Squidoo Downgraded by Google
Squidoo was founded in 2005 and their stated mission was to give people a place to share knowledge online… with the understanding that marketers would likely use it to project their expertise and generate new business.
What the company may not have counted on, and certainly failed to prepare adequately for, was the swarm of black hat SEO practitioners that have pummeled the service with pages intended primarily, and sometimes exclusively, to boost their organic search placement.
Recently, that oversight has caught up with the company in the form of a flurry of unwelcome attention from search bloggers and Google, which seems to have penalized the content sharing site following a drop in its rankings.
The firm allows people to create topic-specific pages it calls “lenses,” and shares with them, or the charity of their choice, a portion of ad revenue resulting from their pages. SEO and SEM spammers have exploited the service by funneling user links through those lenses, automating comments on lenses or redirecting viewers using iFrame technology. Squidoo began offering new anti-spam tools and filters that block spam or allow its users to alert the company to potential violators more easily.
A certain amount of damage was already done with Google instantly dropping Squidoo approximately 30 percent in its rankings.
[...] Squidoo.com was downgraded by Google , which was designed to give people a place to share knowledge online… with the understanding that marketers would likely use it to project their expertise and generate new business. Squidoo ended up turning into a black hat marketers play pen and because of this Squidoo had to clean up their site. Black hat marketers, you can say, killed the reputation of Squidoo and will drive some away from the website because they do not want search engines to penalize them by using the website. In the end, this also hurts Squidoo as a business. [...]
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Sometimes I have found useful content on Squidoo but more and more its been just reams and reams of SEO specific content promoting a product or person. Wikipedia is still the best independent source for information and after that Answers.com
Hi Ramon…
When a website gets highly ranked by search engines and you are able to put your own content on that website, it is only a matter of time before people take advantage of it.
Wikipedia does a great job not allowing spam type content.
Given what Google did to Squidoo, what’s to prevent them from doing this same action to any other specific site that allows easy updating and linkages…. or carnivals?
Well the only thing for Squidoo to do now is to become the number 1 most clicked site in the Net. That is to push Google off it number 1 position and then it will be Google concerned about what Squidoo does instead of Squidoo being worried about what google does.
Squidoo is ina class by itself, it does not need to worry about Google. Now the Online Marketers, well that is a different Story.
Sites like squidoo will always be exploited by poor seo firms as well, its just an easy channel for free spamming for that type of outfit. Unfortunately it is squidoo who suffer not the companies creating the lenses.
Spam is broadly used term which, in my opinion, has become very confusing for many. As social media becomes more prevalent, it may become more difficult to decide what is spam and what is not, and that will be a problem for Google, Squidoo and everyone else.
If a doctor writes a book about a radical new treatment for cancer, then promotes it by posting free information on Squidoo, is it really spam?
The book may indeed be one which contains real valuable, even life saving information, but when promoted as a commercial product, it gets lumped in with bogus schemes and scams.
Opinions about, what is legitimate, worthy and valuable vary tremendously as does what constitutes spam.
It is unfortunate that Google has taken a punitive approach to dealing with this issue in so far as Squidoo is concerned.
There should be a better way of dealing with the issue than simply smacking them down.