Squidoo and SEO? (Update Jan.3, 2012)

Happy New Year to everybody!


This will end my experiment with Squidoo. The results were NEGATIVE.


Please note that what I've done did NOT prove anything, except one thing: Squidoo is not a "magic wand" for SEO purposes.


Here is the summary of my observations:

• Posting something to Squidoo does not bring it to Google, unless you place a link to it from somewhere. In other words, Google does not crawl the entire Squidoo in search for new pages ("lenses" as they call it).
• It takes too long for Google to reindex the page. A month after I changed my experimental lens' content, it still was not in Google; a special link I placed there was ignored by Google either (obviously because Google did not index that page again).
• Squidoo is a primitive, buggy and ugly tool built to spam search engines with junk content. It's definitely not a "Site For People", but a "Site For Search Engines". For some reason, "Mr. Panda" did not bring "Mr. Squidoo" down, so it can still work, but I decided that my time will be better spent somewhere else.

I deleted my experimental lens.

Thank you for your attention!

"To Use Squidoo for SEO?" : Dec.20 update

After my experimental lens was indexed by Google, I placed a special link in it, with an anchor text having two mistakes. Two days later, the search for that exact anchor text gives no results in Google. The link will stay there, and I am not going to place that text anywhere else, so if one day it appears in search, I will know that Google refreshed my lens' content in its index.

"Using Squidoo for SEO" : Dec.19 update

Nothing happened in Google/Bing so far. The phrase search for the words in subject still does not return any pages the page I made from the Squidoo site.

Let's place a link to the "lens":

Using Squidoo for SEO

I am aware of the low level of that article's content and design. This is done intentionally and is a part of  the experiment.

A side note: my first impression about Squidoo is: a large well-done piece of junk, a huge MFA ("Made For Advertising") website, which should have been demoted to zero by infamous Panda, together with all "article" websites. This impression is based on reading of a few articles in the "Giant Squids" area. I seriously doubt anyone goes there to read. A "writers'-only" website.


Update: the link worked immediately. Google shows this blog entry and my Squidoo lens as crawled at the same time.

Using SQUIDOO for SEO (experiment)

SEO experiment: Squidoo

2011-12-14: I registered on Squidoo

2011-12-15: Created a first posting there (they call it "lens"). The post was marked as "in progress", because not all of the items in their "checklist" were competed. The "lens" was "published", however.

2011-12-15: Checked in Google if my "lens" appears. Did a search on the exact title match and on some special "words" that I placed in the text. No results.

2011-12-16: Finished the "checklist", and re-published the "lens". Now it's marked as "featured", and not as "in progress"

2011-12-17: Checked Google again. No results

Conclusions so far:

• Posting to Squidoo is complicated and time consuming. The resulting article looks ugly.
• Google is not "pinged" with the new entry URL immediately after the "lens" is published.

Next steps: I will wait a few more days and if Google still does not know about my "lens", I will place a link to it from somewhere. Then will check the results again.

BY THE WAY: this post appeared in Google search immediately (as expected)