I had a nice successful lens on squidoo (Doll of Fate) which was doing an extra $15ish a week for me through affiliate sales. Problem? It made the Squidoo top 100 list for video games ranking #50ish. That list gets promoted on all the videogame pages there. Dropped from #1 to #15 on google for most of the terms at the same time (90% dip in search traffic) and wondering if that could be why. Don't really care all that much to do anything major about it, but the extra money would be nice to keep
I'd be very surprised if you lost your rankings due to an extra link from squidoo.com More likely your lenses was penalized for some other reason. You do have a lot of affiliate links on one page. I believe there may be a penalty for too many affiliate redirects on a page. Have you changed anything at all on that lens recently? Perhaps you added an extra amazon ad box? With some of my previous squidoo lenses I did notice some traffic and rankings at the beginning, but that disappeared over time. Perhaps squidoo lenses rank best when they are fairly new. How old is your lens? Another possibility is that the extra squidoo.com link oversaturated your link profile for a certain link anchor text. You can get penalized if you don't vary your link anchor text enough.
$15 a week is not bad. But the problem here is, your site rankings is going down because of that link. Anyway, maybe you need to do something in order for your lens to get back on top. Just continue building links.
Try to build more backlinks to that lens, and maybe start using various keywords in your targeted anchor text... It might the reason behind such a drop
I think the link from squidoo can't be the problem, think about anything else that could have changed? As the other allready said keep on going with link building and it should work out fine.
I'll try putting a few links to it with other terms - could be right about the oversaturation Quick check showed some of my other lenses outperforming it on "eternal eden hints" that aren't even about the game. Don't think I changed it recently, but I just took off a non-performing amazon module. Thanks for the tip vansterdam. I'll see if that makes a difference too Bit over a month. I've seen the same thing you've mentioned posted on Squid U a few times too... hmm.
Parallel question, if you dont mind. I am a squidoo donkey, so here it is: what is the advantage of doing a squidoo lens versus just putting a page on your site? Do you get high pr juice from squidoo itself which help serps? Do you need to create outside links to your lens?
For Squidoo to promote your lens internally (give PR) you generally need to rank high (low). Top 100 in category (the link I had made this post about) is enough to push your lens into PR 3 by itself, and top 100 total will boost you to PR 4 as of last update. Everything else isn't really noticable. You'll definitely need to create outside links, though I have some on another account that do alright through related links/groups on other lenses. I'd say you're always best making your own pages, but it's a great place to test things out and create some relevant links from if they end up being worthwhile
It could also happen if someone build a squidoo lens with similar content to yours, and Google read it as duplicate contents.