I reported in my Honest Way Blog about the sudden loss of page rank that nearly all of my previously ranked Squidoo lenses had suffered, but never got to the bottom of exactly why they lost their Page Rank. So I thought it would be proper to report it here at Make Money too.

Here’s the Make Money take on things: What makes it quite the mystery is that the Squidoo lenses were only recently given the page rank and haven’t exactly changed much since then except for the addition of a little more original and topic relevant content where I had time to do so. They don’t exactly make money hand over fist, there are no paid links in any of them and certainly no paid reviews, as those sites don’t allow anything other than true blogs to take part in their activities to make money.

I was baffled then.

All I could think of was that they had maybe been sabotaged by some jealous make money competitor to the themes I had created the Squidoo lenses for.

Now this sort of thing is not actually unheard of in some circles. In fact a make money Internet marketing friend of mine has been the subject of some truly nasty sabotaging of his articles at Ezine Articles, by a person deliberately and consistently going in there and giving each of his articles a bad vote, thereby diminishing the popularity of his articles and thereby reducing his ability to make money online.

That’s nasty, small minded and unnecessary, but all the same it is happening.

Could such a thing happen with Squidoo lenses? I wonder.

I checked all my Squidoo lenses (all niches including the make money ones) thoroughly today and found in some of them something I didn’t like the look of. One of the modules you are able to add to a Squidoo lens is what is known as a “links plexo”. This module allows you to add links to outside sites, such as your own and then other people can vote for them if they think they’re worthy of a vote. It doesn’t mean much unless your Squidoo lens gets a lot of traffic and then it can help to drive traffic to your more popular sites in order to make money from them.

What these links plexos also allow is for other people to add links to the list. I didn’t realize that anyone would bother doing that with my Squidoo lenses, because of course they were all PR0, weren’t really geared up to make money and who would bother to get a link from a PR0 Squidoo lens that didn’t make money?

Well, that was before some of them got their PR3.

Then I guess some clever sneaky people must have cottoned on, saw a way to make money from them and added some of their own links to some of my Squidoo lenses. Not many, just one or two here and there so as not to peak my suspicions.

Well, as I said I didn’t like the look of other people adding links to their sites from my Squidoo lenses, so I naturally went in and deleted them. That was before I’d noticed the loss of PR.

Now I’m wondering if those links (which I know I should have checked out but didn’t because I was in a rush) were not to legit make money or make money online sites, but to bad neighbourhood sites? That might have gotten my Squidoo lenses tracked on Google’s radar and zapped!

Maybe.

I don’t know but if I get time I will check with Google and see what their take on this is. I’d be interested to know one way or the other.

Terry Didcott
Make Money