Real Impact of Google’s Squidoo Filtering

01. Aug 2007 | 9 Comments

Cam over at Web Cite has posted a nice article with some Hitwise graphs showing the drop off in traffic from Squidoo since the start of July. These graphs seem to back up the theory that the lenses were filtered by Google.

Squidoo Traffic Drop Off

A similar pattern also emerges when you check the url at Alexa too.

Squidoo Alexa Drop

It’s fair to note here that Hitwise’s data is usually much more accurate than Alexa (since it monitors data at the ISP Level rather than with toolbar installs) however both graphs show the same bleak pattern.

Although this brings up another question. I’ve had this happen to similar sites of my own over the past few months.

Almost like a 50% filter hits & the breadth of keywords you rank for drops significantly, check out this Google Analytics data for example:

Google Traffic Drop

This site is slowly recovering, but the drop is so instant that it makes you wonder why the filter kicks in, or even what the filter IS. Regardless of how many new relevant backlinks I generate, this site just can’t seem to shake the filter (which has been in place since February). It’s almost certain that Squidoo are suffering from something similar to this.

Anyone else noticed anything similar on any of their sites?

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9 Comments on "Real Impact of Google’s Squidoo Filtering"

TextAdSearch 01. Aug 2007, 10:43 pm

It was only a matter of time. At the end of the day G has to provide relevant results otherwise it will lose its searchers.

Mike 02. Aug 2007, 1:05 am

Most lenses DO provide very relevant content. It’s only maybe 10-20% lenses which were crap but Squidoo has already taken care of them and IMO Google totally overreacted with its filtering, to me it seems more like to demonstrate who the power has and nothing else.

From so many Squidoo lenses I visited and I myself do own a bunch I maybe came across 3-5 lenses which seemed spammy. There is no reason to whip all others likewise. And I’d say it’s more like 60-70% lenses were hit directly.

Pat 02. Aug 2007, 4:33 am

Yes, this happened to one of my sites in March. From one day to the next, traffic was cut in half. I don’t know why it happened either. Mine is slowly coming back too, but it has a long ways to go.

Margaret 03. Aug 2007, 12:54 am

An important point to make is that with the black hatters infesting Squidoo, there was ALSO a plethora of ‘jump sites’ at the same time, so that many keyword stuffed off-site pages misdirected traffic meant for Squidoo with camoflaged adsense ads. As visitors click on those camo ’squidoo links’ the click makes money for the site owner and visitors never get anywhere near Squidoo. These are also done with every conceivable misspelling of Squidoo a searcher may use, with every keyword set that seems to draw traffic to Squidoo. THOSE are the ones showing on Google search. It is hideous, it is thievery, and Google is permitting it.

Rob 03. Aug 2007, 6:14 am

ThatÂ´s why I prefer http://www.oondi.com

Fat Burner 04. Aug 2007, 8:06 am

Oondi? You are jesting surely? One of the very few articles I looked at was a pure ripoff from WikiPedia and another article had over 60 pages of comment spam (I got bored after 60) Nice try though.

Robert 03. Oct 2007, 6:35 am

Good for Google and Squidoo too. Boy I’d lke to be the person that figures out how to eliminate the various forms of spam. But at the least pc users should practice safe computing, by adding the usual(firewall, spyware removal software, anti-virus).