Squidoo, Supplemental Results & Twitter Twittering

Where Art Though Squidoo Lenses?

Dude, where’s Squidoo? Has Jason Calacanis finally won? Say it ain’t so.

Jason Calacanis has been bellyaching over the spam issues at Squidoo for months (we’re sure it has nothing to do with him wanting attention for Mahalo. No. That would be unlike him), and Squidoo seemed to be paying attention, even outlining a 6-step spam fighting plan; however, it appears they were too late.

Since this past weekend, users have noticed Squidoo pages either dropping from the index completely or being buried pages and pages deep. Some Squidoo lenses have reported a 75 percent loss in traffic. Google won’t confirm or deny, but all signs point to an invisible Google penalty.

Danny Sullivan has in-depth coverage over at Search Engine Land, complete with a full timeline dating back to February. Personally, I’ve never been a huge fan of the site, but if you take a look at the sites now ranking above the Squidoo lenses, they’re not any better. We’re seeing lower quality sites with fewer backlinks. What gives, Google?

What Squidoo punished for spam? It appears so but I don’t know that I’d classify Squidoo anymore spammy than any other site.

We Need To Know Where We Stand, Google!

The blogosphere has been buzzing with posts about Google’s recent disabling of the supplemental results query [site:domain.com *** -asdfgh]. Basically, Google took it away and now webmasters want it back. Matt Cutts, however, seems happy that it’s been taken away as it will force webmasters to stop obsessing over it. Yeah, until they start obsessing over something else. Like how much they hate you, heh.

I’m all for webmasters not obsessing over things that don’t really matter (like PageRank, for instance); however, if my page is in the supplemental index, that matters. That matters a whole bunch. Not telling me it’s there doesn’t fix the problem; it actually prevents me from being able to fix the problem. It’s like when your girlfriend is all mad at you and giving you the cold shoulder and not talking but she won’t tell you why so you can’t make it better and just enjoy the darn movie you started. Yeah. Why is Google acting like a chick? (My apologies, Kim, I know you hate when females are referred to as "chicks":))

Part of the reason the query was disabled was because Google was concerned about competitors using it for evil. If that’s the case, I say use the compromise Rand Fishkin came up with and throw the functionality into Webmaster Central. Let site owners see what needs to be fixing. Maybe they’ll choose not to do anything about it, but they should have the choice.

Steven Bradley had a great post regarding the issue today in Google’s Supplemental Spin is BS. It’s well worth the read.

Should I Be Twittering?

Neil Patel had a nice article over at Search Engine Land yesterday entitled Twitter Useless For Driving Traffic? Think Again which suggests three reasons why you’re not getting as much traffic from the service as you were hoping for. Basically it’s because you don’t have friends and/or you’re doing it wrong.

I’m still not sure about this whole Twitter thing. I’ve heard from many people (including my BFF) that I’m missing the boat here. Perhaps someone can answer this once and for all: Do I need to be Twittering? Why or Why Not?

Fun Finds

Michael Gray gives ProBlogger’s job boards a big thumbs up and seems less-than-impressed with Craigslist offerings. If you’re looking for bloggers, you know where to go.

Chris Silver Smith argues that Domainers Can’t Get No Respect. Aw. Go give a domainer a hug.

Lisa Barone is a writer, content marketer & VP of strategy at Overit Media. She's also a very active Twitterer, much to the dismay of the rest of the world.

See Lisa's author page for links to connect on social media.

Comments (7)
Filed under: Social Media Marketing
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7 Replies to “Squidoo, Supplemental Results & Twitter Twittering”

Yep, agree with Tom. And the special search tag is pretty useful.

As for squidoo slap, I believe that the SEO benefit of squidoo is gone. However, squidoo is not dead at all, there’s so much more on squidoo than just seo. The free report at http://special.providenthost.com/squidoo-slap/ is explaining how this seo benefit is dead.

On Squidoo —-
There have been a lot of comments and questions on what really happened with Google & Squidoo
I interviewed Seth Godin on the “Squidoo Slap”
http://www.searchingdot.com/2007/07/17/interview-with-seth-godin-on-the-squidoo-slap/

I’m on board with the whole discussion about supplemental results – and I think I agree with Rand that webmaster central is the best place for the report but I’m not sure why everyone is getting upset about losing the search function – it still works in google.co.uk (even for US sites).

See it in action for seomoz here

Thanks for the mention Lisa. I think Rand’s solution for the supplemental information is the fair compromise. Despite what Matt seems to want us to believe it is important to have information about which pages of your site are in the supplemental index.
And I agree completely that people are going to find something to obsess about when it comes to search engines and how their pages rank. It’s not as though people have stopped obsessing over PageRank even though we all know or should know it’s not worth obsessing over.
I kind of feel the same as you about Twitter. No offense intended to all my friends, but I really don’t need to know what you’re all doing right now. Neil’s post is making me wonder if I should at least take a closer look at Twitter. But I have so many other things to do with my day.

Dyea

Why was Cutts allowed to sit in on the “Give it up” thing? I can see why he would want to but sounds like a bunch of kissassism on the part of the SEOs. And we can see the result of that… no more supp searches… well done.

“obsessing over things that don’t really matter (like PageRank, for instance)”
I totally love you now.
As far as twittering goes, I think what really makes it successful or not is whether or not you have a fair amount of peers already using it. It doesn’t matter what you twitter about, it’s whether or not any of your friends will give a crap about it.

Is it so hard to just use the regular site:domain.com query to track down supplemental pages? Set your search result count to 100 and then click through the search results pages until you see supplemental listings and you’re in the same position as when there was a special supplemental index query.

Since supplemental pages appear after non-supplemental pages (at least from what I’ve seen) you can still get an idea of how your site is doing by looking at what results page you’re on when the first supplemental listing appears.

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