May Payday & More Squidoo Changes

The other day was May payday at Squidoo. Tier payments were way down (back to 2010 levels) due to the reduced site traffic and continued site cleanup that Squidoo is performing.

Thankfully my earnings are holding steady thanks to the large amount of work I put in over December-January. While I obviously expected this work to help my earnings reach a whole new level it ended up just balancing out the reduced earnings. I can't complain though many other long time lensmasters have had huge earning drops across their accounts (and I would be one of them had I not worked my ass off for 2 months straight).

Provided Squidoo keeps going with the cleanup earnings will slowly start to pick up in the mid-end part of the year as they always do.

I'm happy with the progress Squidoo is making thus far but it still pains me everytime I visit the forums and see people posting about locked lenses. I always take the time to check out a cached version of the pages and some are definitely getting caught up by mistake which is unfortunate.

I still can't get over the fact that Squidoo should have been working towards site cleanup years ago when HubPages was first hit. Had Squidoo stepped up its game there and then they could have introduced new standards slowly overtime making it a better experience for everyone.

April Payday - Website Updates - Over Squidoo Community

Today was April payday for Squidoo, it fell about 15-20% short of previous months payment but that was due to the sharp drop in tier payments that occur during this time of the year (deleting a lot of lenses from Squidoo and the Google slap didn't help either).

It will pick up over the next few months as it always does and I've increased my number of tier 1 and 2 lenses with some recent tweaking (along with the fact that there is less junk to compete with, yay Squidoo!)

My website is growing nicely (Games Like Finder) it is a bit annoying that I can't really launch it with some powerful DoFollow links from my own Squidoo articles that I've spent 5 years building up, but hopefully that won't be too far away.

To finish off I realised today that I am just over being part of the Squidoo community in general and really miss the old SquidU forum. I can't really put it into words and I probably shouldn't but I just don't feel like I fit into the new forum or even the Yuku forum. Can't really explain it, but had to get it on paper (online paper anyway) and out my head.

Squidoo Goes NoFollow

A few days ago Squidoo shocked its users with a rapid change, they introduced NoFollow on all outbound links. Talk about unexpected!

Don't get me wrong the decision is a good one from HQ but I find it hard to believe that Squidoo didn't already have something in place before it reached this point. All the other major writing platforms (Wizzley, HubPages and Zujava) have some sort of requirements before your links go DoFollow so why didn't Squidoo make Giant status the requirement ages ago (or something similar)?

Everybody is jumping up and down with excitement with the change and I don't have any complaints either, although I am slightly saddened by the fact that my hard work on Squidoo can't be used to boost my blog or related websites. I'm glad a few other lensmasters have brought the issue up as well (like Spirituality's post, who sums up my view perfectly).

Hopefully it will turn around the recent Squidoo slap that seems to have plagued the site and make it future proof. I'm still relatively unaffected compared to some others with drops as big as 50% (if not more).

I was going to continue this post and talk about the growing feeling of being a Squidoo outcast but I'll save that for another day.

New Website And 2 Squidoo Top 100 Lenses

I'm excited to share that my new website is now live and has got 10 game reviews up so far (I plan to have several 100 eventually). The website is available at http://gameslikefinder.com/. I'm mostly still experimenting with things for now but the core features are already there.

I'm also very excited to announce I now have two lenses in the Squidoo top 100 (first time ever), I'm thinking a combination of the Squidoo changes (like and blessing restrictions) and increasing traffic to the particular lens are the main reasons for its success.

In other Squidoo related news I managed to finish going over all my lenses, I had very little to fix up and only had to delete a few lenses which I no longer had a passion for. I'm very confident in the Squidoo platform moving forward and can't wait to be part of the new and improved (number one) writing platform.

Blog Cleanout

I was just checking out Webmaster Tools for one of my websites (one that has been struggling as of late) and was shocked to see that I had 300+ links coming from blogger, making it my number one source for backlinks!

This is definitely not something I wanted and I figured it was probably hurting my website with all the new Penguin and Panda updates that Google is flying at us. Looking further into the issue I noticed that my blog archive pages were being indexed by Google, something I really don't want since it means your content is double indexed.

Google is smart enough not to hit you with duplicate content penalties, but there is definitely no positive reason to have it all indexed in Google. As such I disabled all archive and tag indexing which should help out.

While going back I also decided to clear out some of my older low quality blog posts to cut down on poor content even more. Hopefully it will help boost my blog and my linked website.

March Payday & Squidoo Puts The Foot Down

Yesterday was the Squidoo March payday, I had a nice little payday and was pretty happy overall considering the early months of the year are terrible for Squidoo.

Everybody was also welcomed with an important Squidoo announcement regarding the continued effort to cut down on spam and thin content. Combine this with the like and blessing limits I expect to see some massive increases in Squidoo earnings over the next few months as I secure more top tier (and second tier) spots with my lenses.
With so much change happening on Squidoo currently its hard to comment on any of it while it is all still up in the air but hopefully it all works out.

Happy 5th Squidoo Birthday To Me!

A few days ago I turned 5 on the Squidoo platform, I can't believe its been 5 years already!