Spam is a giant, fourteen-headed version of Bette Midler - it just won’t go away.
Google and other search engines spend countless hours and resources hunting down and shutting down spam and black-hat SEO tricks. According to various links on the internet, most notably TechCrunch, Google most recently laid down the law with Squidoo:
The reports indicate that some Squidoo pages have seen a 75% drop in traffic, and in other cases have either been removed from high ranking positions on Google, or removed all together.
Squidoo itself isn’t a spam site. In fact, I think Squidoo is a fairly good idea—you might call it user-generated About.com, where each author (lensmaster) gets a little kickback on the Google ads served for their answer.
But Squidoo made the mistake of allowing their service to be too easily spammed, and if Google finds one of those fourteen heads sprouting out of your domain, they’re going to chop it off. And if they get a little bit of your shoulder…oh well.
To their credit, Squidoo is on top of things, blogging about it, and I’m sure they can recover.
The lesson here is that if you’re not careful with your SEO strategy, BAD THINGS can happen, even if you’re good people with good ideas. There is a far more effective and less risky way to raise your search engine ranking:
- Get a blog
- Write good stuff
Come learn about it at our conference in September!
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