These days, how effective are Squidoo, Hubpages and free blogs (like blogspot, tumblr ) in building backlinks?
Google also deindexed my tumblr blog after a few months as it didn't have enough unique content. I still like Squidoo though.
I personally am not a fan of squidoo, I've posted a few articles and didn't receive much traffic from them, squidoo will unpublish them randomly for no apparent reason and I didn't notice much improvement for keyword results in serp. I do have confidence in hubpages though. I wrote an article, and within a month a new site (that was only 2 months old) was ranking for the keyword I used in the article. They haven't given me much traffic, but the "power" within the search engines definitely makes it a valuable resource. I use blogger and get no traffic from them (but I don't really spend much time creating quality articles, as I use it primarily for links).Hope that helps, at least a little!