Squidoo SEO uses

Well most people in our industry know all about facilities such as Squidoo….

I have a number of Squidoo lenses including one for my French Watermill

Squidoo has been used frequently to aid the passing of trust in link campaigns, in fact it is often possible to get a Squidoo page well ranked in its own right and then pass the benefit of this strength to a secondary website, this can of course be done legitimately as I have a Squidoo lens for my French Watermill renovation and because of the way it is set up I can actually earn a little advertising revenue from the Squidoo page but also get people into my watermill blog.

The problem with Squidoo is that Google gives it a lot of trust but also is very capable of understanding how people can abuse this when creating their online marketing strategy. Squidoo themselves are reasonably good at policing some aspects of course but benefits hugely from being Google friendly.

To see the effects of creating a Squidoo lens for marketing purposes and then overdoing the SEO work we set up three individual lenses and then populated them with content. The lenses linked to corporate websites so they looked really genuine and viable for a test.

Once they had been around for a few weeks with some initial linking we tracked their progress in search using niche search terms that the pages were targeted towards.

Once that was done we then went to town and deployed a reasonable spike in the link campaign, with one Squidoo lens we hit it with 400 independent links in 2 days another with 800 and the third squidoo lens with 1200, now bearing in mind we had a few inbound links to start with and that in some respects these were reasonably low numbers for link spam the results were startling.

The lens with 400 links moved up over 3 weeks, the other two didn’t move at all and then after week 4 they were dropped from Googles index one at a time, there was nothing linking the squidoo lenses together and no common denominators.

The question is whether Squidoo worked with Google or did Google just spot the link spike and knew not to trust those lenses, at the time of writing none of the lenses have returned to Googles database.

What was the point of this test.. well using Squidoo as part of a naturally balanced SEO strategy is a good idea but remember just because Google trusts Squidoo it doesn’t mean you can get away with link spamming as a method of safeguarding a clients URL, clearly if you link spam the Squidoo lens it will get burnt in serps and render it useless in your campaign.

Be patient and work the lens with good content and use the social media options that are offered, get the lens successful in its own right.

No Corporates were hurt during this testing.