Squidoo is now global nofollow

I am sour about it, BUT, it's not the end of the world. I adapt.

Guestblogging, if you want to call it that. What a concept.
Let's see, I can't think of a thing to write, so I need someone
else's content. What kind of a lame blog do I have? I guestblog
somewhere. Gee. Why am I doing that? My blog's not good enough?
I need to fill up someone else's blog? With what? Leftovers? And
they're going to fill my blog with the same? I think not.

Paul

I guess your talking from an SEO point of view?

Guest blog/pages aren't any different than any other web page on the net that gathers targeted niche traffic. If there's targeted niche traffic, I'm interested no matter what the page is called.

I have a direct competitor that's recently asked me to allow their link/s on my sites, I'm still thinking about it but one of the options I'm considering is to allow the competitor to have some unique content (not articles) posted on my domains.

The competitor gets laser targeted niche traffic (from me), I get free unique content that will last the next 20 years... I still haven't made up my mind, charge the competitor for the links, or allow them to have their unique content posted on my sites (I keep the content).

Making friends with competition isn't such a bad thing.

I had one competitor a year or so ago where I was earning $400+ per month in affiliate sales from a single sitewide link on my niche site pointing to a sales page on his site. This only happened because I talked shop for a few emails & eventually asked him If he had an affiliate program, he asked what percentage I wanted, I aimed high (first offer) & said 25%, he said ok, didn't even try to haggle on the affiliate commission per sale.

I have some different plans now, where I'm thinking about bringing in my two best quality content competition & let them each have their own Category on my site/blog, then allow maybe 10-15 blog post on the Index page of the blog/site, this way they each keep posting new unique content battling for most post on the my sites Index page. I'll feed niche traffic into this blog/site from my own established authority sites that already get consistent traffic & all have an email list.

I'm still thinking on this one, but so far I don't see how it couldn't be a win, win for everyone involved.

Never said I was a good Catholic, what the Pope don't know won't make him quit his job. LMAO @ anyone deciding "I'm so over being the earth's direct line to God, I want to play golf damnit"

We need not feel guilty. CTR very well could have brought it down all by herself. She is more than capable. MikeF will back me up on that

(lets see if he has google alerts too)

Now I'm confused. I thought the Easter Bunny didn't not exist...

About squidoo: I think that they will never recover from this fall no matter if they choose do follow or no follow. They had become too powerful for their own good. (yes, it's a conspiracy theory, I love those!)

That's a good point. I honestly never did much with Squidoo because I found the content on most lenses was a notch above Ezine Articles (in other words, awful).

This probably had something do to with the move:

The last couple Panda refreshes must have taken their toll.

I always find it funny when people say "The Devil Made Me Do It" when so many forums like this one were largely responsible for the feeding frenzy regarding the plastering of Amazon affiliate links on their lenses. I'm not saying that to be accusatory, just pointing out a statement of fact. Regardless of Squidoo's actions, there were always people pushing it as the ultimate affiliate marketing/ SEO tool/ get rich quick scheme to be milked to death, independent of anything that Squidoo might've done. Maybe through some actions, Squidoo inadvertently played into the feeding frenzy mentality. But never at any point in time did it ever advertise itself as being this huge "thing" that people could literally abuse to the point of becoming spent

And it sure as hell never, ever, ever advocated the type of spamming that became rampant there, of lens being built up entirely of Amazon modules, with zero content, not even so much as a product description. In fact, over the past year, Squidoo literally had to argue itself hoarse with the scammers, spammers, and leeches claiming that it was "stupid" to add content to sales lenses. One lensmaster even bragged with pride on the forum once about how she basically flipped off an actual Squidoo staff member who asked her to add more content to one of her lenses.

I do, 100%.

Amazon modules were always voluntary. The reason why they were voluntary is that Squidoo believed in good faith that people who were on the site to make money would actually use them (in other words, not be greedy and hoard all the sales for themselves). Remember, when someone makes a sale through the Amazon module, Squidoo takes a cut.

What instead happened is that Get Rich Quick schemers began leeching off of Squidoo. What they would do is use Third Party sites like SquidUtils to imitate the Amazon modules, so that they could get 100% of all sales through their lenses without having to share revenue with Squidoo. Making matters worse is that these are probably guys who were also getting massive payouts from Squidoo anyway from having cheated their way to Top Tier, either by using scripts to mass-update their lenses on a daily basis, using bots, whatever.

Do the math and you can see why this would a problem. Say you have a lensmaster called, say, "bling4life" who has 10 lenses in Tier 1. At the highest payout ($50), Squidoo is paying him $500 a month for the privilege of posting lenses that earned him and him alone an additional $800 a month in Amazon, eBay, etc sales. Meanwhile, Squidoo isn't getting a cut of that money, not even a pittance to help pay for staff or maintenance or anything.

This is why Squidoo added that prompt-- to annoy and discourage the leeches like that who literally come onto the site and expect to hoard every single sale they make through the site, with the expectation of massive Tier 1 payouts on top of that. Unfortunately, since Squidoo can't figure out the difference between a leech who's chosen not to use Amazon modules and a person who isn't using them because her lens isn't conducive to selling (like a lens about a pet that just died), Squidoo has forced this prompt on everyone's lenses.

You may think it's obnoxious, but you know what? It's better than the alternative-- Squidoo saying, "You are no longer allowed to post outside affiliate links; you can only make money through our modules."

Which is, if you think about it, well within its rights to do so. In fact, if the leeching got bad enough, it could conceivably do that in the future.

It doesn't. It only affects people who were relying heavily on Squidoo for link juice.

But don't think this allows for complacency. Squidoo has been doing more active policing of lenses and has been scrubbing the site clean of lenses that really too heavily on affiliates. Make your sales lenses, but make sure that they're up to snuff.

This was done because they were hit by the Big G. Otherwise, they would've done this years ago. It's not like these "leeches" haven't been around that long.

Their traffic keeps falling and they keep dropping in Google. I wouldn't call that working.