Squidoo: A Review:

Rating: (4/5)

Squidoo is a self-publishing website that has a very different format from most other websites that allow self-publishing. Highly flexible in features and format, and providing numerous opportunities for direct income-earning on the site, Squidoo has the potential to appeal to casual users, to side-income-earners, to marketers looking for a free platform on which to promote their businesses.

My Experience with Squidoo:

I have created a number of pages on Squidoo; you can find them through my squidoo profile. My experience with the site has been generally good. In particular:

• The site is very fun to use.
• Squidoo has an outstanding richness of available features, including polls, discussions, quizzes, and more complex interactive features.
• The site has less of a problem with spammers and self-promoters than other similar sites, like HubPages.
• Squidoo can be easily integrated with other sites, such as listing products for sale in Etsy shops, or pulling dynamic content from other sites via RSS feed.
• High-quality pages can rank well in google searches with little or no outside promotion. When I first started using squidoo, the ranking tended to be good, but lagged behind key article directories like EzineArticles and Buzzle. Since the google farmer / panda update, Squidoo has seemed (in the case of my pages) to perform equally or better relative to those sites.
• When I have linked to my sites from pages published on Squidoo that were receiving regular traffic, I have seen a substantial click-through to my sites.
• The community, both on the site and the squidu forums, is very supportive and there is a positive culture and cooperative spirit on the site that I think brings out the best in the users.
• I have found Squidoo's official staff to be very responsive to inquiries. For example, when I suggested a new category, they added it immediately, and when I have reported pages as spam, they have deleted them and banned the offending users immediately.

Downsides of Squidoo:

• Squidoo can be a bit of a time-sink. Creating pages on it is more time-consuming than you might expect, and if you are primarily interested in earning cash, I think there are much better ways to use your time.
• I have found that material published on Squidoo does not tend to attract much local traffic unless you spend time actively participating in the community. This stands in stark contrast to some other self-publishing platforms. For example, EzineArticles and other article directories generally attract some local traffic without any promotion or participation required. I have also found that a catchy and well-tagged post on a wordpress.com blog, even one with no subscribers, will often attract a significant amount of local views from people scanning posts with certain tags.

What would make it 5 stars?

Squidoo is a very good site, and it is in that zone where it would be tricky to improve it substantially. But I feel it is not quite yet at the 5-star zone. Here are some thoughts of what could place it there:

• Better spam control and slightly higher quality standards. Spam control is pretty good on Squidoo, but some overly promotional lenses still slip through the cracks, and some are up for a little longer than would be comfortable. Squidoo has also, in my opinion, been weak on checking for duplicate content. Some lenses get published and listed on the site, which consist exclusively or almost exclusively of content taken from elsewhere on the web. While Squidoo takes these lenses down ASAP if you report them, I think a five-star site would have better checks in place and would not let them slip through to begin with.
• Slightly fewer ads. Squidoo is flexible in terms of the amount of ads that it allows on a page, but I think it allows you to go too far in the ad-cluttered direction. The worst culprits, in my opinion, are the infolink ads, an exceedingly annoying flash-popup over a fake "hyperlink" embedded in the lens text. However, some pages consist mostly of links to Amazon modules and come across as overly promotional. I think that requiring a greater portion of actual content or interactive modules to product-selling modules would enhance the site slightly.
• Faster site responsiveness. There is a noticeable delay when clicking just about any link on the site, and sometimes the delays can be several seconds long. Squidoo has substantially sped up the site since I've been using it, but I think they could do better. This will be a continued point of concern until the response time is instant for most of the clicks, especially while editing pages on the site. Even a delay of 1 second can slow you down substantially, especially when you need to make dozens of clicks while working on a page.

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