MasterLink Internet Marketing

There have been many reports earlier this month on Squidoo, a co-op site that allows anyone to create web pages on just about anything they want for free. Squidoo has been used (or abused?) by SEO's, internet marketers, and spammers for the last year to gain links and search engine visibility. Squidoo pages, or lenses as they call them, ranked surprisingly well for relatively competitive terms rather easily and quickly. The traffic to lenses which ranked well could then be directed to any other site via links.

That all changed when Google seemingly penalized the site. Squidoo lenses disappeared from the search engine results across the board. Duncan Riley of TechCrunch wrote about Google Acting Against Squidoo Due To Spam:

"The reports indicate that some Squidoo pages have seen a 75% drop in traffic, and in other cases have either been removed from high ranking positions on Google, or removed all together."

Now I have a few Squidoo lenses out there with links pointing to my clients sites. These were ranking well in the search engines, but we didn't really feel the hit of the so-called "Squid Slap". Fortunately, we Never Put All our Social Marketing Eggs in One Basket as social marketing blogger Michelle MacPhearson suggests.

Well apparently Squidoo is back. Seth Godin, founder of Squidoo, wrote on the Squidoo blog:

"Those of you who track Squidoo pretty closely know that we had a lousy week. 30 spammers took advantage of us and blew Squidoo’s name all over the web.

The good news is that as of Thursday, July 12th, all of those holes are closed. We erred on the side of goodwill, and we’re going to be a lot more careful in the future."

Today we noticed Squidoo lenses back in Google's search results, even at #1 & #2: