What about Squidoo?Category: All news, pubcon, social media, social networks, squidoo | |
24 11 2008 |
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I had the opportunity to attend PubCon in Las Vegas and I am glad I did. I learned some cool things about SEO and various aspects of search marketing. While I was attending several of the sessions, I heard different social networks mentioned as places that were good for marketing on the internet. Some of the ones mentioned most often were Digg, Stumbleupon, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. I was surprised that I never heard any mention of Squidoo. Now, you are probably wondering why that would surprise me, so I am going to tell you about some of the basic features of Squidoo and why I would expect to hear it mentioned as a good social network.
Squidoo.com was created by Seth Godin. It is a social network that allows registered members to create a profile about themselves and also create personalized web pages on the site that can be about any topic they choose. As a registered member, you are given tools to create what is called a lens using various modules on the website. You simply pick your modules, arrange them on your page template, add content, and publish the page. The possibilities on what you can do are almost limitless.
The benefit of putting the work into creating these pages is that Squidoo lenses can be picked up and ranked in the search engines very quickly. If the lens you build is directly related to the topic of your website, you can place links to your site on the lens and then the traffic that the Squidoo lens gets can click through the links and bring targeted traffic to your site. And that’s not all, the links also count towards the link popularity of your site.
When Squidoo was fairly new on the scene, lenses would often rank quickly and rank very well in Google. Now they don’t rank as well. Google caught on to spammers creating link filled pages on Squidoo just to try to inflate their rankings. Now the trend is that a lens will rank for a couple weeks after it is first picked up by Google. Then it will drop from the rankings. If you promote the lens and get links to it then eventually your lens will come back in to the top rankings in Google. The important part of lens creation is making sure you fill it full of good quality content that is unique and not just scraped of some other site. Not only Google but also Squidoo has a way of finding and removing spam lenses.
So this is why I was surprised to not hear Squidoo mentioned at PubCon. From my brief explanation of how Squidoo works, you can see that it should be considered as a good social network for SEO and search marketing. Maybe Seth Godin will plan on attending the next PubCon so he can be sure that there is mention of Squidoo.
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