Squidoo has now instituted aggressive filters to catch spam, thin, and duplicate content, a move that was initially cheered by many lensmasters tired of seeing garbage outranking good content on Squidoo. In fact, my dire predictions didn’t come true until late November 2012 until then Panda was just dinging Squidoo with small paper cuts. Thin/Duplicate/low-value affiliate content: I raised concerns about this on the now-deleted official Squidoo forums in early 2011, a few weeks before Panda first launched, and I’m still sore about the “you’re being chicken little” response I got at the time. Let’s take a closer look at each of these problems and how it’s playing out on Squidoo: Most of these are content-related problems which are the responsibility of Squidoo members. Link schemes like traffic exchanges and paid links (was already in Google algorithm before Panda and Penguin, but Penguin has emphasized it more).Squidoo has taken mild hits from this one.) Overly aggressive advertising (especially “above the fold”) (Page Layout algorithm, starting Jan 2012.keyword stuffing (Part of Penguin “webspam” algorithm).Squidoo has actually been treated kindly Penguin, for reasons I’ll explain below.) Mass backlinking to boost a site (Part of Penguin “webspam” algorithm, starting at the beginning of 2012.Google’s quality rater guidelines show that it has evaluated affiliate-link pages critically long before Panda, but I think Panda has raised the bar. Affiliate links that sell without giving users something that helps them.
#Google killed squidoo update#
Squidoo took modest hits from Panda, offset by other Panda update boosts, until Panda 22 update in November 2012 killed 60% of Squidoo visibility.) Spam, thin, and duplicate content that’s not useful to visitors (Panda algorithm, starting in Jan 2011.So, we all knew that Squidoo had to do some major damage control to rescue itself, since Google’s downranked it for… well, we’re all making educated guesses, but Google’s webmaster guidelines provide us with a list of likely culprits (links are to the specific part of Google guidelines detailing each big no-no): We learned a ton! And had a lot of fun in the process.Recent major Google algorithm updates that have helped or harmed Squidoo, according to ’s “Google Updates” tracking tool. Also European early investors were not eager at that time to invest in online ad driven business models. It proved to be quite hard to have really relevant ads showing next to our content and we could not find enough users to write large quantities of useful content. We hired a developer (who later went to work for Google in Mountain View after an offer he couldn’t refuse) to write algorithms to show related lists.Īfter more than a year we decided to kill the project. We were accepted to the incubator YES!DELFT to help us find possible early investors and share experiences with other startups. We did cognitive walkthroughs and held user interviews (using think aloud protocol) and tested our prototypes by using online tools like We discovered that people prefer visual lists that they can browse through quickly and when we received positive feedback we both pitched in money and time and hired a company to develop the platform. We developed personas, user stories, wireframes and simple prototypes and tested those with people that we thought would be interested in this kind of platform.
We developed a revenue sharing program called ShareZis to give creators of content incentives to make more lists and better content. The business idea was to serve relevant ads next to the content by using Google AdSense and to show related lists so that people would keep on browsing and co-creating more and more content. Subjects like home and work, finance, health and cars were our main categories. We focussed on content that was useful instead of trendy and that was evergreen. Patforms like Pinterest and Squidoo by Seth Godin were upcoming. We wanted to make a place where people could co-create content in the form of lists. We had the idea to create a content marketing platform for useful and rich information at a time that content marketing was not yet a widespread concept. I co-founded an internet startup called CheckZis.
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