Trusted sites - squidoo seo ponderings
There is every indication that google ranks sites based on all kinds of things: one of them being whether it ‘trusts’ a site.
Google trust is composed of several aspects (some of these are speculation):
- age of the site
- trusted links to that site
- type of domain (.com , .org, .info, .tk)
- amount of links to that site
- signs of spammy content
The question is: is squidoo.com a trusted domain? I’d say the evidence suggests that it’s (still) on the border of being considered spammy.
There was the sudden loss of google rankings in 2007 which clearly meant that at that time squidoo was considered spammy by google. Rankings recovered to some extent after that so I’d say squidoo is on the upside again. There are too many lenses that do rank decently… I don’t think google considers this a spam domain that much anymore.
BUT there is one sign that it’s still in the neighbourhood of spammy: the serp changes. Lenses that rank well may loose their rankings quickly (and vice versa). As I said yesterday: more quickly than on most other sites. This could be due to the dynamic nature of many of squidoo internal links - but it could also be due to the domain not being quite as trusted.
2 Comments »
poddys said :
August 15, 2008 at 2:46 pm
The first domain I registered will be 10 years old on Monday - http://www.poddys.com was created on: August 18 1998.
It’s weird how some of my lenses, like my Bournemouth one, virtually don’t exist as far as Google is concerned, yet there must be 20+ pages that come up that reference it, even Squidtop where a cached page shows a link to it on the recent postings section. But you won’t actually find my lens. It’s very frustrating, and it’s not a spammy lens.
katinka hesselink - spirituality said :
August 16, 2008 at 3:20 am
The age of a domain is one of the factors in trust. But squidoo is old enough by now to have gained that type of trust. What pulls it down is obviously all the OTHER spammy lenses out there.
I’ve said this before: it’s of vital importance to all of us that squidoo keep fighting spam, because if it doesn’t - the whole site gets pulled down.
They do that pretty well actually, but still - compared to say wikipedia, where spam actually gets corrected, squidoo is a different story.
20+ non-trusted links are often not going to help if your competition has a more trusted domain and/or more trusted links.
On an aside: you an I are apparently online for a similar amount of time. I went online in 1998 as well and started my website in that year or the next (not sure). I got my domain name two or three years later (that’s something I could look up).
For now the balance still is that squidoo is a great place to express myself and to make some change
(as an international publisher I’ve still got to figure out how I’m going to find reliable affiliate programs that actually pay out in a way that works for me - squidoo is one such program).
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