Squidoo Traffic and Sales Still Dropping Like Stones

It's the very first time I experience such a drop in traffic and sales since my first day on Squidoo. In the beginning, I didn't pay real attention to traffic and even less to sales since I joined back in 2007 to provide my own self-hosted websites with some social traffic - Squidoo was primarily meant to provide curated info pointing to OTHER sites and wasn't meant to become a content site itself.

Then things changed and Squidoo as well. Then I started writing for traffic and sales on my own lenses instead of my sites. That is where I did a big mistake since all these years, I worked hard for today my work becoming useless. It now looks like a huge waste of time. Though I don't plan on moving all my lenses, I just monitor traffic and sales and make decision depending on which lens doesn't get traffic any more and, therefore, no sales.

According to Quancast, between 17th July and 17th August, Squidoo lost another 15% traffic. This means that it lost sales as well. And to be honest I think that unless we write on a niche that needs very specific and narrow topics, chances to make money on Squidoo are near to zero. 

No wonder why my Halloween lenses, out of which at least 5 should be already in tier 1 - they've always been there in August and all in September -  are still in tier 2 and, for some, tier 3 and even far from there.

I'm convinced that none of those in tier 3 and beyond will reach tier 1 or even tier 2 by mid-September. So from now on, I consider any kind of work on these lenses a big waste of time and not worth the effort. In case their traffic goes to zero, I'll delete them and will rewrite them for my own Halloween site. Recycling is the best option in this case.

Recycling useless lenses is indispensable - especially if they worked well in the past. We should move lenses that dropped too much and of which we're convinced they'll never recover. All it takes is some time to rewrite them and a place to host them.

However at the rhythm traffic and sales drop go, I'll be quickly running out of lenses on my account. I think that if I remove all holiday related lenses from my Squidoo account I'll be left with 10 or 20 lenses in total. Most of these lenses don't get traffic neither sales since they're historical lenses - history and intellectual stuff doesn't really work on Squidoo unless it's visual like art and things alike - and personal lenses - personal stuff doesn't provide traffic neither sales. 

Although stats are particularly alarming, HQ doesn't seem to worry about neither pay attention to them. They still keep on their new way of doing things, not listening to those that ring the alarm bell. They seem to want to guide the site to the big black hole... I wouldn't be really surprised if this was deliberate, a way to get rid of such a huge site to manage or for whatever reason. But all in all I'm not convinced that their will is to keep the site up and running the way it always was.

From the posts I can read in the official forums, new comers and eternal optimistic members, crowd followers, they keep claiming that building new lenses will help the site recover. However, while THEY keep building lenses, I - and every other member checking the stats on professional sites - know for a fact that traffic is still dropping, that Squidoo is NOT in Google's good graces any more. 

Most lenses have been copied on other sites and, Google's new policies giving priority to fresh content, indexes this copycat content higher than our lenses. What does HQ do for such things not to happen? Nothing. They punish their lensmasters for having their content stolen but wouldn't lift a finger for such a stolen content de-indexed from Google's page results.

This would however be a positive step if HQ would report any stolen content. They're surely have more power than individual lensmasters for such content to be taken out from Google's index. In addition they have all the data related to all created lenses: date, modif dates, actual content owner, etc.

 

What should we do ? What can we do to help Squidoo recover ? To say the truth, I'm hopeless, I think that anything we can do is useless. Squidoo's still sinking and nothing can save it unless Google decides otherwise.

So from now on, I'm going to closely monitor my lenses and more each of them that's sinking.

Posted by Squidoo Angel Prosperity66