You've heard of the "Google Slap"? Well, prepare yourself for the "Squidoo Slap".

Lots of people have seen their Squidoo lenses plummet in the Google rankings over the past few days. A large part of the reason for this is some new anti-spam measures that Squidoo has taken, combined with a suspected penalty of Squidoo.com on the part of Google.

Squidoo has been a bit of a double-edged sword lately. It's a great Web 2.0 platform for marketers because they encourage people to market with their lenses. Unlike many other Web 2.0 sites such as Myspace, where marketing is frowned upon or even banned entirely.

But the other edge of that sword is that being a great place to market attracts spammers, who are always on the lookout for an easy mark. And Squidoo has had its share of spammers recently.

One of the problems they've had is with the fact that they allowed iframes to be used within a lens. An iframe is basically a way of inserting a web page from another site within a page on Squidoo.

The problem is that opens Squidoo up to abuse in the way of redirects to other sites. So when you view a lens on what you would expect to be a G-rated subject, suddenly you're redirected to a porn site.

Not cool.

The openness of the site has also made for a lot of less-than-stellar (way, way less) lenses that have absolutely no value to anyone except the lensmaster.

So Squidoo has put some new policies and protections in place to combat these things. You can read more about what they're doing in the following posts on the Squidoo blog:

An update on spam (including iframes)

Fighting Spam, part II

What’s next for Squidoo?

So where does this "Squidoo Slap" come in?

Well, it seems that a lot of Squidoo lenses have lost their rankings in Google - significantly in many cases.

For example, I have some lenses that have dropped from #5 and #13 for their main keyword to nowhere in the top 100. These are lenses with good content and multiple modules, including modules that make money for Squidoo. They haven't lost any lens rank within Squidoo itself, but Google has still dropped their rankings.

Discussion is starting to appear on various forums about why this is. Some of what I've read is pure drivel, other things sound reasonable.

The reality is, there's no way to know for sure what has happened because Google doesn't speak openly about things like this.

I do have my own opinion, however.

I believe that Google has devalued Squidoo.com overall, most likely due to the amount of junky lenses and outright spam (like the porn redirects) that were showing up on their site.

I mean, imagine for a moment if a Squidoo lens with a top 10 ranking for an innocent keyword phrase was redirecting to a porn site. Do you think Google would receive some complaints?

I doubt it would take long for them to give Squidoo.com some kind of manual penalty, at least until such time as they cleaned up their site.

I have no proof whatsoever, but I suspect that Google warned Squidoo that this was coming. The changes at Squidoo started right before the rankings of all these lenses dropped. The timing is just too much of a coincidence for me to believe that there wasn't some sort of warning from Google.

So what's the long-term consequence?

I expect that once Squidoo weeds out a lot of the crappy lenses, the ones that pass muster will start to climb back up the Google rankings. It may not happen overnight, but if you have quality lenses and continue to maintain them through this, you'll probably come out okay.

The good news is that by tightening the reigns a little, Squidoo is going to get rid of a lot of the people who are looking for a shortcut. They'll just move on to another site that is an easy mark (look out Hubpages!)

That leaves Squidoo to those of us who are willing to put in a little effort. We'll have less competition from the "no hard work" crowd, and ultimately we'll come out ahead.

UPDATE: I just wrote a follow up to this post