It's been in the making for a long time but Squidoo finally got the "Google Slap" for the plethora of black hat search spammers that have infested the social network.  When Squidoo was founded back in 2005 it was centrally focused on allowing people a common repository to share and exchange knowledge. 

Now in 2007 Squidoo has become a search spammers playground due to the favorable organic search engine positioning Black Hat marketers can obtain from manipulating the service.  According to a recent article in ClickZNews:

SEO and SEM spammers have exploited the service by funneling user links through those lenses, automating comments on lenses or redirecting viewers using iFrame technology.

And Google has now responded.  Seth Godin recently acknowledged that Google has dropped Squidoo approximately 30 percent in its rankings.  Ouch brotha….

Godin goes on to state:

There's no question that with Google's last shift in their algorithms and ranks we lost traffic," said Godin. "[But] it's very easy to get superstitious about why organizations do one thing or another. Our expectation is that as our lenses get better, and our site gets traffic, our Google rankings will get back to where they were. It's overly optimistic to think it's going to happen in a week though.

Squidoo probably should have anticipated this with all the lessons learned from MySpace.  MySpace has been a priority target for many professional spammers and has implemented an arsenal of combative tools to clean up their social network. 

One such tool MySpace recently deployed to combat spammers is called the msplinks program.  When you input a link in MySpace it will be converted to a redirect link which looks similar to: msplinks.com/adf9sd9f.  The link will still point to the original url, but it will let MySpace monitor all the links and easily turn off links to spam, phishing, or virus sites.  This is a pretty progressive move for MySpace and has significantly cut down on comment spammers.  

IMO Squidoo is still an excellent social marketing resource for online marketers to build product awareness and branding…and should be used accordingly.  With the new spam countermeasures Squidoo is sure to implement I'm sure it's only a matter of time before they regain some of their lost ground.

*If you're looking for a new up-and-coming social networking site for the marketing community I highly recommend taking a look at Brad Fallons http://www.FreeIQ.com.  I've noticed Google has been looking very favorabley on FreeIQ in regards to organic search…..just don't tell those sheisty search spammers!

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