Google Slaps Squidoo

Google, the God of Internet Marketing, has chosen a new recipient for it’s infamous “Google Slap”. Quite honestly, it’s not totally unexpected either. The brainchild of Seth Godin, Squidoo has from the very beginning been about making money online. Of course it supports a lot of charities but the bottom line is, most people using Squidoo are doing so to make a profit.

The advantage: Squidoo pages normally get very high rankings in search engines (especially Google) with almost no effort or work.

In fact you can even get full courses on marketing with Squidoo, with most of the tactics revolving around selecting a long tail keyword, optimizing the keyword on your Squidoo “Lens”, and putting in your affiliate links. To maximize your profits, you then build more lenses on different keywords.

It’s only natural that a system like this attracts the wrong kind of attention. Although the moderators in Squidoo manually approve your lenses (or so they say), it’s only a matter of time before some spammer exploit the system. And apparently that’s what happened, as revealed in Seth Godin’s email:

Last week, a few dozen spammers exploited Squidoo and drove the rest of the Web crazy. They spammed tens of thousands of blogs and built thousands of worthless lenses, violating our Terms of Service with reckless abandon. One spammer in La Paz, Bolivia built more than 400 lenses in one day on exactly the same topic. Sheesh.

Since then, search traffic to Squidoo was also impacted, as was our ability to post on blog comments or some social networking sites.

Here’s the great news: thanks to terrific work by Gil, Corey and Megan, we’ve eliminated the tools that bad actors used to damage the rest of us. We’ve also added a squadron of people who hand review lenses, and we’ve made it easier for you (and anyone else) to report spam.

I’m confident that as the web sees that the problem is solved, we’ll be back on track, and searchers online will continue to discover your good lenses.

In the meantime, the very best thing we can do is what we’ve always done: build great lenses (by hand) and promote them (by hand) to people who want to hear about them.

Ok Seth, if you say so.

The popular opinion in the Internet marketing circle is that it’s game over for Squidoo. I however feel more optimistic about the situation. It’s not over – it just got a lot harder. You’ll still hear stories of people making tons of cash from those single-page Squidoo lenses, but I suspect you won’t be hearing too much of them. If you believe in going against the herd, then now would be a good time to get into Squidoo marketing.

Because the herd, I suspect, will be leaving soon.

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