Now I very much respect Seth Godin - so don’t get me wrong. The man is marketing genius and literally farts idea.
But, in my opinion Squidoo sucks & half the traffic on it is marketers who hear Seth speak or read his blog.
I have made multiple lenses for products / sites / clients and I have at most seen 2-3 clicks off the pages. I SEO the pages, add alot of images & even do my best to keep the content fresh. Still nothing. When was the last time you googled a product and saw a Squidoo page come up in the first page of the SERPs?
Enter Knol. Which originally I had thought was going to be more of a jab at Wikipedia - which it still is, but it looks as if its also going to give Squidoo a run for its money. Now knol is still locked up at the google fortress of solitude so only the google engineers currently have the low down on exactly what its going to be like. But they are starting to drop some screen shots & they did make a blog post about it.
In the blog post they made a few statements that I found pretty interesting. Being an expert on translating nice clean P.R. posts into what they really are, ruthless business tactics, I took the liberty to do this and share with you. So please enjoy…
Google Blog Said…
“Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results.”
Translated to…
“WTF is up with wikipedia ranking all over the place, we want some of this action - so get ready when we drop this bitch as a page rank 9”
Google Blog Said…
“We do not want to build a walled garden of content; we want to disseminate it as widely as possible. Google will not ask for any exclusivity on any of this content and will make that content available to any other search engine.”
Translated…
“Spider this shit up yahoo, damn you gonna be HEATED when our site controls all your SERPS! WE ARE GOOGLE, WE OWN EVERYTHING - ROLL OVER AND DIE”
Google Blog Said…
“At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.”
Translated…
“Seth Godin had a great idea AND WE TOOK THAT SHIT! So please put our ads up on knol and we will say that we are giving you 60-80% but in reality its only gonna be 5-10%!”
Google Blog Said…
“A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read.”
Translated…
“Thats right, universal search up in the BEOTCH - Soon there will be at least 5 google products before organic results even appear! So all you SEO’s better get ready to ROCK some Knols!”
Google Blog Said…
“The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted.”
Translated…
“We are all about authors of content & keeping their names highlighted or credited - as long as our logo is at the top of the page and google is somewhere in the domain name!”
There you have it. Some select translations - I could do the entire blog entry but it would just end up being a bunch of caps, curse words and yahoo put downs.
If anyone has had large success or any success with Squidoo please by all means comment and let me know!
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Great post, first of all. Squidoo has indeed become a haven for spammers, but I have a number of lenses that rank well for competitive terms. It’s not favored by Google to the extent it was a year or so ago - but it isn’t a complete waste of time, either. I still use it as part of a comprehensive SEO strategy. One small piece of the puzzle. Email me anyone who wants some specific examples.
I agree, its been said that meta keywords are dead - I still use them as does everyone else. I also don’t think its a waste of time, but it also doesn’t live up to the hype that Seth gives it.
I’ve seen a Squidoo several times for different SEO related searches. With their Link Domain count if you do some link building essentially you can rank on Squidoo for most low to mid competition keyphrases. Although personally I wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot pole
Cheers.
The income that Squidoo deposits in to my Paypal account every month pays for my new 2008 car’s lease and insurance. Is that success?
depends what kind of car you drive
My Squidoo lenses don’t earn much, but they do very well in Google - I’ve been #2 for a top keyword phrase for several months now.
Now had your actual LENSE been #2 or has your site?
Other than links, squidoo will convert at about 3 percent. Other than that, don’t use it to sell jeans or purses.