Is Squidoo still Viable?

"For marketing purposes"?! No, it certainly isn't, IMO. For all the reasons explained in this thread. I wouldn't even touch it with someone else's 10-foot barge-pole, as the saying goes.

No, stay away from Squidoo. I had over 150 lenses on it and they were making me a decent income. A lot of my lenses have been locked and my income has dropped.

I wouldn't waste my time on it. If you are using it to build backlinks to your site, then you may want to? But don't do it solely to build an income online.

In my opinion it would be a waste of time.

I know some people that are still making money online with it, but with that said, even they don't rely on Squidoo for their main income. It's like an additive -- something they do on the side to create income when they don't want to build a site in a niche that they don't plan to stay.

Not being able to control the content is a major down side to using free sites to make money. If I were you, I would focus my energy on a long-term business model in which I controlled the content, and maybe come back to Squidoo once I had some money from other income sources coming in.

Good luck,
Joey

Absolutely not!

I looked into this personally a few weeks ago. Here is what I discovered:

As an experiment I spent two days and wrote two1,500-word articles, which were totally original, had no affiliate links and scored 100 -- the highest score you can achieve on Squidoo. I sourced all of the images in both articles and even refrained from putting ads in the copy. I only added a couple of approved Amazon.com ads at the very end of these professional, well-written and informative articles. Others have tons of ads dispersed throughout their copy to the point that many Squidoo articles are off-putting info commercials.

So, I submitted the first article and it went through with flying colors, but wasn't indexed by Google for two days. In addition, its ranking was so low on Squidoo, you would have to search for the exact title to find my article.

The next day, I submitted the second article to Squidoo and it was summarily rejected by the site's robot saying only: "Remove spam-like words."

What they were talking about made no sense at all.

I quickly pulled my articles off the site, put them on my own hosted blog and canceled with extreme prejudice my late and-not-so-great Squiddo account.

Beware of Squidoo. Do not waste your time there. They have big, big problems. Believe me, or believe the many members that post here describing their problems with that site.

Hope that helps.

All my lenses are featured and some of them are driving traffic to my websites (they are not about IM), but I’m having many technical problems with Squidoo’s system and nobody ever answers my bug reports, and I even am a Giant Squid!

Squidoo is also stealing, but to whom can I complain if they are not answering my messages? They didn't include my best lens in the payment of April, they paid me less than what I deserved in June since I’m a Giant, and I keep having to find new pictures for my lenses because they keep disappearing… I have many other problems.

While two years ago I was very glad with Squidoo and I even created a lens helping everyone learn how to easily create Squidoo lenses, I'm quite disappointed with the Squidoo system and their ridiculous support team.

I discovered a similar free platform, but didn't have the time to try Zujava leafs, which are like Squidoo lenses and their links are dofollow.

I will create a few Zujava leafs when I will find the time to do so.

These pages send targeted traffic to my websites, but it’s hard to drive traffic to all pages.

You should create a few of them because they do help you get a better ranking and get targeted traffic, but don't exaggerate because you are not the owner of your work, you depend on their system, etc.

I still make a bit every month from squidoo lens rank and affiliate sales, but it's about half of what I had averaged before the big changes. I will only say that this is probably not the most opportune time to get involved with Squidoo, however I think a time will come when the current issues have been forgotten and the site will again rank well in organic searches.

I deleted a few articles earlier this month, but my remaining 77 or so lenses (pages) seem to pass the filters. All but three of them are at 100% It's not that hard to do if you can follow the guidelines. That said I have not written anything new there in months and am looking at other options.

I hate squidoo. I used to use it to build some good links, but they have recently locked 75% of my lenses. Huge waste of time IMO. The thought of using it again makes me cringe lol. Spend time building content for your own site.

I've never thought it was a particularly good idea to build someone ELSE's business for them..

No! It definitely isn't.

Squidoo sucks. You don't know until when you would be able to have your site live. They just shut it off for weird reasons.

Do you like being banned for any form of promotion? If so, then yes Squidoo is still very viable.

I am no expert and I did try to put up a couple of different lenses. Not one of them were accepted. I have not been back since.

Didn't squidoo change the links to non-follow?

Squidoo is almost dead for affiliate marketers now, really sad. It used to be a great income booster

I did very well out of Squidoo in its hay day but now as Alexa says wouldn't touch it with a barge pole.

It's like they've turned the site over to a bunch of six year olds or ex communist dicators for the last few months, with more and more bizarre updates being implemented.

AVOID!!!