I know I’m a little bit slow on this, but I’m finally catching up on my news reading, and came across this post on TechCrunch, about Google penalizing Squidoo lenses in search rankings because of apparent spam on Squidoo. And it looks as though my Fab judgment on Squidoo for marketing may end up becoming our first ever reversal here on FadMarketing. But let’s chat about why this shouldn’t be a surprise:
1. Internet marketers are a bunch of self-absorbed, self-serving dimwits (yeah, I know I’m generalizing), who can’t help but manipulate any new, potentially quality tool into oblivion. So pat yourselves on the back guys. And another one bites the dust (maybe)…. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could just learn to play nice? Black hat marketers can all go to Hell….
2. On the other side of the equation, Squidoo was really asking for it. But then again, that’s what happens when you’re a Google slave! I wouldn’t believe for a minute that they don’t rely rather extensively on Google for traffic, and therefore revenue, given the nature of their basic business model. Hopefully they’ve been working on their end enough to bring decent type-in and other referral traffic, so that they’ll be able to weather the storm until the Google Gods quit throwing yet another shit fit because not everyone’s willing to bend to their whims. But really, only time will tell. Oh well….
You can get good results from a lens, better than the article marketing sites anyway, but it’s not exactly magic. I’ve seen mainly obscure or long tail keywords gotten this way, but nobody will link to a Squidoo lens that crap so you’ll usually be in PR0 oblivion unless it was an easy phrase to get ranking for anyway.
Squidoo has never taken any measurable steps to prevent spam or encourage quality. There’s just no rewards for it, and that’s got marketers using it like a tool, similar to Twitter. To be honest, you could setup a WordPress domain and probably get more traffic to an entry there than a squidoo lens when it’s all said and done (if you use the right plugins). I personally don’t like to spend any substantial amount of time posting to a site some other company owns.