Surfarama

I don't know why this annoys me so much, but this post on Techcrunch is a bit of a wind up. The suggestion is that Seth Godin's service, Squidoo, is being singled out for punishment by Google due to the large amount of spam pages (or 'lenses' in the Squidoo vernacular) that have unquestionably taken hold.

Specifically the writer is suggesting that Google is doing a hand job on Squidoo which has seen their visibility in Google SERPs drop precipitously, leading to a 75% drop in traffic to some pages (as reported by a random Squidoo user) if not actually banning them outright.

Whoa Nelly...If they are indeed seeing a serious drop in organic search traffic I think it is much more likely that they witnessing the result of a broader algorithm change, or have hit some kind of threshold, that is applying a filter to Squidoo pages rather than a domain specific penalty. It may well be that the algorithms are detecting more rubbish on the Squidoo domain (which they can easily do if lots of pages are linking out to bad neighourhoods), and so the whole site is less 'trusted' which impacts their visibility in the SERPs overall. But that does not mean Squidoo is specifically being targeted, penalized or banned by Google, and too suggest so just feels a bit sensationalist to me. It just means that Google is getting better at filtering out rubbish which is something that affects lots of sites (as it should).

Let's face it, Google knows all about the problem of spam on user generated content sites like Squidoo...hello, Blogspot.