About 10 days ago I posted on a well known forum a question asking what would be the back up plan for affiliate marketers should the much loved Squidoo lenses suddenly drop from favor within search engine results. I promise you I had no inside knowledge about what happened about a week ago!

There seems to be a number of theories on why this has happened are far and wide (and there are also the tall tales that are coming out as well) but as of yet there is no real picture to say if it is a temporary slap from Google or if it is going to be a long term problem for marketers to get out there and start looking for other methods of promoting their sites. Some say it is because of Spamming, others because of abuse and the best I heard was because Ebay get a lot of traffic from Squidoo for free and Google and Ebay are currently handbags at 20 paces! (Oh please has big business come to this?)

Squidoo have taken a number of actions since resent Spamming problems, removing the iframes module from the site completely which does nothing for opt in lists as they required the iframe module in order to show on the lenses. Any lenses with less than 4 modules will not be published this means that marketers have to actually work for their money and not just throw up an article and hope for the best within Squidoo, but they now have to be a little creative and add some valuable content.

With the above taken into consideration this still doesn’t give the lenses the power that they had in Google over the past few months, gone are the times of posting and getting to the top of Google within days and sometimes hours. Many Squidoo lenses have dropped to Page 9 and show little sign of recovery.

A marketer that I respect a great deal for his SEO skills within the Wealthy Affiliate forum mentioned that this wasn’t a bad thing as in many cases people who have worked very hard on their websites over the past few years were seeing themselves booted off of the top spot on Google by a Squidoo Lense that was created 24 hours before. Hardly seems fair does it?

Google push that their searches are all about relevancy and give the best results but is the fact that some content is within their most loved social site of the moment a good excuse for it being at the top of the SERPS?

A few worrying things that I find with this are, firstly that Google can pull the plug on a site as quickly as that and drop pages in the rankings like they never existed and secondly how this is effecting marketers that have been making a living out of this for the past 3 months. Everyone was so sure about having a back up plan when I first mentioned it but there now seems to be a lot of people that are suffering the consequences of the move by Google to demote Squidoo from its dream team list!

A few things marketers could try to get things back on track:

  • Build blogs and articles on your own site and push your traffic building exercises towards something that you control
  • Use Blogger its in the Goo family so unlikely to fall out of favor
  • Use Weebly, its WEB2.0 functionality is in favor but be aware that it could also fall the same way Squidoo.
  • Market using Articles! Ezinarticles and GoArticles send a great deal of traffic to my websites through my article promotions
  • Use Pay Per Click we have links here that are for the best offers available in Pay Per Click
  • Use all of the above and link them all together to give yourself a number of routes to your merchant.

If you are really struggling and need advice, if you are not already a member then I would suggest a membership at Wealthy Affiliates where they offer a great resource to learn all of the above methods without getting ripped off by promises of riches by tomorrow night! Good luck and make sure you get your Yahoo Bonus!