All the Squidoo-related talk today is revolving around the fact that the network recently lost Google PageRank on it’s main domain. Many speculate that this was largely due to the efforts of one man. Jason Calacanis of Mahalo has been waging a personal war against Squidoo for several months now, pointing out (accurately) that its become a haven for spammers and SEOs. What I don’t understand, is how this guy has so much time to vehemently devote to this crusade when, judging from his blog, he’s so very busy. I have to assume that Seth Godin picked on him in high school or something.

Many folks really enjoy using Squidoo, including myself, and some are even making some money off of it. Seth gets a lot of flack because he made a lot of lofty predictions for the network when it launched to the public way back when - but it’s got a large following and a huge number of informative, lovingly tended to lenses. Spammers are like ticks, locusts or barnacles, infesting everything in sight. If Google’s apparent scorn of Squidoo is indeed deserved, then more power to them. But if Seth and company are scrambling to alleviate the problem to the extent they seem to be, make sure said penalization is a very short one, Mr. Cutts. I’m not a huge fan of the quality-control department’s new encouragement of ‘reporting’, and this may be the first tangible and large scale example. For a detailed play-by-play of the exchange so far, there is no better source than Danny Sullivan. Of course, that can be said for a lot of topics.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 12th, 2007 at 2:37 am and is filed under News, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.