Squidoo review: What it is and why you should care

1. Squidoo wass a writing platform, where you could write on numerous, but not all subjects. Gambling, illegal download, dating, dieting pills and some other subjects were not permitted. Check their TOS before you start writing your first lens (this is how an article on Squidoo is called).

One of the biggest beauties on Squidoo was simple. Non-English languages are not explicitly prohibited. However lenses in non English languages had more chances to get locked and deleted.

One big difference from Squidoo and blogging platforms was interaction. Most blogging platforms have only comment section for communication between bloggers, but Squidoo had several others too: duels, polls, predictions...

Interaction on Squidoo was well encouraged. It was lively community with more than 20 million unique visitors per month. Because of this activity a lot of lenses performed very well in search engines.

2. Squidoo had tier system for making money. Every lens had its own lensrank, calculated from many factors: freshness, traffic, sales, outclicks, time (visitor's) spent on lens, ... In general quality and quantity of traffic guaranteed high tier position. So you could earn money even without selling anything. This money came from advertisers.

3. Selling stuff on Squidoo was easy. There were numerous selling modules available (Amazon, Ebay, Zazzle...) and you could also place your own affiliate links in text modules if you had basic html knowledge.

4. You could sell lenses on Squidoo. It was extremely easy. You only needed to push a button for transfer a lens from your to somebody else's account. Or you could buy a lens. Prices vary. I have seen lenses for 3 and lenses for 3 thousand US dollars. Fresh lens, made from scratch is in general cheaper. Well matured lens with good backlinking background and a lot of already made sales and high tier position could be a real money maker, so price is higher.

Update: on 28 February 2013 Squidoo turned the ability of lens transfer off. There were still ways to buy or sell a lens but now they are much more complicated.

5. You could support your on-line business with Squidoo lenses. With presentation come powerful links and I had used Squidoo mainly for this purpose.

Before I discovered this site, my e-store was about 100 in SERP for my main keyword and nowhere for others. Now it is on first page for all keywords and I have several number one positions, in one case for some time I even had first seven positions for one longtail!

Update: on 28 March 2013 Squidoo made all links pointing out of Squidoo nofollow. This drastically reduced the site's potential for SEO purposes. But there was I trick I discovered only few days later - links from modules called link-list stayed do-follow until Squidoo closed. Same was true for links from profiles until July 2014, when the ship was already full of holes. I can reveal the secret - I learned the tricks of the Squidoo structure so well, I managed to build PR5 links in less than two days, what greatly helped at promoting of my blogs. None of so called SEO experts used this tricks, because none of them spent so much time studying the structure.

6. At the end of 2010 Squidoo introduced Squidoo monsters, some sorts of badges for achievements for every individual lensmaster. Some of lensmasters were not too happy with this, but only few of them used the option of turning them off on their profile.

Some monster badges were easy to achieve, some are much harder. Monsters for Lens of the day and Purple star were among the most appreciated.

Click here to check my Purple star lens about picture books publishing:)

Just a look at the monsters on one's profile can tell you a lot about a lensmaster. Is he active member of community or introverted SEO geek, does he like to play games, or he is more serious kind of person, is he competitive or real team player, is he on Squidoo every day or just occasionally... Of course you will never know for sure, but don't count on lensmaster who gave only 20 'likes' in four years to give one to you.

Apart from badges you can tell a lot about a lensmaster by his level. Level 80 is pretty hard to achieve and most of the most respected lensmasters are in this level. But there are already more than a dozen on the level 81...

By leveling up on Squidoo you get some interesting rewards but this is too specific for this wizz.

And there is special status: being a Giant squid, what means you have published 25 great lenses (manually checked) what I managed to do after several months of learning and working...

7. You could learn a lot on Squidoo. Before I joined this platform I have had no idea about SEO and here you could not only learn all the tricks of the trade, you could actually ask lensmasters some more specific questions. And some of them will actually help you.

Forget about SEO, you could learn a lot on almost everything, from Asperger's syndrome to zebras.

And, because this community was so big, I had also learned a lot about human psychology (and being officially dramatist by profession I have already known a lot before). Here you could study huge palette of human characters and their emotions.

If you like to switch from your daily routine to some news sites, you could also replace this habit with new one: checking what's new on Squidoo!

8. Don't get me wrong. Not everybody on Squidoo was nice. But pretty good percent of its users understand humans can achieve more if we work together. You can find people who will offer you a word of encouragement, a good advice or a backlink. And if you persist with your work and building your reputation, all this adds up.

Squidoo had a lot of organized programs to help lensmasters to start, make progress, exchange information and so on.

It also had a lot of magazines, what are really sites to support lenses from specific niches and could serve as powerful backup in case if Panda, Penguin or some other similar beast striked again!

Fan clubs on Squidoo were dismissed because they were abused, but a lot of lensmasters organized themselves outside of Squidoo to support each other on social sites, shared blogging platforms and so on and on...

9. Squidoo design was so SEO friendly for some time my biggest problem was that lenses made better positions in search engines results than my sites supported with these lenses.

Just a mere look at design of the site can teach you a lot about authority (PageRank) and how it should be distributed through pages. Interlinking system is sensational, although there are some users who are tag squatting.

Spammers were problem on Squidoo but I believe this issue was not too big. At last two updates of the algorithms many other publishing platforms were badly hit, but Squidoo even made some progress (as a site, I can't tell for every individual page).

Update: Squidoo made some changes in November 2012. Not all were successful, so traffic and authority were decreasing from the beginning of 2013.

Squidoo lens creation was another textbook on SEO with html H1 to H7 tags, the non stop motivation to add images (spammers hate to do that) and default nofollow tags on sell modules.

Even if you don't have an idea what html is (I am almost there), you could make extremely optimized lenses!

10. Squidoo lens creation was addictive. I use it to support my sites and blogs but then realized my Squidoo lenses interest me more than my main pages. I created my articles on Wizzley to support Squidoo lenses but you can do the opposite. Or you can use it to test some keywords or...

Just don't forget this game can be great fun and also very time consuming!

Update: In September 2014 Squidoo lenses were transferred to HubPages (if lensmaster didn't opt out) and a lot of things changed, so i guess I have a material for two interesting articles:

10 facts about HubPages

and

10 reasons why Squidoo flopped

Which one would you prefer to read first?