There has been a lot of chatter about Squidoo as of late, and most of it isn’t very good. Squidoo, a company that…nevermind…the official description is here…has supposedly become a bit of a haven for internet marketers, and that is rarely a good sign. My take is this (including some background):

I put up a lense over a year ago. Squidoo was barely off the ground, and I was simply curious as to what it was all about. I spent about an hour doing it, and was left with the impression that the whole bit was pretty easy to use and might make a good tool for the soccer mom set. Sometime later, I had an email exchange with Seth Godin on an unrelated topic, one that frankly left me with a bad impression regarding Seth himself. Not long after that I was reminded that I had a lense out there, and I proceeded to take it down and delete my account. It was kind of a “screw this” reaction, and I thought no more about it until Jason Calacanis fired a cannon across Mr. Godin’s bow. I swung by Squidoo, and immediately found a lot of what people were talking about - tons of pages filled with nothing but keywords, and a ton of highly ranked lenses clearly created by SEO types. Not good.

Fast forward a few weeks, and you find Squidoo addressing the problem (or at least saying they are addressing the problem), Calacanis is offering congratulations for the efforts (as well as a watchful eye), all while the chatter escalates to the pages of TechCrunch. To complete the latest picture, there are plenty of folks offering up their opinion as to why Squidoo now has one foot in the grave because Google is penalizing them.

What I haven’t found is…

• Valleywag joining the funeral (in fact they pounced on Jason Calacanis instead…and no, I still don’t read ValleyWag…I just paid a quick visit for a quick search)
• Any reason why someone would listen to an internet marketing guy who misspells the word “Interrnet” in his blog header
• Anyone noting the fact that Google’s actions against Squidoo are at least slightly hypocritical, considering their very own Blogger was the last bastion of spammers and they dragged their feet on that one
• Anyone offering up any constructive suggestions that might aid Squidoo in their battle (a battle against a problem that anyone with a scalable, user generated content-based web app might face at some point in time)

I can only surmise from these observations that 1) Nick Denton likes Seth Godin and/or isn’t stupid enough to burn a bridge with a high profile marketing guy sitting in his backyard; 2) guru Ed Dale isn’t selling many get-rich-quick interrrrrrrrrrnet marketing programs; 3) Google has only gotten around to hitting Squidoo because the site just so happened to be next in line…a very very long and growing line; and 4) very few people have any good ideas while a lot gain self-worth primarily by kicking other folks when they’re down.

Number four seems to be the flavor of the day, and I’m curious to see what people are going to say when those presently winning the high school popularity contest (Facebook and Bebo) get caught in the same rut. Meanwhile, I am giving a thumbs up to Calacanis and Godin. Jason gets a brownie button for opening up regarding the situation yet still having enough class to point out when Squidoo was doing something right. And Seth gets a gold star for keeping quiet, head down, making an effort to solve a problem while faced with obvious adversity.

I hope Squidoo gets the situation straightened out and continues its climb on a cleaner slate, if for no other reason than to hear the deafening silence created by feet in mouths.

UPDATE/CLARIFICATION:

1) I did not drop my Squidoo lense because of any negative opinion regarding the service - in fact, I pointed out that the site would be well suited for soccer moms. If you can win them, you can win period, which is more than I can say for a lot of services that are, shall we say, less user friendly. I dropped out because I was a little miffed. It was an emotional and probably somewhat juvenile reaction - so be it.

2) I don’t hold grudges - in fact I practice flushing the memory of unpleasant experiences the moment I’ve garnered a lesson from them. I did not point out the issue I had with Mr. Godin because I hold a grudge; I pointed it out so there would be no question as to where a “spam-hater” such as myself stood, prior to commenting positively on Squidoo and the actions it was taking to right itself (particularly in the face of the bandwagon attempting to push Squidoo through the glue factory door).

On a final note: I like trends - trends are your friends. Betting on winners and shorting losers is fun and profitable. I also believe that information flow serves a valuable purpose, particularly in the case of public companies where the sting of a negative event should rightfully be publicized. Leave investors to digest and take action on that information as they see fit. It’s what makes markets such beautiful things.

Clubbing a private, closely held company does not, however, seem particularly useful to me.

Search engine spam may not seem to affect as many folks as some think, but it is a menace. Every time someone does a search, they are bound to run into useless (and sometimes ridiculous) links at the top of the page. Overzealous search engine optimization techniques are to blame, and Jim Hedger does a heck of a job explaining the tricks that make your search results suck.

Over at Spamroll, no artifice of electronic trickery is safe from scrutiny. With that in mind, one must follow the goings on with search engine spam (see Is Google Becoming A Central Theme in Spam Wars? and Blogger gaming search engines, from the inside out for starters). So I was surprised to notice the other day that some of the PageRanks that Google is reporting seem a little off. I have found PR3’s mingling with PR8’s on the first page of some results over at Google, as well as some 6’s and 7’s hanging out with 0’s down in the bowels (like the +20th page of result).

What gives? Has Google changed their reporting to get the SEOs’, link farms’, and spammers’ wheels spinning, or have they changed their algorithm somehow, so that PageRank doesn’t matter as much as it used to? The results are still in line at the top of page 1, but the PR for some just doesn’t make sense like it used to.

My personal opinion…don’t care. The results are great, and if Google can do something to make the gamers pull their hair out in frustration, then it is nothing but a good thing. If I am missing something altogether, let me know; my feelings won’t get hurt, and I will shut my trap about it.

I have a hard time believing that SEO firms have any interest in avoiding search engine spamming, but Web Host News seems to have found one. SEO tricks are what started the gaming process, and Google has been the attractive target for all make and manner of site, including their own blogs, ever since.

If the firm mentioned in the above article, SEO Inc, is attempting to kick off a trend, then kudos to them. I’ll keep my fingers crossed, but I am not holding my breath.

Lets face it folks..while email spam is still a problem, and a growing one, spammers know that it is all about economics. If they can’t make money off of the exploit, then it is time to move on. Secondarily, if the space gets crowded enough, with spammer and anti-spammer alike, then it is time to try something else. If the attention (and the cash) is focusing on other channels in cyberspace, then maybe some ingenuitive folks can get the jump on the rest, and the payoff, before that scam gets overrun.

Lets sit back and watch, as they take the search engines bait..

Right now, the attention is all over search engines. Keywords, ad space, search engine optimization, and other buzzwords cover the press. There are some holes in the way some search engines work and money is pouring into the sector right now, so scammers and simple cheats alike are running to it as well.

Link farming, ad click fraud, and keyword hiding are popular and effective ways of gaming results and their revenue end-sources, but these are short-term plays. Now we even have software and services specifically to sculpt keyword efficient content (see www.hotnacho.com).

I think it is all stupid, and here’s why:

The focus of gaming is short term. Search engines frequently remove “gamed” pages from search results, so cheats are constantly chasing their tails (this is true of link farms and keyword optimized pages). Second, the guys that run the search engines (particularly the big ones like Google and Yahoo) are not dumb. In fact, many are EXTREMELY smart. And they are aware of the problems with their own systems, and I doubt they are just sitting around with their thumbs up their butts, waiting for the problem to die on its own. They have a vested interest in fixing the problems, or a crashing revenue line and shareholder lawsuits are eventually going to rear their ugly heads. Last but not least, good content will prevail - if you want a steady stream of revenue, you know the kind that builds enterprise value, then you have to develop a core viewer base.

Now you may think some of the above thoughts are a little naive. Maybe they are. But they also reflect simple common sense business principals. Simple and common sense is the mean that everything in the natural world migrates towards. Simple is the shared pot for those who add real value to the online world. That shared pot is gargantuan, and gargantuan means there is plenty to go around. The trickery is the tail of the distribution curve, and I don’t think it is very fat.

You can read a little more about search engine spam in The Spamming Of Web Search, or type a popular keyword like diabetes, mesothelioma, or even SEO into your favorite search engine and see for yourself how irrelevant some of the top results are. But be quick about it, because I think they are going to disappear just as fast.