The Rise and Fall of Squidoo

Squidoo was one of many internet projects led by Seth Godin.  Another key person, Corey Brown, identifies himself as a community builder on his hubpages bio, and I don't think this is a coincidence as community was one of Squidoo's greatest strengths.  The site was launched for beta testing in late 2005; the site was officially launched in March of 2006.  When it launched, it was innovative as a self-publishing platform that had a module-based format.  This made it a pioneer in its niche, launching ahead of HubPages, which had a similar format, launching later in 2006.

The site was also innovative in facilitating the donating of advertising proceeds to charity, with the site taking a cut, and then giving users the control of which portion of the remaining profits to take themselves, and which to donate to charity.

Squidoo started out with a burst of activity, which was followed by slow and steady growth, which started to pick up pace in late 2009.

What made Squidoo stand out to me was the positivity and supportive atmosphere of the site's community.  Whereas HubPages struck me as cold and a bit self-promotional, I found Squidoo to be a more supportive place, where established users were welcoming to newer ones.  The site was also silly and fun: it had a system of "Squidliking" and "Squid angels" who would "bless" pages, as sort of a peer-review system, intended to maintain the site's integrity and reward authors for the best pages.  This system attracted me to the site, as someone who puts a lot of thought into my writing and my work.

The site seemed to grow organically as more people were attracted to it by a wide range of factors, including its fun and quirky nature, its rich and diverse features, the positive community there, and of course, the growing potential for earning money and attracting a large audience.

Following the history of Google's algorithm changes relative to Squidoo's traffic patterns suggests that Google algorithm changes did not directly drive the rise and fall of the site.  The famous Panda/Farmer update in February of 2011, which devastated many content farms, seemed to not affect Squidoo much, perhaps even helping it.  The April 2014 Penguin update also produced only a slight effect, perhaps slightly harming Squidoo.

The peak of Squidoo's activity occurred in October of 2012, according to data from Quantcast:

Well before Squidoo reached their peak, the site had developed a serious spam problem.  The spam problem was created by at least two different incentives: the financial payout for top-ranking pages on the site, and the site's prominence and high level of traffic, which made it attractive to affiliate marketers and people looking to drive traffic to external websites.  The higher-traffic Squidoo got, the greater these problems became, because the payoff for spam became greater.

But Squidoo built in several features that I think actually facilitated spam.  These included a module that made a giant arrow pointing towards a link in huge print, and also aggressive encouragement of users to add more sales modules to their pages.  Well before the site's decline, I started to get the feeling that the Squidoo team was making choices that came across to me as inviting or encouraging spammers.

• Low-quality pages written by far-from-fluent English speakers, or by people who weren't putting much effort into quality
• Plagiarized or stolen content, including both written material and images
• Gaming the ranking system by methods like fake accounts and networks of accounts that would "squidlike" each other's lenses, boosting the ranks of pages artificially
• Overly promotional pages such as users creating series of pages highlighting their businesses (which were often little more than affiliate shops) but contributing little else to the site

The spam problem also began to impact the community aspect of the site.  The Squidoo forums had a section where users would share newly created pages, offering feedback, including both praise and constructive criticism.  As the spam problem worsened, the pages showing up in this part of the forum became worse and worse.

The comments left on my pages also became worse and worse, sometimes filled with egregious spammy links, but often just meaningless or generic comments from new users who had published a few spammy pages.

For me, seeing the spam problem destroy the site's sense of community was what first started me feeling disillusioned with the site.  I was aggravated that I worked so hard to write and publish unique, high-quality pages, and I had to sit by powerless while other users were allowed to spam the site with pages, comments, and low-quality posts in the forums, without being cracked down on.

As early as 2009, Squidoo began revising and updating its content policies in an attempt to crack down on spam, plagiarism, over-use of affiliate links, and other problems.  You can read one of these notices in modified form on HubPages.

The problem, as I see it, was that Squidoo did not initially enforce these policies consistently and aggressively enough.  There were whole sections of the site, indexed by tags like "make money online", populated by mostly spam and little else.

I reported numerous pages as spam, and the response was slow and inconsistent.  Some pages were taken down, usually with a delay of a few days, but many (including the spammy page in the screenshot above) stayed up month after month and were never taken down or only taken down months after the fact.

My experience with reporting pages as spam suggests that the first problem that went wrong with Squidoo is that the initial updated policies were not enforced strictly enough, and that there was not an active enough response to the spam problem.  As a result, there was still a strong incentive for spammers to use the site.

Some time in 2013, Squidoo enacted a series of draconian content filters that forever and radically changed what it was like to publish on the site.  Huge numbers of existing pages were flagged as being problematic.  The filters took several courses of action: in many cases, they would simply prohibit pages from being updated.  In other cases they would put up a warning, after which a page would be unpublished if it were not brought into compliance with the vaguely-specified policies.  In other cases pages were simply unpublished without warning.

The filters themselves though did not inform the users why the page had been flagged, instead giving a vague form message that gave a long list of different possible reasons, and again, vague policies.

My pages fared better under the content filters than most users of the site, but I still ran up against them so often that it was aggravating.  After trial-and-error, I realized that one thing that was causing my pages to be flagged was overuse of keyword phrases...but in some cases it was almost impossible for me to fix or address the problem.  For example, try writing a page on calculus books (which I since moved here to Wizzley) without using the words "calculus" or "books" or the phrase "calculus books" more than a certain (unspecified) number of times.

After the new content filters, I found my writing style became unnatural and I was dedicating an overwhelming majority of my time on the site to editing my writing in unnatural ways, to come up with creative ways to paraphrase things or substitute synonyms, in order to avoid tripping the keyword density filters.

I also ran into problems with external links.  I make liberal use of external links on my pages, often linking heavily to Wikipedia, which I think is an excellent reference to clarify technical terms.  I was forced to remove many of these references, and I thought this left my pages impoverished.

I also found inconsistent and slow responses when I wrote to the Squidoo team to get pages manually "greenlighted" in the cases where I gave up trying to get them past the content filters.  The Squidoo team greenlighted many of my pages, but the response was slow and inconsistent.  In many cases, the team would greenlight a page, only to have it get tripped in the filters again the next time I updated it.

My experience with the site was so aggravating that I stopped publishing new material on the site entirely, and began to plan a move of the material over to Wizzley.

Squidoo's fall began before the worst of the content filters were implemented.  Following the site's peak in October of 2012, the site's traffic began a steady and steep plummet until around August of 2013, when it bottomed out and began a slight recovery, only to stagnate and fall more gradually into and through 2014.

Alexa's data in the internet archive shows that by late 2013, the site had fallen to a global rank of 652, and 401 in the US, a major loss from its position in the top-100.  Quantcast estimated its number of unique visitors per day to have fallen from around 1.4 million to around 230,000.  That's a loss of over 83% of their traffic.

My own experience with my pages on the site, interestingly, was that my pages held on longer.  My traffic remained high through July of 2013...but in late August, the traffic dropped off precipitously.  I had been getting as much as 1,900 visitors a week, and this dropped to around 400, and remained flat at this level for the remainder of the site.  To compare, one of my other sites, RateTea, consistently gets 5,000 to 10,000 visitors a week, making the new level of Squidoo a drop in the bucket for me, in terms of visibility.

In August 2014, Squidoo announced a deal with HubPages, in which the top content from Squidoo was going to be moved to HubPages, and the rest of the content would be deleted.

Squidoo gave users a choice to opt out of this transfer, and I acted on it--I do not like HubPages and did not want my material published there, instead choosing to download my content and then upload it here to Wizzley, a site I am much more a fan of.

I was disappointed with the choice of the Squidoo team to sell to HubPages.  I understand that HubPages is the largest site with a model similar to Squidoo, and I can understand how people want to close out and cut their losses on a failed business venture, but I had a particularly sour feeling about this deal in large part because I originally chose to publish on Squidoo after trying HubPages and disliking it, and preferring Squidoo better.

When I saw Squidoo decline and vanish, I felt like something good had been lost.  I am grateful for the presence of Wizzley, however, as I like it even more than Squidoo, Hubpages, or any other sites with a similar model.