Squidoo was a really great tool for bringing in traffic not so long ago, until Google started penalizing anything that came from the site, due to so many spammers taking advantage of it, but it’s been a while, so I’ve decided to take another look at it.

It looks like Squidoo has taken the steps necessary to get rid of most of the people spamming their system and have made their content much more relevant. This, it seems has gotten rid of the penalties that they have incurred before. An example would be a search for “Michelangelo’s David.” A Squidoo page, or “Lens” as they call it, about the famous statue ranks on the first page of MSN, Yahoo, and Google. There’s a reason for this though. That page actually contains a lot of good information that can be very helpful to anybody interested in that particular topic.

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If you own your own site, you’ve likely had the great fortune of keeping a sitemap.xml up to date. Well, now you have the great fortune of keeping a video sitemap up-to-date. Sorry for the sarcasm, it’s just been a tedious process for me in the past, especially when I come from an SEO agency in which I had to manage more than 70 clients at a time.

A video sitemap is actually a great idea.

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Google has been making so many great updates to their services, it’s hard to keep up, but of course, they’ve done it again. The service of interest this time is Google Maps.

Google has now added some new functionality to their already awesome app, Google Maps. If you do a search, you may find the results showing Google Book search results, photos from Panaramio (if they have been geo-tagged), and even videos from YouTube. I’ve also noticed photos being pulled from credit.net which is owned by InfoUSA, so if you don’t already have a listing with InfoUSA, which you should, I definitely recommend you do that right away.

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When you are searching the natural listings in Google, have you ever noticed a PlusBox under the listing? These are normally used for either a Google Map or a YouTube video.

It’s a pretty cool function actually.

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In an attempt to protect the privacy of those who have been captured on Google Street View doing something embarrassing, Google has announced that they will be blurring out all faces in the service, along with license plate numbers. This will start when the Street View service launches in Europe and they have stated that they are thinking about doing the same with the U.S. version.

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