Squidoo Lenses are a big waste of time

Every once and awhile I see someone tweet on Twitter on how to create a great Squidoo page. If you go over to freelancing sites like Elance, there are pages of people looking to hire someone who knows how to create a good Squidoo lense. Once upon a time there was great benefit by writing a highly targeted Squidoo page. It provided with you an authority site which you could target niche keywords that provided link juice. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case anymore and your much better off concentrating on your own blog and blog building strategies. Some reasons:

1. Google Hates Squidoo

This has been going on for quite sometime. There was a point before viagra spammers and Nigerian princes took over 90% of Squidoo lenses that google actually took Squidoo lenses as seriously as Wikipedia pages. Two years ago this started to change, as this article points out: http://www.earnersblog.com/squidoo-rankings/ google started lowering the rankings of Squidoo pages significantly and continues this day. A page that might have had a PR3 or 4 two years ago on Squidoo maybe burried 4 or 5 pages back now. Unless the only keyword on the entire internet is only on your Squidoo page, the onsite SEO is horrible.

On a side note, if you really want to find some Web 2.0/Social Site to game for SEO reasons, simply google Viagra and you’ll see a new site being gamed.

2. Tags are not indexed, period

As this article points out, In order to fight spam Squidoo started dissallowing the indexing of the article tag pages. In fact there has been no new tag pages indexed since 2007.

3. Spammers have overrun Squidoo and destroyed credibility

Although, Squidoo is trying it’s best to fight spammers, at the end of the day it’s credibility is lost. It would need to implement something like Hubpages which has a community scoring system and open community filters which can easily flag spam Hubs for deletion (plus iffy or commercial hubs can easily get a lower score which recieves no SEO benefits).

In fact (in my humble opinion), if you’re thiking of doing something like Squidoo I would checkout Hubpages. It has a couple of benefits: 1. It keeps you honest since hubs can easily be deleted by others. 2. If you produce good content and you have a hub ranked over 90, you’ll benefit from the link juice and SEO. It’s much harder to achieve a high ranking page on Hubpages, but at least you’ll have some benefit for all your hard work.

Maybe I’m wrong? What do you think?