Pages on Squidoo that had enjoyed high rankings in Google have been dropping in the search engine’s rankings. Spam has been cited as the culprit.
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Google Squishing Squidoo Over Spam
Marketing expert Seth Godin created Squidoo as a site where anyone could easily create a ‘lens’, which would be a user-created page that takes a deeper look into someone’s favorite subject.
As with all good things on the Internet, abusers came along to try and game the system. Jason Calacanis posted a spam he received, with links going back to Squidoo pages, as an example.
Calacanis also mentioned in a separate post how some SEO folks he chatted with on his podcast adored Squidoo for its ability to “game the system.”
“If SEOs love your platform you have a HUGE problem,” he said.
Google has evidently noticed the issues with Squidoo. As a result, plenty of Squidoo pages have been knocked back in the search results since July 7. Squidoo announced anti-spam changes to the service on July 5, but it appears that was too late to stop Google from penalizing Squidoo’s offending pages.
Blogger Ed Dale suggested a trio of reasons why Google may be placing Squidoo sites lower in its rankings. Dale doesn’t mention spam at all, or low quality pages, as possibly being a reason for the changes.
Google tends to be straightforward in its anti-spam efforts. If Matt Cutts or others who do Google’s spam fighting catch pages that violate Google’s guidelines, the hammer gets dropped. That looks like the case with Squidoo.
