Are You A Squidoo Offender?
September 26, 2007 – 5:20 amIf you have been spending anytime over the last year in internet marketing, then you surely know of the site named Squidoo. Well a few months ago, what some call the “Squidoo Slap” took place and thousands of pages (lenses) were deleted due to questionable content.
This greatly frustrated a lot of marketers because they were riding the wave of traffic and Google love that was part of using Squidoo and as quickly as it started.. it came crashing down.
Or Did It?
First of all you need to respect the actions taken by Squidoo, they were getting hammered with people pumping out new lenses that offered absolutely no value, they were creating “spam lenses”. Well even though this was affecting many people, there was also a large amount of “Over Reacting” going on. Of course the people that did have “Spam Lenses”, were also crying in all the major forums around the net.. so, what seemed like a huge amount of concern, was really not.
You see, there are still thousands of lenses out there, getting great traffic and getting fantastic results, but it comes down to the principal of quality versus quantity and Internet marketers are notorious for “quick and easy”. The “quick and easy” lenses were the ones that got pumbled, but the quality lenses.. they stuck around.
Hmmm??? Kind of like quality blogs and websites versus spam ones, do you think there is a relationship here?
So what does this mean for Squidoo and the future of using it. I think it only means that it is going to be better!
Now Google will see the content is cleaned up and worth while, people will use it how it was intended and the results will continue to be great. There are however more rules that you must be aware of, which basically means that even if you are planning to build a quality lens, there are certain topics that Squidoo will just not allow.
Squidoo has revised its Zero Tolerance Spam policy to disallow certain types of lenses from being created. The reason is there are some topics are just irresistible to spammers, topics they are just not going to let people write about.
The 5 biggest offenders in the spam world are according to Squidoo are:
1. Pharmaceutical reviews and sales (including the recent Hoodia craze–we’ve been inundated with thousands of ripped content lenses on this drug).
2. Online gambling sites
3. Underage or violent sexual content
4. Sexual enhancement sales
5. Dealing with credit card debt
So if you are focused in these markets (for the case of #3, you are a pig if you are) then you probably are not going to want to use Squidoo.
You can read more about squidoo’s policy at: http://www.squidoo.com/squiddont
