Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

Evey SEO pro knows the power of Squidoo. And for those non-pro’s, you only need to a do a search on Google for Squidoo to learn about it. A simple search will result in AdWords like:

Make Money with Squidoo
Get Truckloads of Traffic
Report Only $9.95
www.squidoomarket.com

or

Squidoo Blueprint
How I acheved First Page Rankings
Results in Only 8 Days!
www.squidooreport.com

For those who don’t know, Squidoo was created by marketing guru Seth Godin and is one of the better known social media sites on the Web. The idea behind Squidoo is to share your expert knowledge in a specific niche. For example, if you feel you know a lot about the Shiite vs. Sunni conflict, you can share your knowledge.

So where does the problem lay? Well the fact that Squidoo is such a great resource means that it ranks well in search engines. And if a site ranks well in search engines, then it gets a lot of traffic. So if I was wanting to make you buy my specific brand of car wax, it might make sense for me to write a Squidoo “lens” to talk about how to wash a car, and of course mention how important it is to use my brand of wax. This example is extremely mild compared to the abuse of Squidoo.

Here is a link from a well known SEO site talking about how Squidoo is really a great place to get ranked. Just put your lens up, point a few external links, and you have yourself some first page visibility on a challenging search term.

I will admit to recommending this to a few clients myself, although with the advice to write a really good informative article. I do the same with Wikipedia. Write good content and things should go well.

But does this mean that Squidoo’s report of search traffic drop is a sign of Google smacking Squidoo down a bit? A quick check on Google for Squidoo currently shows 648,000 pages indexed. That’s a fair amount by any standard. Google is currently showing Squidoo as a PageRank of 6. That’s not bad, but I would think it would be a bit higher. Keep in mind that that’s only 1 higher than this site. This seems a little low, especially since Yahoo is currently showing 3,930,847 back links to the domain.

Looking at the site architecture shows the site is very well put together. URL’s are tight and relevant, titles are good. But looking at the source code shows some unsightly items. Mainly I’m referring to the incredible amount of JavaScript toward the top of the page. Unfortunately I wasn’t checking out the code of the site a month ago, but I would be very curious to see if that code is new.

I’ll be curious to follow this through and see if in fact this is Google showing some penalties. If I had access to their logs and info I could probably tell them pretty quickly. The key test would be where are the traffic drops? Take a look at the lost rankings and see if they are Spam pages.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I am not certain Google has leveled a penalty on Squidoo. But the fact that it has come up shows some potential guilt over how this site is being used. This is a good time for Godin to take a hard look at installing some more precautions and also take a look at the code of his site and see what he can there as well.