Big news today for any SEOs using Squidoo for link building purposes, as Bonnie Diczhazy, the Head of Community at Squidoo announced that all outbound links from Squidoo will be nofollowed. The change is effective immediately, though they say it may take a few days for the change to rollout due to caching issues.

I just checked my profile and all my lenses, and yep, they’re all nofollowed. Just goes to show that you don’t want to invest too heavily on a third-party platform. I was able to find a hack that allowed me to remove the nofollow attribute from my profile page (e-mail me if you want more info), but we’ll see how long that lasts.

Squidoo says in their announcement that they “eventually hope to start giving our best (and most trusted) lensmasters ‘follow’ privileges on a case-by-case basis”. This could actually be a boon for SEOs, as it raises the bar for those who want a backlink from Squidoo and increases the value of links from the site. As long as the process isn’t too onerous (I’m guessing it will be for Giant Squids), it could be worth it to invest the time to get Squidoo’s recommendation.

For now, I see the change as a big reset, since all the old sites out there which have invested heavily in Squidoo have now lost all their links. Now it’s just wait and see to see what the process is like for getting the nofollow removed.