I used to love Squidoo since it once offered a dofollow link for URLs embedded within your article. Today, your embedded links are no longer dofollow. You can still get a dofollow, if your article falls under the "featured lens". Do you still use Squidoo for link building? How are you going to assess your effort?
I guess there are different types of peopoe on Squidoo... 1) People who build lenses for fun, vanity, the greater good - not mad. 2) People who use Squidoo's own monetization system - probably not mad. 3) People who create low-quality lenses for backlinks - probably a bit mad. 4) People who put as much effort into their lenses as 1) and 2), and generate a lot of traffic and link juice to their own sites - really mad! Cheers Zander
I've just checked out my lenses using Firefox's nofollow/dofollow check - the links are still showing up blue (ie dofollow). Does the nofollow only apply to new lenses?
Oh no. That is bad news. I won't spend so much of my time working on squidoo as a result I think. Thanks for the heads up.
That is how most of those sites start out. They are promoted as a "dofollow" site, all you have to do is build a page and insert a few links. Then a few months later all of the links switch over to "nofollow" - meaning everyone that built a page just got ripped off. You took all of that time to build a page, write articles, post images or videos, and now you get very little link juice in return. No, and I never have. Mainly because a lot of those sites use a bait and switch tactic. Meaning, you think that you will get a couple of backlinks by building a page. And then the site switches to a "nofollow" tag a few months later. And its not just Squidoo, I have seen several social bookmarking sites that have done the same thing. If you focus on sites like Squidoo or hubpages, be aware that they can switch to the nofollow tag at any time. That means that your pages are going to get you less backlink juice, while the people that own those sites make money off of your work. To me, that is not a fair trade off. The owner of the site continues to make money from ads on your pages, and your backlinks are tagged with "nofollow". Someone is getting the raw end of the deal, and its not the people that built the pages.
I just checked my lenses and all my links are not "nofollow". The featured lenses just means it's not garbage. Generally speaking anything that isn't featured won't have any PR anyways... that's where lenses with no visitors at all go & things with less than 2 modules/WIP. Ranked 230,000 with no visitors in a month is still featured.
What is source for the new can you please disclose. Whatever it may be it will be applied to new lenses i guess.. Some guy is selling reviews at $32 at squiddo on this forum would be hit hard if news is true..
It is just a way to make the spam lenses not pass PR. If you have a legit lens that you work on it will probably become featured and will pass PR. I have never focused on Squidoo just for the reason of they can turn nofollow at anytime but if I ran the website I wouldn't recommend it, I also haven't seen any lenses ranking well lately either which means google has probably devalued the domain.
I'd be interested in knowing what authority you have in saying that lenses are now nofollow - have you read something somewhere (if so what source)? As I and RandomGuy pointed out, our lenses are still dofollow. Mine have never been featured as lens of the day or whatever being featured is. Having said that, if moves are indeed afoot to make lenses nofollow in future, then obviously I would be very interested in knowing this.
I've just visited my Squidoo lenses and the links are still DOFOLLOW - checked with firefox plugin, and even looked at the page source. The lenses are certainly not featured lenses, so I would like to know how they are applying this nofollow strategy to lenses - is it possibly for new lenses? Where did you come about this information? Is this on your own lens?
This is not good for me since I just started with squidoo lens and I would really like to get a huge backlink from my lenses. Thanks for the info but I hope you wrong... wishful thinking i guess.
Sadly I saw this coming. I predict this trend to continue on popular "dofollow link building" websites.