Squidoo To Affiliate Marketers: We Don't Like You Anymore
Very quietly Squidoo dropped a bomb of an announcement yesterday. The picture that accompanied the announcement was a cute little candy bunny but the message was anything but nice. Squidoo has built it's empire on other people's content. Content that many built to help promote their other web pages and blogs. Squidoo though has announced that all those links will be changed to nofollow thus negating any influence that they would have to the search engines. In effect saying "Thanks for helping us build our web empire but now we don't want you anymore". Now sure there are those marketers out there that will create thin lenses in bulk to try to build links to their pages. There are also those though that would like to build a real presence on Squidoo but also want to promote their own blog or website at the same time. The latter are being punished for the actions of the former.
It's funny how when Squidoo was first starting out and needed content to grow their business they would pretty much auto-approve any lens. Now that they have peaked as far Google is concerned they want to weed out content that is dragging them down in the rankings. They want to especially go after lenses that have affiliate links (but all the Squidoo money making modules are highly encouraged) a bit hypocritical if you ask me. They will even promote your lens more within Squidoo search if it has more Amazon and eBay purchases. So to now say that they are all about top notch quality content is a bad joke. They even compare themselves to Wikipedia which is strange since almost all the content on Wikipedia is edited and fact checked by a human. Wikipedia pages often carry a great deal of authority and Page Rank while a new Squidoo lens starts out with zero links and no Page Rank whatsoever. Really an affiliate marketer must put a lot of work into promoting a Squidoo lens before the links will really carry any weight with Google anyway.
If you're an affiliate marketer and have links to any Squidoo pages on your website or blog I urge you to switch them to nofollow. Squidoo needs to realize that their success is largely because of affiliate marketers and bloggers and with this move they are essentially biting the hand that feeds. If they don't want to link to our blogs and websites then why should we let them be a drain on our PR. Fair is fair.
It's funny how when Squidoo was first starting out and needed content to grow their business they would pretty much auto-approve any lens. Now that they have peaked as far Google is concerned they want to weed out content that is dragging them down in the rankings. They want to especially go after lenses that have affiliate links (but all the Squidoo money making modules are highly encouraged) a bit hypocritical if you ask me. They will even promote your lens more within Squidoo search if it has more Amazon and eBay purchases. So to now say that they are all about top notch quality content is a bad joke. They even compare themselves to Wikipedia which is strange since almost all the content on Wikipedia is edited and fact checked by a human. Wikipedia pages often carry a great deal of authority and Page Rank while a new Squidoo lens starts out with zero links and no Page Rank whatsoever. Really an affiliate marketer must put a lot of work into promoting a Squidoo lens before the links will really carry any weight with Google anyway.
If you're an affiliate marketer and have links to any Squidoo pages on your website or blog I urge you to switch them to nofollow. Squidoo needs to realize that their success is largely because of affiliate marketers and bloggers and with this move they are essentially biting the hand that feeds. If they don't want to link to our blogs and websites then why should we let them be a drain on our PR. Fair is fair.
Leave a Comment