Will The Recent Change At Squidoo Affect Your 2010 Marketing

: Image via CrunchBase

Will The Recent Change At Squidoo

Affect Your 2010 Marketing

It was a ‘cold-water-in-the-face’ wake up for many marketers. As
Squidoo evolved into a SERP-ranking powerhouse, many savvy online
marketers finally invested in a guide to teach them how to jump on the
Squidoo bandwagon. They created content, did all the recommended
traffic tactics – and one day awoke to discover their lenses locked and
their efforts ruined.

Squidoo has made many changes in 2009 – and for good reason. They were
in the good graces of Google until one day the search engine giant
decided to teach them a lesson and slapped their search engine rankings
into the great abyss.

To combat this horrible effect, Squidoo knew what they had to do. They
had to lock down spam lenses, implement some new rules and take down
unsavory content. Gone were the porn lenses that were previously
allowed on this site.

A new Squid Don’t lens was erected to help guide lensmasters in how to
create a proper page on Squidoo. Many ClickBank products, which were
the bread and butter of some affiliates, were blacklisted.

No more teaching how to cure toenail fungus or how to lose weight with
acai berries. These topics were just too enticing for spammers, so
Squidoo had to make them off-limits for everybody – even those who
provided viable content about them.

Squidoo did create a great program called the Giant Squid program,
where lensmasters with at least 50 good lenses could bypass the filter
system they set in place – because they earned a badge of trust from
the creators of Squidoo.

They limited the number of links to a hefty nine, which is more than
generous considering places like Hub Pages only allow two. In the
coming year, Squidoo will be checking up on lensmasters to see who’s
abiding by their policy and who isn’t – and they’ll be cleaning house
on lenses that don’t comply.

One unfortunate prediction about Squidoo is that they will continue
finding new resources that help them make money. It’s understandable,
of course – but it inserts links and competition in your lens that you
can’t always turn off.

One of the best ways to get what you want on Squidoo is to become an
active participant in their SquidU forum. Here, you can interact with
the founders and worker bees on Squidoo – and they constantly ask for
your input on future decisions, letting you speak out about how it will
affect you.

For example, they’re considering giving lensmasters the ability to take
a live Squidoo lens and purposefully make it a work in progress lens –
but before they do, they’re asking for your opinion. Take advantage of
this open door philosophy because not many social networks have it –
they simply make the rules and you’re expected to follow them.

So for the spammers out there that were taking advantage of Squidoo’s
powerful Google-juice, good bye and don’t let the door hit ya where the
good Lord split-ya

For the rest of us that use Squidoo for driving traffic and generating
a few bucks occasionally, keep making those lenses and let your voice
be heard in the SquidU Forum.

Sincerely,
Steve Dougherty