Web Marketing Strategy Update

Few days late posting the bit below on dropping Squidoo lense rankings, but it’s still worth your attention anyway.

Personally I’m having greater success at Hubpages than Squidoo. Not only is it easier and faster to use, but I get more visitors — I assume because of fewer pages and therefore less competition.

Of course if Squidoo has been targeted by Google, the same thing will happen to Hubpages in due course. You’ve probably time to make a good few bob before that though.

The lab has been investigating the recent drop in ranking for Squidoo lenses in Google’s search engine results. It appears that as of the 7th of July nearly all Squidoo lenses have dropped in ranking in the Google search engines. There is a lot of speculation in various forums at present (including Squidoo’s own SquidU forum) but the reasons are uncertain.

At this stage, the lab feels there are 3 potential causes.

1. Recent Squidoo changes have resulted in Google indexing Squidoo lenses in a different way that is resulting in lower ranking scores compared to before.

2. Google are applying a virtual penalty on the Squidoo domain for reasons known only to them.

The Prince of Print, famous — perhaps infamous — as a larger-than-life copywriting genius, passed away in his sleep on Sunday, April 8th.

I missed this at the time, but if you haven’t heard of him, you need to. Gary was one-of-a-kind and nothing short of a legend in the world of direct marketing. A man whose reputation preceded him, he inspired marketers and copywriters everywhere.

For years now he’s been freely giving away all his old paid subscription newsletters he began publishing in back 1986 at The Gary Halbert Letter, which is where I first got to know of him.

His newsletters are packed with marketing tips and ideas — tons of real gems, which he was adding to every month as he shared his thoughts on Internet marketing. I’ve been going on and off for years now. The only thing is many are pretty long, and finding the time to read them all is why my visits always remained erratic, despite the best intentions.

He also published his, The Boron Letters on the site. Written to his youngest son, Bond, when Gary was imprisoned at Boron Federal Prison Camp or, “Club Fed” as he called it, he described this series of letters as “the most precious gift I have ever given him… and… the most precious gift… anyone else could possess.”