Squidoo Beached by Google
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Written By Drupad Sil | July 11, 2007 | Share This
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Google Inc. has taken steps to penalize personalized directory site Squidoo.com for not cracking down on user-generated spam hard enough, according to several reports on the web today.
Squidoo, launched in October 2005, is a site designed for users to create “lenses”, which are single pages that highlight one person’s point of view, recommendations, or expertise. The page manager, or lensmaster, gets 50% of the revenue generated by their lens, though Squidoo estimates that nearly half of their lensmakers donate their royalties to charity. The site had experienced rapid growth of late, expanding more than 40% monthly since the spring of 2007, pushing it into the top 500 websites globally based on traffic.
Unfortunately, as user traffic grew, so did the emergence of Black Hat search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. As more Black Hat SEOs and other spammers began using Squidoo for their own ends, a number of blogs began speculating that Google would eventually pick up on the problem, but they questioned whether Google would really censure such a popular site.
Squidoo eventually responded to its critics, and recently posted a six-part plan to combat spam on its company blog, mainly by creating several layers of spam filtering and allowing spam reporting by users.
However, it seems to be too little too late, as the reports today reveal that some Squidoo lenses have lost 75% of their traffic, while others have been removed from Google altogether. While Squidoo users are of course concerned, many in the online community saw this coming. Indeed, Duncan Riley over at TechCrunch thinks that it’s about time, and introduces a serious consequence:
“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.”
We’ll have to wait and see whether Squidoo’s newly released spam filters are able to bring them back into Google’s good graces. If not, the lensmaker may end up being all washed up.
Topics: Advertising: Online, Google, SEO, Social Media |
Aaagh I forgot to type in the word again and everything disappeared !
Re. Squidoo the situation is interesting but I wonder how many people it actually concerns. I have recently written two posts on my blog about Squidoo to try and elicit some comments - http://www.netmonetization.com/2007/07/seth-godin-sinks-squidoo-spammers.html - and so far have received just 1 comment, although at least it was from Seth Godin himself. Of all the other readers ( yes there are some) no-one seem interested enough to state an opinion.
There have been a lot of comments and questions on what really happened with Google & Squidoo
I interviewed Seth Godin on the “Squidoo Slap”
http://www.searchingdot.com/2007/07/17/interview-with-seth-godin-on-the-squidoo-slap/