quick spam case study on squidoo dec 2013

Hi guys,

I'm new here, and love this place. this is the only place i've been to where i've had results. so many people have helped me here and to list them all would take too long.

okay, so now that that's out of the way, on to the topic of the thread.

i did a quick spam case study on a squidoo lens for a topic that's quite competetive

i looked up the search results and found a that about half of those results were low PR and some were just dumb youtube vids with obviously spammed backlinks

i started the squidoo lens with original content. i tried to make it as useful as possible. since this was a hobby of mine (music) it wasn't hard to do.
how useful was the content? i got squidlikes and people commenting my lens without any promotion at all. even got a few giant squids to like it.

i had income from the adsense pool which totalled $0.14. this was after a month the site was online.

so i decided to scale it up with spam backlinks. here's what i did:

1) used a fiverr gig to get social bookmarks and pdf submissions
Pdf submit:
got an original article from one of my blogs related to the topic, converted it to a pdf ebook, submitted to 15 document sharing sites

social bookmarks:
submitted to 15 high PR sites

you can do this for free obviously, but i wanted to test manual submits vs mass spam submits. and i'm a lazy mofo and i have a day job so i'm willing to pay. plus i can test out fiverr gigs. virtualgirl2010 is the one i used. not bad. still trying out others.

findings:
the links weren't even indexed even after i've pinged them. i'm not sure if this is normal, but i tend to get this fairly consistently.

i waited for a month before trying something else.
this time i got a fiver gig to do 20000 scrapebox blog comments to the lens, and the 15 bookmarked links. this is going into a bit of tier 2.

findings:
the links were now indexed, but my lens wasn't anywhere in the top 100 serps. this time out of 20000 backlinks, 139+/- were indexed.

when i did my research, some of the results were just piggybacking on the homepage's PR, ranking with just under 200 indexed links. to have no movement on a squidoo lens is a bit weird.

i decided to go for broke and scale up the spam:
i pumped in 23000 forum profile backlinks using xrumer via another fiverr gig. i just thought i'd mix things up a bit
i also sent traffic to the lens using a fiverr gig. i read somewhere on here that that'll help with the rankings

my mistake:
should've done both separately because now i'm not sure which gig got me the banhammer. was it the forum spam or the bot traffic?

anyone could help with this i really appreciate it.

anyway both the forum profiles and the traffic were delivered on the 12th dec

my own opinion:
i do believe that the bot traffic was the one that got me banned.

my reasoning:
in squidoo, there are in-house stats were you can see traffic. with my fiverr gig, the vendor gave me a link to see the stats
i did not get a screenshot of the squidoo lens stats, but on the vendor stats, the amount of visits were around 200, compared to 10 for the lens.

they might have a way to detect whether or not the visitors are real.
* the fiverr gig i used claimed the traffic was real human traffic. i doubt such claims..

conclusion:
1) squidoo doesn't seem to mind spam backlinks, as long as they're not done too much, too soon.
2) i highly suspect that squidoo has a system in place that warns them against bad traffic, because they make their income from adsense.
3) if you need fast cash, don't rely on white hat alone. <200 links indexed out of 20000!! and manual submission? LOL

any feedback is much appreciated here. that's all for now! good luck moving on to 2014 and happy holidays!

Quote from the Squidoo staff member:

Lenses found to contain an excess of links from "nofollowed" blog comments or low quality "link directories" could be flagged or locked.

Click to expand...

I also have a number of lenses locked because of "suspicious inbound links". In couple of occasions these were AMR (article directory) links, but mostly blog comment links.

Cheers!

squidoo don't work for me. they closed several lenses and my new ones don't get accepted.
to much hassle for me......

They closed my 100 % whitehat, legal, regular user lense with comment "unoriginal material" or something like that, 2 years ago, since than I didn't even logged in. Stupid mofos. Everything was original, made by me personally with my own hd camera and phone camera, photos and videos about touristic zones where I live, about local life, local gift shops, beaches and other places with a lot of interests for people coming here on holidays. Nothing of amazon modules, adsense, ebay and other money making stuff, just a simply, high quality content, about 800 original hq words article mixed with bunch of photos and 3-4 videos, and just one link that lead to my website, mini directory where local people can promote their businesses for cheap. I don't know by which criteria they are "ranking" pages but is retarded, for sure. Not to mention that I didn't do promotion, fake traffic, comments, backlinks, etc, everything was intact and pure human traffic mostly from google and squidoo itself.

thanks for the replies. the reason i tried a squidoo lens in the first place was because i read several seo blogs who claim to be going back to squidoo. the site even mentioned using black hat tactics and managed to rank squidoo lenses on the big G.

i still think there are loopholes in my case study, would love to give it another go sometime. this time i would test gradual backlinking. and no fake traffic.

anyway it's safe to say that squidoo detects normal spamming with great efficiency at the time of this post. hope that helps. i'm trying an autoblog now. will post results soon.

Stupid. You spammed Squidoo crap all over the Internet and you wonder why they banned you.

archon10 said:

Stupid. You spammed Squidoo c**p all over the Internet and you wonder why they banned you.

Click to expand...

uhmm.. bro, a few things:

1) what do you mean "spam squidoo c**p all over the net?" I had a lens, and was testing squidoo's reaction to spam as recently as dec 2013 for the benefit of everyone here. the way i approached it, i got banned. do you even know what you're talking about? i'm not spamming squidoo all over the net, i am directing spam AT squidoo, on purpose, as a case study

2) you may think i'm stupid, and you're entitled to your opinion, but at least i'm doing stuff, learning lessons and sharing what i know so far.

have a great life

You spammed thousands of links through fiverr AKA "spammed squidoo crap all over the Internet." What do you think the guy did? He spammed forums/blogs and you got reported. I mean duh!