As you know I very much like Squidoo.com pages. They’re excellent for link aggregating. They’re a great way to combine links to your articles on other websites and create a new “unique” page without lots of extra work and have another site in cyberspace point back to you.
But as I warned earlier, the spammers have tried to do their best to ruin Squidoo as well. Squidoo as I reported is taking important steps to stop the spam, but not before Google, it seems is now penalizing Squidoo pages in their search results because of the spam. It’s called the “Squidoo Slap”.
Squidoo still can be useful for sending you traffic. If you’re producing niche content, you can still get search engine traffic and visitors already at Squidoo may browse your site as well. So don’t rule out Squidoo or any other 3rd party “authority” site for getting links and traffic back to your main site.
I have to agree with Steve Weber though:
I’m not an expert on search engine optimization, but I think all this just reinforces one basic idea that authors should remember about online marketing: If you’re going to invest a lot of time creating content on the Internet, keep your best stuff on your own domain. It’s fine to have a presence on these social-networking sites, but keep your crown jewels at home.
DarrinW on July 17th, 2007 at 9:59 pm
I never considered Squidoo to be the place for putting up the best posts I have. The recent penalty by Google showed up what I long thought would come, seeing as how Squidoo allowed anyone to write anything with all their affiliate links inside…etc. I have always wondered how they manage to stay on top of things for so long.
Howie on July 18th, 2007 at 8:02 pm
I had the opportunity to interview Seth Godin on the “Squidoo Slap”
Here is the full 5 page interview:
http://www.searchingdot.com/2007/07/17/interview-with-seth-godin-on-the-squidoo-slap/