As a result, Squidoo used to edge out Hubpages slightly by giving the more user-attractive “related” lenses lots of cross-links and giving every lens in the category a boost by having it linked to GOOD related content. (Google likes to see cross-links to good, relevant content).

However, Squidoo has hobbled its top-down directory by taking many categories off the front page (which used to be an index of the categories), it’s taken out the “Related lenses” or made them nofollow on the sidebar, and it’s systematically allowed more and more irrelevant links to creep into the sidebar while making it harder and harder for us to cross-link to related lenses. The magazines are particularly notorious for this problem. [Update: Okay, most of the categories are back on the homepage, and the magazines are a separate mess…never a dull day in Squidland!]

Meanwhile, Hubpages, which used to have too much marketing about writing for Hubpages at the top level of its site with hidden links to its topics tree, and whose topics and subtopics pages used to be cluttered up by big ads for the writing contests, has cleaned UP its internal navigation to make it more SEO-friendly.

I think Squidoo started tumbling as soon as it started tinkering with its internal linking structure. And I’m pretty sure that Bonnie and Robin have no idea what we’re talking about. I really lost patience when they ripped out the “Related lenses “box and replaced it with paid links to a traffic exchange site that promised to send Squidoo paid traffic in exchange for getting ALL the rights to repost our content on its other affiliate sites (Cloudignite). [Update: Okay, that has finally been removed, but people were sounding the alarm on it from late November through at least March.]

Well Quantcast shows the site as still sinking as of today, so who knows?

I also have a sinking feeling in my stomach that all the auto generated sales page sites for Amazon and CB and co that have flooded the market will meet the same fate as the old Adsense sites.

They are succeeding at the moment to convert into sales, but if google downgrades them, or even de-indexes them, since they are just page after page of nothing but product links, then they will be sunk.

And Squidoo would have a wary eye out for signs of that happening. I also suspect that they want to secure their revenues for the future by reducing or eliminating amazon links on pages that are not part of the shared revenue income modules.

We’ll see when we see… there won’t be any warning or notice of the changes if they happen, based on the usual non-communications to date.

Loving your blog, never miss an update!

Alexa’s a bit unreliable. It estimates traffic, patterns and ratings only by tracking visits and behavior from users who voluntarily install the Alexa toolbar. A certain segment of stats geeks and SEOs use it, but it’s not representative of web audiences as a whole.

Whereas Quantcast uses a digital turnstyle to measure traffic: sites that participate voluntarily embed a 1×1 pixel graphic on every page of their website, and Quantcast can see and measure each time that the graphic loads because of a visit to that page.

Quantcast clearly shows that Squidoo traffic got clobbered by the March 15 Panda update, and that it’s been sputtering a bit ever since Panda 22 back in late November.

I think, despite the flailing, that Squidoo’s recent changes on balance should put it on slightly better footing with Google. There is a wildcard, however: just as 2011 was when the Panda algorithm changed traffic patterns across the web, and 2012 saw the Penguin algorithm, this year, Google’s going to be unleashing a new major component of its search algorithm that attempts to evaluate and reward/downrank websites that are SELLING things, depending on customer satisfaction, ratings, and other (who knows what) variables. The big question is: will this algorithm change include pages with affiliate sales links? And my guess is yes, it will. A lot of Squidoo’s flailing right now is trying to batten down the hatches in anticipation of that update, even though we don’t yet know exactly what it’ll be looking for.

I notice that they are still sinking in the rankings according to my Alexa bar… not gone to look for details, but it does not appear what they have done this month has actually improved anything… it has just lost them a heap of content pages and not much else.

Re: Zujava, I saw a notice that they are not allowing any personal direct affiliate links to Amazon any more, so that will be a disincentive for a lot of people planning to use the software created display boxes on their leaves or any direct text links.

So it would appear that Wizzley is now the more flexible profit share platform left to affiliate marketers.

What I would like to know Ellen is what is the CURRENT situation with the traffic status on squidoo… any updates on the way for us?

A lot of sites flail like this when hit with huge traffic and financial losses.

If it were my site, I would’ve rolled back all site changes since Panda 22, when the first traffic drop happened, then re-implemented each of those changes one at a time, sloooowly, to see if any of them were the culprit. And/or implemented new changes more carefully and systematically so that one would have some idea whether each new change worked, before throwing in further modifications.

On the other hand, that could take months, even a year. Perhaps that’s too long to turn the ship around, so instead they’re performing open heart surgery, a long transplant and brain surgery all at once, hoping to fix it in a hurry.

I think the net result of all this flailing about will be positive, because most of them are moves towards what Google recommends. But there is certainly a risk that they could accidentally axe some of the very advantages that made Squidoo survive earlier Panda and Penguin updates unscathed.

From my experience in managing websites, and from what I’ve read, after the inevitable rankings loss, it’s next to impossible to determine which changes had a negative (or positive) effect. It’s all guesswork.

Plus, there’s a kind of ‘Russian Roulette’ factor. If you keep making major changes, like no-follow all your outgoing links, it’s not surprising if one of those changes bites you in the…

A few months ago, it would be Squidoo hands down, and my instinct is that it will be again. Yet I’m not confident of that, for the reasons I outlined above.

The good news is that SquidHQ is making a concerted effort (finally!) to clear out the spam and junk and get back in Google’s good graces, while making the system a little more rewarding for those who are focused on creating good content as opposed to playing social games. So I’m hoping Squidoo is turning a corner, and that it will recover and prosper as it did from a 2007 Google slap. HQ just seems to be making about a 27-point-turn to do it, knocking over a few mailboxes in the process.

Hubpages has problems as well. If pages don’t get enough traffic, they become “Unfeatured” after a while, which adds a noindex tag to the code telling search engines not to crawl or show those pages in search results. You can get those articles “featured” again if you republish them, share them on social media, and work on getting more traffic to them, but that’s hard for newbies, and there are some kinds of pages that just don’t get much traffic.

Also, on Hubpages, they are very picky about what you can link out to: no linking to your other related pages, or it may get locked as overly promotional. You have to use Hubpages’ Amazon capsules, which are small and unobtrusive and don’t make many sales because it’s so easy to miss them. The two-outbound-link-per-domain limit means you can’t showcase Zazzle designs or any kind of affiliate links, unless it’s just one. So income opportunities on Hubpages are fewer, and in general, despite the downturn in Squidoo’s fortunes, I still see more earnings potential on Squidoo.

But at this point, neither Hubpages nor Squidoo is earning that well for me. At which point I start looking at audience and aesthetic factors. For example, more serious readers of an article on women in ancient Rome may be turned off by Squidoo’s cartoonish interface and aggressive ads, while an article on collectibles will look boring on Hubpages where one can’t embed images into Text Modules or tailor Amazon Associate Links to look their best.

The problem there is that neither site will pay you until you reach your payout threshold. On Squidoo you can set it low in payout settings, but on Hubpages it’s $50. So you may wait longer on HP for your cash, and if you do a little on both sites you will have to wait longer.

The other options I’m looking into are Zujava and Wizzley. Zujava has tier payouts like Squidoo, and it’s a sensible site without a lot of the craziness and stress of Squidoo’s constant jerking from pothole to pothole. On the other hand, for the moment, the earnings are low — a little like Squidoo some years ago! — but growing. Wizzley lets you plug in your own third party payment programs like Adsense, Amazon Associates, Allposters, Zazzle and so on, so the nice thing there is that if you’re already making some money on other sites with Adsense or Amazon or whatever, then your Wizzley pages can help add to the total and bring you up to your payout thresholds with those programs faster.

If I were a newbie, I think I’d pick two of those four sites that seemed to look good to me and experiment for a while to see which one feels right to me, brings me traffic, and starts to pile up a bit of income. I know Hubbers who make more money than Squids (although the reverse is true more often, in my experience), and there are some people who swear by Wizzley or even Zujava. So you may find that the community, the interface, and your own style of work just clicks with one site or another. The important thing to remember is that you can make money with your writing on any of the four, so don’t think, “Oh, no! I should switch to the other site now that it’s doing better!” unless you’re really frustrated with the platform you’ve chosen. You’ll get there. It’s just…a slow process, dictated more by your own learning experience and (let’s face it) the number of good articles you’ve got out there than anything else.