Google Slaps Squidoo with lowered rankings

[SEOold]

What the company may not have counted on, and certainly failed to prepare adequately for, was the swarm of black hat SEO practitioners -- a.k.a, "search spammers" – that have pummeled the service with pages intended primarily, and sometimes exclusively, to boost their organic search placement.

Recently, that oversight has caught up with the company in the form of a flurry of unwelcome attention from search bloggers and Google, which seems to have penalized the content sharing site following a drop in its rankings, several affiliate marketers and search bloggers have observed in the past week.

[clickz.com...]

[tedster]

Google is understandably not talking specifics about this -- but I wonder if the spam at squidoo was caught and devalued purely by algorithm, or if some manual attention also played into the picture.

I'd hope for a purely algorithmic approach, and after all, Google is clearly moshing things around right now. But given the high visibility of squidoo, and the challenges that Google's algortihm is having detecting some blatant spam (blatant to a human user anyway) I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this involved some degree of manual intervention.