Before I left on vacation a few weeks ago I set up some squidoo lenses as a little test.  I’d “read” that squidoo was dead.  Out of 12 lenses that I made – there are only a few that ended up ranking “well”.  Well means with in the first page of my targeted keywords.

Every site had 40 bookmarks, and added to some of the rss tools I use.  Nothing else.

The only ones that are ranking all had this in common:

• Keyphrase was in the url.
• Used the keyphrase as a tag.
• Made sure the keyphrase was in the title.
• I also used the keyphrase in the headlines of each section, and in the body.

ALL THEY RANK FOR IS THE KEYPHRASE I WAS TRYING FOR – nothing related.

The keyphrases weren’t cake either – but they weren’t super hard.  I could have done the same thing with a WP blog and 5 posts with a few links…. however, squidoo saves the cost of a domain for a long tail keyphrase.

My guess however is that squidoo won’t be worth crap soon – guess it’s time for a more “private” type of squidoo.  Like you apply, get accepted, that’s it.  Spam or lose your account your done.  Unless you get a new phone number.  Sure people would still abuse it – but it could be set up to be self moderated. Users can vote down others pages, etc…