The End of Squidoo Groups?

Being the curious soul that I am, I thought I would take a look at some of the statistics for my lenses today. I was particularly interested in looking at those for my Squidoo Group, Handsome Hunky Men.

Over the summer, it had suffered from the "no recorded Squidoo traffic" syndrome and consequently plummeted in the rankings. Then, around the beginning of September, Squidoo turned the traffic faucet back on and its lensrank began to recover. Today it stands at #4 in the Top 100.

That recovery may be short-lived, however. The traffic appears to be in decline yet again. So, I did some searching. I put the URL into Google, and while the Group is still indexed, its title is now showing as "Squidoo : show". I went back to the Group and, yes, up in the left hand corner, the Group's title has disappeared and is now replaced with the same words. In fact, it looks as if all the Groups are indexed in this way. The meta description doesn't look to be as it should either. This is obviously not going to bring search engine visitors to the Group, as the keywords to attract them are no longer there.

Squidoo's decision to overhaul its Groups and purge the bad ones - and any interim changes to the concept - now appears to be hurting those that are still trying to administer the ones that remain. Not only through what I have already described, but also because some of the tools provided, such as RSS feeds and poll modules, simply do not load.

If it is Squidoo's decision to jettison Groups altogether, I wish they would make that decision now and put us out of our misery. If not, at least make them accessible to the outside world and ensure that lensmasters have fully functioning tools with which to work.