by Google, it will not have a big drop in traffic. To be a service-provider, and when people like your site, your site will naturally becomes a content creator.
I think in general it’s a good wake-up call if you can get a Google penalty and survive it. It hurts, but it makes you realize you just can’t rely on the whim of a company you have no control over to make your livelihood.
I’ve been through it, and if I had to guess, Squidoo will make it alright, even if the penalty time is unpleasant.
What’s interesting is that there is no news about this whatsoever from the horse’s mouth (i.e. Google.) NOt that it matters anyway…one more spammer not ranking is all good with me.
To this date, i don’t know WTF squidoo does. In fact, i think it does squiddly squat
There are a handful of people of people making a LOT of money on Squidoo, creating presell marketing pages that automatically rank pretty well in Google without much linkbuilding.
Just check out their top 100 lenses list for an idea
how do spammers use squidoo?
Adam
Google very rarely announces SERP changes like this…in fact it’s probably closer to never. At least one of those linked pages I’ve been reading for a long time so suffice to say I trust the writer as reasonable source.
Kster
essentially spammers stuff Squidoo pages (lenses) with links to their pages, and I believe until recently they could even load a page from Squidoo via an iframe call (since disabled I believe). Squidoo ranked well for lots of search terms, not as high as say Wikipedia but still very well, the result is two fold: authority links from Squidoo as Squidoo ranked well in Google, + traffic for sites from Squidoo pages.
Any reports of sites that are linked to from Squidoo dropping in rankings or is it just the Squidoo pages themselves?
thanks for the explanation Duncan! keep up the great writing!
Again, I am late to the party! I was just writing bunch of articles to publish on Squidoo to with links to our site.
According to NYTimes, Google makes about 6 minor and major changes to their algorithm every week. And it’s their job to do so. They won’t be doing press releases about it “Guess what, we just did out what we are supposed to do again yesterday”
Squidoo is a platform. Instead publishing information one one’s site they publish on Squidoo, and untiol now the big incentice to publish on Squidoo was the good rankins it got.
If they do their internal clean up well, I don’t think this should be a long term problem. In the end, their pages in the SERPs are more relevant than Technorati’s.
if Google is only deranking Squidoo’s spam pages then it’s traffic they shouldn’t be getting, anyway
I wouldn’t expect Google to announce something like this. I probably think they do it to a number of sites and so that would a mean a lot of announcements on their part if they were to do it.
the news is true. I’ve just built some lens on squidoo. I start to get some traffic from Google but now it’s not easy anymore. I guess Squidoo will find the way to get around this problem otherwise they will die soon.
Sambay Reviews
Squidoo may be a platform but in terms of its SERP’s its listed like a content site (like Wikipedia), losing a prominent place in Google will hurt either way.
Dave
not at this stage (linked pages) but given it seems to be an intentional move by Google to punish Squidoo as opposed to a major update I would think you wouldn’t see major flow on effects for some time. I didn’t see any mention of PR for the pages, only reduced results so in theory they may still hold value for outgoing links.
Kster
no probs.
It’s about time!
Squidoo, like hubpages, associatedcontent, ezinearticles and other suck sites are the main sources of spam and “internet marketing” crap/spam.
A better alternative for legitimate writers might be http://www.oondi.com which also pays 100% of advertisement profits to its writers compared to 50% or less like Squidoo or HubPages. Oondi does not allow (obvious) spam either so it’s less likely to be hit by penalties like this.
Who needs to be a content business if you can put anyone else out of business with some algo tweaks?
Even with Squidoo’s good intentions, driven by a passionate leader ( Seth Godin ), I’m afraid that thousands of overly-eager Internet marketers and SEOs have taken advantage of a great idea by publishing content of little or no value.
In recent weeks, I’ve been on conference calls promoting link building on Squidoo, and yes, there are even ebooks that show newbie Internet marketers the ins and outs of Squidoo manipulation.
My question is why don’t these people just start a blog on their own domain? Create real value and engage an audience directly. If you can do that, you won’t have to rely on Squidoo at all, and rely less on Google.
I’m confident Seth will turn this around.
Duncan,
Thanks for replying and you have confirmed my understanding as well. Thank you.
Seth Godin knew what he was creating and where he was going with Squidoo. It’s good that you brought this up in this highly visible forum, Duncan.
I don’t think that good lenses will be penalized by Google. Let see what happen next.
@voices.com CEO:
Excellent point, about starting a blog on a private domain. Take advantage of the lack of traffic to produce content, and allow organic growth to do the rest.
as per Google rules ; they can’t hand pick a site… out of a serp (search engine results page)
– they have to change the algorithm to make it go away….
– I suggest in this case the change was something like ..
” If domain = *.squidoo.* then = Supplementary.results.index.”
With almost 200,000 lenses being made (half of which in the last 4 months), you can expect that a Web 2.0 site will have some people trying to manipulate the system.
However, what the main anchors of Squidoo teach is to use Squidoo for its intended purpose: to provide something remarkable about your area of expertise, no matter how esoteric it is (Adwords, Beef Jerky, polar bears or whatever).
The removal of the iframes tag (starting tomorrow) will eliminate a fair amount of the spam.
But ultimately, Squidoo generates revenue for Google from Adsense ads, is filled with great content on at least 10% of those lenses, and good content on half the rest.
Squidoo has already taken steps to “hide” lenses that don’t have enough content on them.
The trouble with announcements like these is they are usually very overblown, and the shakeout allows the dynamic forward-looking people who use Squidoo and other sites in a value-providing way to continue doing their thing.
And remember, pretty much any tool can be used in ways that are illegal, immoral, or antithetical to the intention of the tool (hence the gun industry’s rationale for their existence). That doesn’t mean that you toss it away and discard it.
BobTheTeacher,
You are part of the problem. Thanks to your Squidoo “secrets” (folks, there aren’t any secrets – just read the forums at squidu.com for all the help and info you will ever need) and other ebooks about the “easy riches” of Squidoo, a bunch of spammers have created crap lenses and groups that have spammed the crap out of Squidoo.
Also, Squidoo Headquarters has insisted on dropping any mention of Squidoo with SECRETS attached to it. Why do you insist on the continued use of “secrets” when Squidoo has asked politely to cease and desist?
I had decent non-spam lenses at Squidoo that used to rank in the first 3 pages of Google results that are now at page 20 or lower. Traffic has dropped to a trickle for those pages.
What I am trying to say is that it was not just the spam lenses at Squidoo that were punished – it was a good majority of the decent content created too.
One (or several) bad apples have ruined the bunch.
It’s a shame when something really good comes along for webmasters to get their rank higher on Google has to be ruined by someone always lurking in the shadows.
I’m sure Seth will get things worked out but it’s tough keeping a step ahead of people that have nothing better to do than ruin everything.
I have made a post in my blog also about this matter…..
It’s about time someone did something about the Squidoo spam issue; apparently Squidoo didn’t act quickly enough.
I’m sure it will be back, though, perhaps they need to add some more editors to manually review lenses?
It was indeed a drop on squidoo rankings at google. i personally think that’s unfair, there is plenty of good and helpful content over squidoo. But i must agree with others that say that squidoo should have done something much more sooner. It’s never late, and squidoo is a big adsense publisher, google will love squidoo again after the “cleaning”, but let’s see how much time will take, it will not be easy.
It’s situations such as this that prompted us at Searchles to make a concerted effort to preempt the spam issue. We’ve taken steps to give users the control necessary to keep spammers off of their radar screen — spam reporting, a ratings system, and search results weighted towards a user’s network of groups and friends. We think this is a very important issue for social search, and we have gone into it in more depth on our blog:
http://blog.sea...do-with-it.html
dumbfounder
I know there are a lot of spammers using this service but don’t think this should be a general trend on Google’s side. Maybe they should find a better way to penalize the exact subdomain that use spam techniques.
I have written two posts on Squidoo on my blog, but being just another unknown blogger (boo hoo) I did not get the number of comments I would have liked, the only comment I did get was, however, from Seth Godin himself ! So I felt honoured. I have just provided an update about my impressions of Squidoo http://www.netm...in-strikes.html – if you want to get an idea of how Squidoo works and what Seth Godin said in his latest e-mail and whether it is worth signing up please take a look !:-)
It looks like if you weren’t on the Squidoo boat a while ago, then you’ve missed it completely now. But I guess that’s okay because the journey’s been cut short.
I think this may be a direct result of Planet Ocean SEO newsletter giving step-by-step Squidoo use instructions in their last two newsletters, and pointing out to so many people, what an excellent opportunity there was…
Although Planet Ocean subscribers can hardly be described as “the masses” I think now that the “secret” is out of the bag, Google is just flexing its muscles.
Seems unfair, but one thing you can count on in this industry is that if someone can exploit it, they will.
I love the irony of spammy “I ROTE ABOUT DIS IN MY BLOG, K? I’M NOT GOING TO SAY ANYTHING HERE BUT CHEK OUT WHAT I THINK AT WHOREFACTOREXTREME.BLOGSITE.COM” comments in this thread. That these people don’t know what a trackback is is just gravy.
Good moderation would have prevented this from happening. It would have been better for the marketers and for Squidoo too. Spammers always ruin everything.
Do you just hate the spammers.
I am sick to death of the hundreds of crap emails, I feel they have ruined my meial list as people are just sick of it, i have had lots of people comaplain i was psamming them and i had paid big money for their optin lead.
I was just start to get a few nice lenses going and now this happens!!!
Spamers again.
Yuo would think it would be easy to just go to their hosts and get them shut down!
never used squidoo even though I signed up. Looks like I saved myself some time
had the opportunity to interview Seth Godin on the “Squidoo Slap”
the full Squidoo interview is available here:
http://www.sear...e-squidoo-slap/
Good info. Thanks!
Squidoo’s brain-dead “lensrank” system measures nothing useful (like sales, or conversion rate) but it is a mechanism to allow a handful of priviledged characters to dominate the Squidoo search results. These “Squidizens” who have been advocating highly questionable SEO practices at Squid U from the beginning are precisely the ones who are reporting big drops in their traffic.
Seth Godin’s bulk e-mail complaining that spammers ” built more than 400 lenses in one day on exactly the same topic.
Sheesh.” seems disingenuous at best considering that he once built about 1200 identical “BzzAgent” lenses in one day — about 35 of which have survived Squidoo’s recent anti-spam “improvements.”
Thanks for info. This should happen sometimes.
Good! Squidoo Sucks. They favor their own.
Thanks for sharing this news/information. It hurts to be kicked out by Google. This is one hell of experience.
Interesting reading even a year later.
I agree!
There’s definitely a lot of spam lenses on Squidoo. It’s entirely their fault though. Their policies are too tolerant. HubPages would just delete the stuff and ban the accounts. Squidoo will send them a warning, at best.
I’ve also noticed the squidoo’s use of adsense lowers the click through rate to your site, so it is not as effective simply because there is more for the visitor to click.
Also the fact that anyone who knows how to drive traffic to their lens will have a higher ranked lens because of that, makes me think that lens rank doesn’t really involve the quality of content because people can easily get their lens ranked high if they know what to do.
I myself have gotten into the top 100 lenses almost entirely on my traffic building effort, among a few other secret tips, I would rather not mention.
For your information, Squidoo URLs are now also blacklisted on Wikipedia: http://meta.wik.../Spam_blacklist
I always suspected Squidoo would be targeted by spammers.