Squidoo Lenses - worth the effort?

Reprobate,

How many lens do you have? What are the topics?

Thanks!

 

400 or so.

Topics...

How to Squidoo
Drumming Tutorials
Fitness
Pimp My Ride style lenses... I'm currently doing a project offline that involves doing up a car in 24 days with $30,000+ worth of improvements, all donated by sponsors and also shooting a documentary of it.
Star Wars
Adsense
Blogging

I like to write about things that interest me. Most of my lenses contain original content.

 

Google Acting Against Squidoo Due To Spam
Is this serious? Will Squidoo be able to handle this?

It was first meant as help to search engines (like people say to search engines what they like) and now it is being banned.

 

While it would be a blow Squidoo are doing a lot to combat spammers.

And Google is not the be all and end all of being allowed to play on the internet.

 

I am still not clear on how to do link building to Squidoo lens. Any advice?

 

Did you guys read this:

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... Should we Squidoo or not Squidoo now?

 

I'm still Squidooing.

 

Didn't you hear of Squidoo being penalized by Google for too much spam.
A lot of users reported they rarely see Squidoo pages in Google now.

 

Yeah, Squidoo is on the outs. They have launched a huge PR blitz admitting the problem and solving it at the same time, with human editors, spam screenign or something, its all PR bushwah. I got a weird email from him today, you got one too if you have a lens..

From: "SquidTeam" <lotd@squidoo.com>
To: selfstyledexpert
Subject: Thanks, from Seth and the SquidTeam
Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2007 09:14:48 -0500

Thank you.

This is the first time I've been able to send a thank you letter to 70,000 people 
at the same time, and despite the mass nature of it, I hope you can understand 
how sincere I am in writing to you.
Since we went live with Squidoo just over a year ago, we (okay YOU) have done 
  some amazing things:
  * We've built more than 100,000 helpful pages, pages that make it easy for people 
  to learn about new stuff online.
  * We've raised a bunch of money for charity. We've built a school in Cambodia, 
  funded scholarships for inner-city kids and done research on juvenile diabetes.<br>
  * We've built a community of really cool, extremely smart people who spend most 
  of their time helping each other.
I couldn't be more proud of it.
Last week, a few dozen spammers exploited Squidoo and drove the rest of the 
  Web crazy. They spammed tens of thousands of blogs and built thousands of worthless 
  lenses, violating our Terms of Service with reckless abandon. One spammer in 
  La Paz, Bolivia built more than 400 lenses in one day on exactly the same topic. 
  Sheesh.
Since then, search traffic to Squidoo was also impacted, as was our ability 
  to post on blog comments or some social networking sites. </p>
<p>Here's the great news: thanks to terrific work by Gil, Corey and Megan, we've 
  eliminated the tools that bad actors used to damage the rest of us. We've also 
  added a squadron of people who hand review lenses, and we’ve made it easier 
  for you (and anyone else) to report spam.
I'm confident that as the web sees that the problem is solved, we'll be back 
  on track, and searchers online will continue to discover your good lenses. 
In the meantime, the very best thing we can do is what we've always done: build 
  great lenses (by hand) and promote them (by hand) to people who want to hear 
  about them.
Thanks again for the great work, for the enthusiasm and for your desire to 
  help.
Seth and the SquidTeam

  P.S. Feel like building a new lens? Here's a list Megan and I put together of 
  100 dream topics. 
<p>A Thousand Splendid Suns<br>
  Adrianna Costa<br>
  Akon<br>
  All Natural Vintage Oolong Tea <br>
  Authority<br>
  Back to Black, by Amy Winehouse <br>
  Bebo<br>
  Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans<br>
.
(on 
and 
on
and on)
.
  Untitled JJ Abrams movie<br>
  Vitter<br>
  Water for Elephants<br>
  What is the Craziest thing you Have Ever Done in a Car<br>
  Yahoomail<br>
  Zeitgeist, by The Smashing Pumpkins<br>
  10 Places to See in Canada Before You Die<br>
  10 Places to See in the UK Before You Die<br>
  10 Places to See in the US Before You Die<br>
Have fun!

Code (markup):

Explain to me why you would send an email out to your audience after you've been slapped for spam and asked them to come create it on 100 of the best-preforming spam topics for blogs? WTF? I think he's really saying he's a spammer..

 

yeah but is it actually detrimental?

 

Link is a link. Moreover Squidoo has a PR6 so undoubtedly it will help in some PR.

 

I'm unaware of the announcement that those were the 100 best-preforming spam topics for blogs.

 

I made 1 squidoo lens ages ago but it wasn't for a site of mine. It has made a grand total of $0.69. I finally got round to making a proper one with links to my main site. I think it's definitely worth it for the links alone, regardless of the earnings.

 

sorry for my ignorance . what exactly is a squido and its lenses ?

 

Squidoo is still a valuable place to have links in your toolkit.

There has been loads of panicky forum posts made about the changes, I think some of the changes have long past coming, like the iframes they were getting so abused by pornsters that it was getting past crazy.

Dont discard it, use it and dont abuse it.

Paul

 

NOt a bad idea WebThisWay....just mite do that....

 

My sales training lens which is over a year old took a nose dive in Google's SERPs recently and still hasn't come up for air.

 

Stop by http://www.squidoo.com/why and it'll give you an introduction.

 

I've written an article of my response to The Squidoo Slap.