*******s. That's ok. I had moved away from Squidoo for Web 2.0s awhile ago. It's a time trap.

I knew it was coming. They've been making a ton of changes lately. Like when they stopped allowing people to transfer/gift/sell lenses. I never spammed it but I wasn't in it for the sales modules either. A ton of good content with light backlinks no crime there. Oh well, good thing they aren't the only game in town

For some reason this does not surprise me. Still a major fan of Guestblogging haha

Guestblogging can be just as spammy as a crappily executed Web 2.0

That's too bad. Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't it the case that some of the links in squidoo were automatically made nofollow already. So now they are going full nofollow.

Of course, but to be fair it's all in the technique no? If in 3 months Google decides to arbitrarily de-index fishy guest blogging links I won't be on that thread telling you "Jeez you should have gone with Web 2.0" The Germans call that Schadenfreude and it gets no thanks

Not a big surprise. Made me money, served it's purpose, one tool in an arsenal that now is less effective, oh well right?

What are YOU building Mr. Dennis, because I kind of like that style

I'm not surprised by this development - I track the search rankings of just over 50 lenses that compete with some of my content, and most of them took a hit in the last Panda update.

Although this is a small sample size - the ranking drops were significant, leading me to believe that Squidoo got hit hard by Google.

Those people who were thoughtlessly abusing Squidoo have messed it up for those who were thoughtfully abusing it.

Hahahaha Mike has Google alerts on his name. All you have to do to invoke him is say his name on WF 3 times and light a dollar bill on fire then BAM!

I like it when you talk in the third person, maybe cuz I'm Catholic.

@Mike The Mad Scientist Bartender: Stop fronting and hook me up with some of those jello shots cuz my weekend starts early this week and I'm buying. I promise to keep my top on lmaooooooooooooo I might just give myself an infraction for that

Edit: Y'all stop editing your posts makes me dizzy hahaha cheaters

Ok BS aside I've done some guest blogging and I've accepted guest posts but it's always been something that's come naturally from an existing relationship with a webmaster in my niche that I respect. I've never hunted for guest blogging opportunities and the vast majority of guest post pitches I get from strangers are pathetic link-begging crap. They get sent to the spam folder to rot.

Backlink in squidoo become useless now as backlinks are nofollow !!

Is worth to join squidoo now or hubpages?

Hubpages is good, my four pages out of 9 are ranking on first page of Google!

bad news for me...

Personally I welcome this decision. :-)

Squidoo is now no follow for all of their links as of today so it's useless for backlinks anymore. As far as bannning lenses, they are banning them left and right. Google killed their traffic so they are in a total panic mode now and a lot of people are leaving and getting their accounts deleted as well.

Self hosted blogs are the best way to go.

I only used Squidoo as a buffer to any money sites, but it looks like I'll not bother anymore. Personally I think the site's rubbish. Below is quick screenshot of the sites Alexa ranking from the last six months. The traffic the site receives is dying which is why they are trying to rescue it with all of the recent changes. Something is clearly wrong there.

the curve is impressive I doubt squidoo will dofollow again.

I still see many lenses ranking on page 1 so I am a bit surprised to see the Alexa graph. It looks like they've been hurting for a while now and I guess that's why they felt they needed to take some drastic steps to keep the ship from sinking.

It's still good for the traffic and still a lot of people will have the benefit from Squidoo.

But nofollow is a big impact, as marketers like us won't use squidoo to build backlinks again. And squidoo will lose marketers like us.

It goes to show that you can never rely on one traffic/link building/product/monetization/blog/website. You have to diversify as much as you can without diluting your efforts.

That being said, this is a shitty move by Squidoo.

I mean, their really biting the hand that feeds them...

People worked their tails off posting content and building links to their lenses.

And they're going to burn them all of a sudden?

Bad news here, i was using it and some of the lenses makes 3-4 pr, so all this work will no go out?

well it was a good ride while it lasted. make couple grand with nothing but squidoo len's over the years.

Self hosted sites is the best thing there is, I have 300+ self hosted sites and only 2 are deindexed. This is a 1000 times better then depending on a platform that can change to nofollow every day. Good bye link juice.

Besides that Squidoo and other successful web2.0 platforms are more and more into removing spam or low quality blogs and turning it into nofollow so self hosted is the future and web2.0's or public sites in general (where everyone can place a link) are close to die.

Well it was only a matter of time, especially given all of the recent changes. I wonder what was the straw that broke the camels back...

is this all lenses or only new ones created after a set date.

It's time to rename "Squidoo" to "Squidon't"...

I haven't used Squidoo in at least 2 years. Even with a followed backlink, who cares? Google has probably determine long ago that it's a source of spam, hence the automatic devaluing of links - even keeping this in mind, nofollow links will make your profile appear more 'natural' anyway.

Time to throw Squidoo in the bushes. You can get nofollow links everywhere.

I was already considering reducing my squidoo efforts.

Their no-follow markup has made the decision easy for me.

Goodbye squidoo!

It is true. I have created a few squidoo featured lenses a few days ago with backlinks to one of my client's site. Did not noticed the links are nofollow because I have switched off my searchstatus add on. Not a big problem. Still squidoo holds a big number of traffic to pass in a website. Never forget about other search engines.

Don't come crying to the forums as soon as you hear this kind of news and post absolute rubbish.

squidoo is very easy to make a ton of money on and this has just made it about 100 times easier for people like me to make even more money with.

:rolleyes:

That is sad... Well, good thing there are other sites out there. Squidoo is not the only tool that you should rely on anyway.

:rolleyes::rolleyeson't come crying to the forums as soon as you hear this kind of news and post absolute rubbish.

squidoo is very easy to make a ton of money on and this has just made it about 100 times easier for people like me to make even more money with.

I wonder if it will continue to be as popular? Certainly less desirable now that these changes have occurred, since it used to be a very solid performer. Be interesting to see if it makes a difference to anything at all.

They're all doing it, being good so Google doesn't slap them around... Found loads of Web 2.0 sites that this has happened to.

I have to admit, I don't much bothered with this sort of stuff any more, since it's pretty pointless now anyway. You can't artificially inflate your rankings easily without social proof anyway.

I would be interested as to what effect it would have overall on a diversified set of links anyway.

Squidoo is an AdSense/Amazon Affiliate farm. Nothing more, nothing less. It really wasn't that difficult to see this coming.

Changing outbound links to nofollow is a desperation attempt to try to get some "Google love". Good luck with that.

If you're going to use Web 2.0's for SEO, stay away from the obvious content farms. They're going to be hit by the Big G sooner or later. Even then, you're still at their mercy if they decide to change to nofollow.

Squidoo have taken a very good step. It will increase the quality of their contents and decrease spam. They have still kept the scope to get dofollow backlinks from them only when they will found you as a useful contributor.
They want to tell you, "Don't become backlink savvy".

Squidoo was a great ride whilst it lasted.

Well, that's the biggest reason you should never have run a business that's more than 25% dependent on any other business!

I was never really a fan of Squidoo. Too much work on a lens, more than any other article writing website. They ask for more of their writers than anything else (unless you try to sneak a backlink article).

There are other websites that rival Squidoo, but are smaller. I remember a lot of them flocking to Zujava. I remember once someone saying they made more money on Zujava then on Squidoo. Thing is, I don't even see Zujava articles on google, but Squidoo lenses show up even on the first page sometimes. I think their ad pool or something is better, I'm not sure.

Squidoo was the first platform of making money online I discovered. While Squidoo brings immediate traffic, in the long run these people who make extremely unique content, especially "How to's", can profit from making their own website.

Their community is a bit uptight, they are really trying to weed out people who want to solely make money on Squidoo, even taking out their transfer lens feature (I don't know if it's back). What do you expect though when you give people the option to monetize their articles lol.

Was good for backlinking while it lasted.

Yeah so, I understand the changes big G is making and all these big G buttkissing websites to eliminate spam and increase quality. It makes sense, and to be honest I agree with it. However, can someone throw us a bone? I mean, squidoo can maybe up their standards for posts and make it more challenging; I'm fine with that. I'll put in the extra time to make a quality lens if I have to...but it's really getting to the point that the outbound linking game is becoming a big shot in the dark.

Guest blogging: more like "guest flogging". I create content for other SEOs sites and they take the liberty of placing their own links at the top of the article, letting my little author bio link to sink to the bottom of the abyss. Too much time and effort for the possibility of some reward---but probably not.

So far what I am seeing is: social, Social, SOCIAL! Creating content that people like and share is becoming a powerful and effective tool for marketing. But...how do I make an electrician company interesting enough to share. Ah yes, another impossible feat.

Anyway, my strategy will remain the same for now: do a little bit of everything. At least if 1 thing gets knocked (*cough* squidoo), I won't...get...eliminated...as they say on MXC

Google says give nofollow, if you do not know the other site. There are millions links, if not billions links on Squidoo and it can not possibly know about all these links. We would say it was a right approach.

Squidoo is going to dead like hubpages when they required phone verification and one more i forget which is now asking for the invitation code or pay for the registration fees.

I feel that many lensbuilders aren't going to like this change.

I create lens on a daily basis for SEO and this is very discouraging. Oh well, just more reason to switch to hubpages.

I guess this doesn't bother me too much. I have yet to read anywhere on the internet that NOFOLLOW = SUCK

People always say "google likes___" and fill in whatever they read that week, but nobody ever seems to say "Google is probably aware that 100% DOFOLLOW links look unnatural".


You never see that. Squidoo is hardly worthless in my eyes with this.


Still going to use Squidoo, still going to get results with it...

Congratulations to Paul for being the first one to break this story. SEO bloggers caught up only 5 days ago. Look guys Barry Schwartz quoted my comment and didn't credit me lmao:

Squidoo NoFollows All Outbound Links

Thanks Barry, and here I am linking to your post It's totally cool, he's Barry Schwartz people, BARRY SCHWARTZ.

This is Big loss of rankings, bad news for webmaster who are using Squidoo for backlinks!,
Squidoo is one of the most popular avenues for traffic generation and Squidoo, is one of the BEST places to get backlinks!

FakeItTilYouMakeIt would love to answer you unfortunately she got herself a 3 day auto-ban for making a joke in binary code (no, really.) Must have set off the WF spam filters. All hater-mail can be forwarded to youjustjelly@hater-nation.com

Well, that scratches them off my list of sites to use...

Squidoo is dumb. Always dancing around to please Google. Websites are for people, not search bots.

All those article directories that got hit by Panda never recovered because they suck anyway. Same with Squidoo. It's one big affiliate marketing scheme and I'm glad people finally found out what they think about you - absolutely nothing.

If you write good content and have a list, you don't even need Google. Why waste time building someone's elses website when you can create and share good videos along with text content to build a loyal following. Forget Squidoo. Record, publish and profit.

From what I see you folks are looking at a lot of pages being removed from Squidoo like it's a bad thing.

Did you ever consider that for every single Squidoo page that's been removed from the SERPs, it's most likely an easy keyword/phrase to rank for ()?

Stop belly aching, fire up Wayback & track down the deleted pages/keywords because 9 other domains/pages just moved up 1 position on the SERPs.

My understanding was that Google still counts nofollow links it just doesnt follow them. I thought nofollow was simply a way for Google to understand that this link is not intended to raise the linked sites ranking.

nofollow - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

rel="nofollow" - Webmaster Tools Help

However in an indirect way nofollow links will still assist SEO in my view. Say you have a large number of people click on your website via a no follow link. Firstly your page views and uniques go up, theh you may have some of those people link you your page via their dofollow sites and pages.

Its the same as the whole "Does using Adwords benefit organic SEO?" question. Ive always been of the opinion that it does, indirectly.

At the end of the day the nofollow links and or ads do not pass pagerank but you can still benefit from them indirectly and or directly via the traffic. Its the same as a paid ad really.

Don't worry guys, there are still plenty of ways to get quality backlinks without using Squidoo.

Although we all know that it is a well known site and an awesome way to create backlinks, we have all benefited from it. But since it is meaningless to use it at the moment, time to find somewhere else! 

Hello,

It was expected I suppose.

Lesson: Never build your links around one platform. Link diversity rocks.

Thanks.

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