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Pages on Squidoo that had enjoyed high rankings in Google have been dropping in the search engine's rankings. Spam has been cited as the culprit.

Google Squishing Squidoo Over Spam

Marketing expert Seth Godin created Squidoo as a site where anyone could easily create a 'lens', which would be a user-created page that takes a deeper look into someone's favorite subject.

As with all good things on the Internet, abusers came along to try and game the system. Jason Calacanis posted a spam he received, with links going back to Squidoo pages, as an example.

Calacanis also mentioned in a separate post how some SEO folks he chatted with on his podcast adored Squidoo for its ability to "game the system."

"If SEOs love your platform you have a HUGE problem," he said.

Google has evidently noticed the issues with Squidoo. As a result, plenty of Squidoo pages have been knocked back in the search results since July 7. Squidoo announced anti-spam changes to the service on July 5, but it appears that was too late to stop Google from penalizing Squidoo's offending pages.

Blogger Ed Dale suggested a trio of reasons why Google may be placing Squidoo sites lower in its rankings. Dale doesn't mention spam at all, or low quality pages, as possibly being a reason for the changes.

Google tends to be straightforward in its anti-spam efforts. If Matt Cutts or others who do Google's spam fighting catch pages that violate Google's guidelines, the hammer gets dropped. That looks like the case with Squidoo.