Aug
Squidoo Clones Are Pointless
Anyone who spammed Squidoo is on the lookout for Squidoo clones where they can expand their spamming efforts for even more links or Adsense sharing.
But it’s pointless, as there are only two outcomes for any of these Squidoo knockoffs:
1) It remains a small site and delivers a bit of traffic to your site.
2) It gets huge, Google notices, and then penalizes the site due to too much spam content.
Option 3 would involve the site getting big and not getting penalized, but the catch in that case is that it would be heavily moderated. So your spamming efforts would be wasted.
HubPages looks good so far, but don’t hold your breath. Oondi, on the other hand, is worthless. (Note: Worthless to spammers that is 
)
First off, I don’t see where you can list a URL. Not even in an author profile.
And you can’t spam them in your article, because everything has to be approved by a moderator.
It’s really just like an article directory with a bit of revenue sharing. So I guess it doesn’t qualify as a Squidoo clone in the first place.
In that case, it might only be good for real authors to share their work.
I actually thought about signing up and getting some good page names (like I did at Squidoo,) but it’s not built like that. So I’ll just sit back until the site’s PR and Alexa rank get real high. Maybe then I’ll jump in.
If you want good links and lots of traffic now, you’ll need something different. Something more like a good site with existing traffic and a good TrustRank in Google.
I don’t think we have that right now. The Million Dollar Wiki certainly doesn’t fit the job description. Wikipedia is heavily moderated and uses nofollow. Squidoo isn’t what it once was. HubPages isn’t all that huge. DMOZ is corrupt.
Maybe we should come up with ideas that don’t involve spam? That’s bloody brilliant!!
Almost as genius as my idea to build websites with a goal of making money!
Want a good laugh every day? Then simply subscribe to our RSS feed.
Or subscribe via email.
Related Articles:
Like this article?
Post to Del.icio.us
Share on Facebook
AIM to a friend
Click here to buy me a beer, because damn, I need to get drunk to forget how much internet marketing sucks!
I follow black hat bloggers to see what they are up to not to do what they do. I understand and agree that the systems in place cannot be void of spammers. Even MyBlogLog with its heavy hand against link spamming still has problems. But at least we are involved now and not 3 years from now when social networks ar so 2007.
BeachBum
Everyone’s goal is just to increase their sites awareness, Yours is the same. You want as many people reading your blog as possible, because then it becomes more valuable, and you can do what you need to do, to quit your real job.
-Aaron
Hey thanks for commenting on my blog….
But why are you using Netbusinessblogs feedsuscription count?? illeagle and busted I’m afraid
Matt,
It’s not illegal (although maybe it is “illeagle” since I’m not sure what that is,) and they’re the ones that started that, hence the reason I chose that one. It’s part of a test I’m doing for certain articles, so I’ll go into it in detail then.
From now on, please read the blog before making useless comments that have nothing to do with the topic at hand. If you have comments or questions that have nothing to do with a certain post, please email me instead.
I guess this is what I get for getting rid of nofollow on comments…
If you were selling sponsored links/reviews it would be false advertising which is illeagle. Perhaps I should have emailed you about this instead.
Well I’m not selling anything, at least not now. And anyone buying advertising needs to do their due diligence anyway.
Not to mention all the sales tricks I use at http://internetmarketingsucks.com/
Back to the topic at hand.
Are you saying that Google penalizes sites that link up to Squidoo?
Nope, just Squidoo itself. Linking to or getting links from Squidoo is fine.
i am bit confused, you’re saying that links from squidoo aren’t valued as highly as they used to be? that makes sense.
p.s. illeagle is what happens when a bird eats a tainted worm
I’m not sure about the exact value of Squidoo links, but the site’s SERPs dropped noticeably, meaning you wouldn’t get much traffic from it (at least compared to before the penalty.)
p.s.
Interesting blog title and good idea about Squidoo Clones )))
I agree, Squidoo doesn’t seems give anything good
The number of visit of my lens remain zero for the past 3 months.
It’s just waste of time.
Why should we promote Squidoo lens, when it is better to promote our own site?
“Why should we promote Squidoo lens, when it is better to promote our own site?”
Exactly. I signed-up to Squidoo to get free traffic without much work. Because if I’m going to work hard to get traffic, I’m going to promote my own site, not a Squidoo page.
But still, people say “oh you can get lots of traffic from Squidoo if you build links to your Squidoo page, update your Squidoo page daily,” and other garbage.
Good point on the two outcomes of squidoo clones…
They either are small and useless, or they become big and penalized by Google.
The only benefit I see is if it remains small, but also gains some good page rank and can pass some pr 3 or pr 4 link juice to your site.
I am glad that some of these squidoo clones are cracking down on spam…. it is ridiculous and screws it up for everyone else.