Jason Calcanis points out that the bad Search Engine Optimization (SEO) crowd is taking advantage of Squidoo.

The culprit as Jason sees it is older content sitting on the site without much real value. The bad SEO crowd uses sites that don’t audit user generated content to create what Jason calls “an SEO trap.” I guess this trap can occur on any site that ‘gets big’. But the real issue comes to light as a larger percentage of a site gets taken over by low value content.

The dilemma for smaller web services comes from the fact that removing content from the site means that page views and aggregate totals for content and users can decrease. This may appear to be a bad thing from the traditional ‘page views and users counts rule’ perspective. In the end auditing content is a really good thing for users of a site. So while we could have a lot more podcasts in our Blubrry community, we choose to have fewer for the sake of our users.

As organizations build community sites they need to ask themselves a simple question. Will the real users of our community find fresh, relevant content? Or are they more likely to find something that tastes like spam?

We’ve done what we can on our Blubrry site to keep the content fresh. We’re constantly searching for spam feeds or non-producing shows. We ping producers of fading shows to check if they’ll continue to produce content.

Of course, it helps to have a tool that can allow you easily identify and remove low value content from your community.