Squidoo was founded in 2005 and their stated mission was to give people a place to share knowledge online… with the understanding that marketers would likely use it to project their expertise and generate new business.
What the company may not have counted on, and certainly failed to prepare adequately for, was the swarm of black hat SEO practitioners that have pummeled the service with pages intended primarily, and sometimes exclusively, to boost their organic search placement.
Recently, that oversight has caught up with the company in the form of a flurry of unwelcome attention from search bloggers and Google, which seems to have penalized the content sharing site following a drop in its rankings.
The firm allows people to create topic-specific pages it calls “lenses,” and shares with them, or the charity of their choice, a portion of ad revenue resulting from their pages. SEO and SEM spammers have exploited the service by funneling user links through those lenses, automating comments on lenses or redirecting viewers using iFrame technology. Squidoo began offering new anti-spam tools and filters that block spam or allow its users to alert the company to potential violators more easily.
A certain amount of damage was already done with Google instantly dropping Squidoo approximately 30 percent in its rankings.
