It’s a rough time in Squidland.

That change alone can affect the traffic in a big way.

Google is tightening up on a lot of things related to ‘thin’ and ‘spun’ content and Squidoo will be on the frontline of sites that will get dinged unless they do something about this. Currently most of squidoo’s success is due to how SEO friendly it has been, which has rewarded the writers there with great traffic. Though as googles algorithm gets more ‘intelligent’ and becomes able to spot ‘thin/spun’ content, this will heavily impact on squidoo, particularly if they are rating this type of content highly themselves. If the majority of ‘self-recommended’ content is thin/spun this will impact the whole site in a similar way to dropping in page rank. There are lots of media articles discussing one of the next evolvements of googles search in focussing on and rewarding good content and the authors of good content, and am sure that is the driving force behind squidoo trying to make these changes.

Speaking of SEO, I think you’re underestimating a lot of Squidoo lensmasters, understandably. It’s true that the lens I held up as an example doesn’t have any SEO beyond latent semantics, although I gave seen from my own studies that pages with a lot of concrete, specific, “nouny” language like that can naturally get at least some long tail searches, if you don’t cut off the traffic by noindexing it as the lensrank algorithm did.

But that is not representative of much of the content on Squidoo. While many of the veterans who have a good grip on SEO have not felt comfortable on the new forum, SEO is a part of the working knowledge of a great many lensmasters. SquidU had an entire “tips and tricks” subforum where we often shared techniques, coached newbies and linked to relevant SEO news and guides. SquidU was where we were hotly discussing the Panda update even BEFORE it was launched, thanks to some cryptic hints in Google’s blog pointing at things to come. Also, a group of successful lensmasters, all of whom make a living through Squidoo and online endeavors, created a Squidoo Step by Step ebook, free for download, detailing keyword research and many other techniques for newbies to get a leg up. I still don’t understand why HQ felt the need to shut us down, but we now share that knowledge off-Squidoo and continue to incorporate it into our lensmaking. (Not that we all use or focus on the exact same SEO techniques.)

So there is a ton of SEO being implemented and used on Squidoo lenses by members who have been doing this since the site began. Yet a lot of optimized content is being outranked in lensrank by content like the shower curtain lens — yes, I understand why it was able to get 5-10 hits a day, but its use of keywords was pretty basic — even when our content is getting more traffic, and possibly more targeted and converting traffic, thanks to SEO.

In other words, you can have competent SEO and still get killed by the lensrank algorithm, becsuse it’s looking at other things besides traffic and conversions. It takes into account a lot of internal factors, and it weights factors like freshness as more important than who’s coming to the page and what they’re doing on it.

FWIW, most of us care diddly squat for the points system and have long argued that it’s distracting both HQ and lensmasters from Squidoo’s originsl purpose, publishing content and getting readers. But they supposedly serve the same purpose that we used to — teaching newbies how to use Squidoo by introducing (unlocking) pieces of it in bite-sized chunks. As a teaching tool, I suppose they’re useful, but I believe that marrying likes and purple stars — both of which convey lensrank boosts — with quests and points has caused some problems with lensrank.

The issue of Crowd Ignite is one I’ve been raising from time to time but so far this has got zero response even when I asked direct questions. I would love it if HQ quit it.

The reason these “thin content aka showercurtain” lenses rank better then more substantial more deserving constant is in my opinion a direct result of the greater Seo knowledge of the lensmasters who go straight for the $/hour.

While hobbyist tend to ignore any technical hufpuff in a blind confidence their brilliant stories will soon find recognition in the eyes of everyone. I’m pretty sure stories can rank well but they are managed differently. For example they then forget to build 126 other similar lenses with similar stories to support it.

However I totally agree and have written so with you that Squidoo’s algo is solliciting exactly the content they are getting.

Currently I don’t care about the point system. It’s cute, I can imagine people who get busy can get a tier 2 out of it with a lot of work but I can’t imagine it being a sustainable way to earn a decent $/hour.

Anyway I love the responsive design. Perhaps it needs finetuning? I really don’t know but it would be a bad move to give that up imo.