Squidoo is Ending: How Will That Affect You?

If you have never heard of Squidoo before, you probably won't get much out of this post.  However, if you have heard of Squidoo and worse, you have Squidoo lenses, then you've no doubt heard that Squidoo is shutting it's doors.

Disclosure: It's reasonable to assume blog author may get compensation for some of the links on this web page.

 

What Is Going to Happen To All Those Lenses?

Squidoo has made the transfer process a little easier by allowing it's lens masters to export the lenses as XML files.  Now, if you've ever seen an XML file, it's a lot of techy, geeky, gobbly gook code that only a true tech nerd would appreciate - sad to say I am one of those :)  The good news is all modern day browsers can render XML.  The bad news is it's not in a format that any of your readers would ever want to read.

I am a member of Wealthy Affiliate and a fellow member posted this morning that they wanted to know how to convert the XML into HTML to be placed on his website.  Again, there some good news/bad news here.  I'll start with the bad news first.  If you were going to do a traditional conversion you would need yet another techy, geeky tool like XSLT.  I won't even get into what that means because you probably don't want to know and I can lead this into the good news: I found a YouTube video that shows you how to do this.  And here it is:

 

If for some reason you are not able to see the above video, here is the direct link:

http://youtu.be/APmGK5vXVio

Did It Work?

As it turns out, the solution is pretty good, but not perfect.  You still need to transfer all of your images or other multimedia.  But the solution is certainly better than copying and pasting each subsection separately to and from your lenses.  And who knows, it could even give you the motivation to rework your content or enhance it.  Which brings me to my next point.

How Will This Content Rank on Your Website?

I'll get to this in a second.  But first some background: since you are probably a lens master reading this, you know that Squidoo has angered many a lens master over the past two years.  They have inadvertently (at least in our opinions) shut down lenses.  They claimed they didn't want sales pitch type lenses.  But they ended up shutting down many lenses that weren't selling anything at all.  I know this because I had several lenses shut down, having absolutely no sales offers whatsoever.  And several of those lenses were well liked by other Squidoo members.

But the truth is many of those lenses were ranking well and the lenses that are still intact, may still be ranking well.  So it is only natural to wonder how they are going to rank when transferred to websites?  After all, people used Squidoo specifically because it was a great ranking site to begin with, not to mention that they made money from the site as well.

So when putting the content on your own website, unless your website is already high ranking, could cause it not to perform so well.  I know, the content itself should be the driving factor and if it performed well on Squidoo, it technically should perform well on your website.  But only time will tell.