Squidoo Traffic Down

Lately on Squidu I have seen many threads started on the topic of Squidoo's traffic being down. It seems that many lensmasters have had traffic going up and down, mostly down, from summer 07.

In the summer of 2007 it seems that Squidoo stopped being a favorite of Google. Before then, we received what seems now like tons of traffic from Google. From there, Yahoo stepped up to the plate to pick up some of the lost traffic.

As of a few months ago, Yahoo changed their search algorithm. When this happens, some of my lenses that had the 1-3 spots on Yahoo for their keywords were dropped like a bad habit.

The staff at Squidoo has spoken with Yahoo who assures us that they have corrected the problem and that traffic should return to normal. Unfortunately, it has not.

One thing that I do love about Squidoo is that they are proactive. Recently they made some changes that I believe are going to have a real impact on the long term traffic from search engines that Squidoo receives.

These changes include the dropping of porn from Squidoo, along with the banning of several spammy topics and better control of spam lenses.

It is my feelings that these new changes are really going to pay off for Squidoo in the long term. It will increase the credibility of lenses and gain back the favor of the big search engines.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the topic. Feel free to leave a comment below.

What Would Google Do?

The current book that I am reading is What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis.

This is a book that I think Seth Godin would love along with all of my fellow lensmasters. It analyzes how we are now in the Google era and how media is changing. Jarvis says, "Yahoo! is the last old media company. Google is the first post-media company." Note that he calls it post-media and not new-media.

The book gives insight on how and why Google is the fastest growing company in history. At the same time he shares how you can apply the principles that Google uses to help in your life and your business.

To learn more about this great book check out my lens on What Would Google Do?

Plexo Bots

If your lenses are like mine, they have been flooded with spam on the link plexos lately. It has wasted hours of my time going through and deleting the garbage posted on many of my lenses.

Squidoo wants us to report the plexo spam. It took me a while to finally do this because I didn't believe that reporting it would help because they should have already known about the problem. Hopefully my reporting the spam will help the Squidoo staff to find the culprits and find a way to block these vermin from littering our lenses with their garbage links.

SquidooKimberly said in the forums on March 2nd that "We've tracked down the problem and are working on a solution for it. Keep in mind for the future that you can set your Plexos up like guestbooks, where comments must first be moderated by you in order to display."

Well, its only one day later but the spam is still there. Hopefully this problem will be resolved soon.

YouTube For Traffic

If you are serious about getting traffic to your lens I highly recommend using YouTube as a weapon in your arsenal.

If you are new to making videos, it is not as intimidating as you may think. I recommend buying a Flip camera if you do not already have one as they are easy to use and make a good quality video that is easy to load onto YouTube.

Once you have your camera, make a demonstration about a product, or a how to video that relates to your lens. Do not simply make a sales pitch. The demo or how to will be much more likely to draw in an interested visitor to your lens.

The traffic will come naturally once you load your video. The keywords you enter for your video will bring in viewers that are interested in the topic of your video and this will bring in highly targeted traffic. Just remember to put a link to your lens in the description of the video and you should soon see the traffic coming in.

Squid Spam

There has been a lot of uproar of late in Squidu over the recent locks on lenses and there has been a lot of talk of what some feel are junk/spam lenses.

Things started slowly and began to snowball into quite a mess that peaked on 2/18/09 in the evening when all of a sudden the Squidu forum was flooded with complaints of locked lenses.

At first was was concerned about a lack of communication and transparency from the small but dedicated Squidoo staff. When panic starts in the flock, rumors, lies and half truths spread like wildfire.

Thankfully early in the morning on 2/19/09 the staff of Squidoo was direct and clearly communicated what was happening and what to expect and what to do. Some of the best statements by the Squidoo higher ups are this one on the spam filter, and one on Squid junk.

The Squid Staff has also been much more active in the forum lately as well. I just want to complement Squidoo for working so hard at doing their best to keep Squidoo the great place that it is. I also want to give thanks to all of the wonderful lensmasters who work so hard to make Squidoo be my favorite social Web site on the net.

What I think we can take from the last few days of mild chaos is that we should focus on the positive. Work on making great lenses that you care about and do it with passion. Don't worry too much over lenses that are made that you do not appreciate, but if you find real spam, report it.

Squidoo is a great place and it is largely up to us as a community to keep it that way.

Username Checker

I was reading the Squidu forum recently and I came across a post from Poddys. He mentioned a site called http://usernamecheck.com.

This site is terribly useful. If you are like me, you have joined dozens of different websites and Web 2.0 communities. You probably also typically use the same username.

This website goes through a large list of sites and finds out if your username is taken or available. This information is useful to me because it lets me know where I am a member, and it also has shown me several website that I have never heard of that I can join to build backlinks from.