If you have Squidoo lenses you need to read on.

It has been reported by many people over the past couple of days that Squidoo lense rankings on Google have plummetted. You have all heard about the Google slap, it now seems likely that Google has slapped Squidoo. I have several lenses and I have found this to be true. For one particular lense I had top 10 rankings. Now the lense is all the way down at 941.

It appears that Squidoo pages have been downgraded rather than removed altogether from the Google search engine results.

Why has this happened? There are some theories going around that it was due to all the free traffic Google was sending Ebay stores via Squidoo lenses. Another theory relates to the fact that Squidoo allowed iframes. This opened the door for porn site owners to exploit. Someone would be searching Squidoo pages with G rated lenses when all of a sudden they get redirected to a porn site.

We can all speculate as to why Google knocked down Squidoo however it does no good. Only Google knows what Google knows. People need to adjust their traffic strategies and move on. Squidoo have taken measures to stop iframes. As from 12 July all iframes were prevented from appearing anywhere on Squidoo.

It remains to be seen if this is a permanent slap or will Google allow Squidoo to clean out the spammers and then allow the good quality Squidoo lenses to climb the rankings again?

What can you do?

Number one is don’t panic. Take a look at what search phrases have been getting traffic to your Squidoo lenses and then establish yourself on other Web 2.0 type websites. HubPages come to mind. Don’t be silly and just take the exact same content from Squidoo and publish it on HubPages. You will then open up duplicate content problems. You need to create new content.

If you have Squidoo lenses I would love to hear some comments about what you have noticed with your lenses and the rankings they have in Google.