I made a squidoo lens about 2 weeks ago with a bunch of links to a website I have. The website is tottally free of any and all blackhat stuff and was getting about 60 hits/day from organic results from google. I also tracked the terms that were popular using hittail and would track their rank in google using ranktracker. 2 days after I made the squidoo lens, my site went to almost null in organic results (maybe 1 hit a day) and I dropped from 3,4, or 5th position for some prominent keywords in my niche to out of the first 100 results. That happened with 99.9% of my ranking keywords. So, knowing that nothing else was done to make google get pissed, I am almost certain that making a squidoo lens with TOO many links to one site can get you seriously Google Smacked. Since then, I've killed the lens and still haven't gotten anything back from Google. I'll keep everyone updated, but please inform us if you've had any similar problems.
If links from squidoo as described genuinely does have such an effect, people will use it to bring down their competitors. What's your site? I feel its unlikely this was the cause.
it could be coincidence. not long ago i was planning to put some paid links to one of my sites but i got delayed on it by a week. the day i was finally going to buy the links my site dropped out from good positions to crap. had i done the paid links when i was supposed to i might have blamed losing my positions on that.
Yeah, I know what you guys are saying, and maybe it is something else. I would say test it with a site and see what you come up with. And I think that you could likely do this to a competitor too, like you mentioned, norfstar, but tracking their traffic decline would be less accurate.
Hm, now that's odd indeed. Squidoo has only helped me so far, since my lenses rank on in the top 10 of Google for keywords that my main site will probably never rank for. Then again I only have a few links to my site on my lenses...I'll be sure to be conservative about that
Hello rawwebdesign not to put too finer point on it Squidoo hate marketing blogs they have changed their TOS and many of us have had our sites blocked and deleted read my other answer to the post "Rank fast In squidoo" for the specifics. Good luck!