Dead website Story #2: Squidoo.com and its lens and lensmasters
Squidoo was a web pages sharing platform that was founded by the brilliant marketer and book writer Seth Godin. Squidoo can be seen as one of the first platforms that tried to give power to internet users through interests social sharing and user-generated content. The model was simple but still innovative at this date3 it was about publishing all internet content, products, services, ideas, and links that interest you with the possibility for others to rate and rank the shared content. Squidoo tried to highlight experts from different topics and giving the power to talk through the medium of blogging and link sharing and commenting with a revenue-sharing model that lets users get money with ads. Webpages on Squidoo were called lens and their owners were the lensmasters. The founder of the platform as a great marketer played with meme my coining and creating a vocabulary that could distinguish and identify the platform and the users.
Here below is the graph of squidoo.com historical traffic and the date of google search engine algorithm updates dates plotted on the same graph.
You can clearly see that this website was getting at its peak of nearly two million visitors per day. This was a successful platform until October 2012. But in September 2012 and November 2012 google released Panda #19 #20 and panda #21. These three updates of the google engine algorithm impacted a lot the traffic of squidoo.com. As a consequence, you can see the traffic going down and down.
Squidoo was competing with HubPages a similar platform that also offered hubs for people to post content and get revenues with ads.
Here are the compared stats of these two websites between 2008 and 2014.
Here also you can clearly see how until November 2012 how squidoo.com was losing traffic at the point of being completely beaten by its competitor HubPages.
In 2014 squidoo.com was sold ….. to HubPages and all its content was integrated into this website. Deadlink identified all the past links of Squidoo and almost all of them lead to this kind of page
There aren't only dead links problems on the internet there are also webpages with title and content that did not still match here an example of an article about squdoo.com and its failure but the content of the article is replaced by content about football but the title « Seth Godin’s Failed Squidoo Webpage Stocks Over To HubPages” still being the same continue to get traffic from a particular person like me who are searching for this topic making me lose my time and wasting energy by landing on a webpage that I don't look for.
here it is
This is the second episode of the series dead website that highlights the story of past successful websites that went out of business because mainly they were not meeting the spec of a search engine algorithm update like google.
A google search engine update can kill your online business if you don't meet the spec. A google CWV update is coming and the spec is clearly announced and published by google. but the spec or run the risk of losing all your organic traffic.
because Seth is someone worth following you can read his amazing blog that I read every day here.
