Squidoo was one of the last sites to be affected by the Panda algorithm. In October 2012 while the rest of the UGC industry was suffering they were still riding high. Maybe Seth Godin the charismatic owner had undue influence with someone on the Google Panda team?
It became an obvious embarrassment. Anyone with access to Quantcast data and a knowledge of the writing sites could see a clear discrepancy in the way Google treated Squidoo and other sites.
Someone at Google pulled the plug at Halloween 2012. You can see the effect on the Quantcast graph - Squidoo is the red line, HubPages the blue. Squidoo began their rapid slide down.
In an ironic twist - HubPages claim to be taking the best pages from Squidoo as they close. It was HubPages who were hit early and hard by Panda. Somehow by laying off staff and making their authors jump through various hoops they have survived this far. No real recovery to be seen, and traffic is still down on 2010.
HubPages are currently ranked 70 by Quantcast and Squidoo 263. At the high point for Squidoo it was more or less the other way round. This is the power of Panda. Despite all the alternate methods of traffic such as the fabled social networking - the UGC staples of "How-To" and "Recipes" need Google search to survive.
2014 is seeing accelerated change in the UGC industry and mostly the change is closure. Previously the companies have re-branded or sold on. It does not look like that option was open to Squidoo.
In a world where a company can not make money from freely provided content, pay the hosting and make a little turn out of the advertising share - where next for User Generated Content?
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