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.

3. Google is undergoing a re-indexing process that is resulting in unusual SERP rankings which will re-assert themselves after the re-indexing has completed.

The lab currently favours the penalty cause because websites now ranking above previously high ranking Squidoo lenses have much fewer backlinks and lower page rank than the Squidoo lenses they have replaced.

Squidoo is the brain child of popular and latterly philanthropic marketer Seth Godin, who’s also the author of a small pile of marketing books containing some pretty revolutionary thinking.

The idea is that anyone can set up a “Lens” on any topic they choose, sharing information for the purposes of building reputation, drawing traffic to other websites, making money or just for fun.

Simply a web page with a hip new name, besides giving you space to write on your subject of choice, a lens has modules to optionally add stuff like RSS feeds, items from Amazon, polls, photos from Flickr, etc.

A lot of time has now passed, but if I remember correctly, the basic premise in setting up Squidoo was that search engines would never be able to deliver what people want, and that the people themselves would make a better job of it by voting with their feet as it were, from amongst Lenses created by others knowledgeable on a subject.

Here’s the Oct 2005 post on Seth’s blog with the free ebook download introducing Squidoo and explaining the concept of “everyone’s an expert.”

Personally I think it’s a flawed idea, because the member group will always be far too small to cover everything, people using Squidoo to position themselves as experts will not point you to competing experts in their field unless it involves financial reward, and many of the true experts will never join Squidoo anyway.

Although Squidoo comes across as egalitarian, virtuous (you can donate part or all revenues from your Lens to charity) and bordering on cuddly toy fluffy in its language, I can only see Lenses as a promotion tool. Perhaps I’m just not a “giving” enough person.

Anyway, I’m drifting. The point is Google loves Squidoo, and carefully planned Lenses bring you PR, backlinks and traffic. Between that and promoting products or affiliate programs directly on your Lens, Squidoo is a money-maker.

But now there’s another, newer place called Hubpages. It’s very similar to Squidoo. In fact, you’d probably be correct in saying it’s a copy.

But it’s got me wondering if Seth’s Squidoo story is going to be like that of Friendster creator Jonathan Abrams: First to market but almost eclipsed by newer rivals who copied the idea but did it better (”better” is of course, subjective. Perhaps I should have said, “more successfully”).

Is Hubpages better? Well, I guess that’s for you to decide. But since it’s faster and easier to use from a purely promotional perspective, and also seems to be getting some Google love, it has my vote. For now at least.