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.

Have you read any of the new Google patent releases yet? I suggest you do, or at least learn more about them. Not that you’ll find anything concerning underwear — I just made that up! But what you will find is a plethora of strategies Google is either already using, planning to implement, or considering for possible use in its search algorithm.

If you’re not one who keeps up with what Google’s doing, or didn’t read the last patent release, it will probably come as something of a surprise to discover how wide reaching Google’s ideas on ranking factors are.

As well as information on things that many SEO’ers already believed to be part of the algorithm, or have been expecting to see implemented, the Google patent also contains quite a few new strategies that on first reading have given rise to some considerable concern in the SEO world.

But before you start pulling your hair out and thinking Google has everything sewn up and all resistance is futile, bear in mind that as it’s a patent, it’s very likely that Google is also to some degree simply, “covering all the bases.” Knowing the SEO community would pounce on it for clues as soon as it was released, it’s also conceivable that there are some red herrings in there too. What’s left is to decide what’s probable and what isn’t.