Squidoo is quickly becoming the favourite playground for SEO folks because of the extra attention accorded by Google. This is apparent from the heaps of lenses that had their content copied from elsewhere and lensmasters who can’t be bothered writing their bio.

I mean what’s not to like about Squidoo? It’s free, fast and fairly easy to create your own lenses (i.e. pages). You could also make some pocket money (50% split) while you’re at it, i.e. from Google ad clicks and Amazon product sales that originate from your pages. What’s more valuable is the ability to create trustworthy backlinks to your website for free - the lifeblood of any SEO effort.

The way it works is that you register an account and start creating lenses, and plug links to your website in the bio or content. You then try to increase your lensrank by getting others to vote for your lens, add to favourites, add to lensroll, joining groups and by increasing your authority as lensmaster. A great way to start is to add a link to your lens and participate in one of the many Squidoo link exchanges in webmaster forums.

Also, it’s a known fact that search engines like Google seem to favour certain websites and Squidoo happens to be one of them - just do a search for “xango” and you’ll see how well it ranks. Other websites in Google’s favourite list include Wikipedia, Ezinearticles and Goarticles.

Jason Calanis has criticized the use of Squidoo for SEO and blame it for the garbage you see on the site now. Nevertheless, I have created a lens entitled Singapore SEO out of curiosity and to see just how well it will rank on Google overtime. I’ll report back here with the results in 2 weeks time!

Update 22nd June: Read my conclusion about the Squidoo SEO experiment.

Update 16th June: The Singapore SEO lens is holding steady at #18 for “singapore seo” and is also now ranked #87 for “singapore online marketing”. I’ve also created a new Squidoo lens entitled Singapore Business Registration.

Update 15th June: the Squidoo lens disappeared from Google’s index for a couple of days for unknown reasons and then reappeared today at #18 of 1,300,000 results.

Update 09th June: the Squidoo lens got indexed by the 3rd day and immediately ranked #40 of 1,360,000 results for “Singapore SEO”.