Squidoo Rule Changes 2009 - Your Quick Guide
Quick tips to help you Understand the Squidoo Policy Change
Jun 19, 2009
Squidoo is a great content site that allows anybody to publish their own content online. Each mini site is known as a "lens" and allows people not only to share their knowledge, but to earn income at the same time!
The problem with having such an open community is that there are some people who chose to take advantage of places like Squidoo. Looking to make a quick buck, they promote dodgy products and prey on the desperation of others and it looks like Squidoo have had enough.
Now, that's not to say that everyone who uses Squidoo is up to no good, in fact the opposite is true. Squidoo is a genuine opportunity for anyone to share their knowledge, promote their business or just write for the fun of it. As a bonus, Squidoo is also a great tool for obtaining backlinks and search engine rankings if content producers know what they're doing.
Your Quick Guide to Understanding the June 2009 Squidoo Policy Update
It seems as though Squidoo is targetting specific topics and niches to stop spammers trying to use Squidoo as their own playground. They say that for people who are doing the right thing within the Squidoo community they are very unlikely to notice the difference, so here is a point form version of what you need to know about the new Squidoo Policy Changes.
1. No Spam - It has always been a policy of Squidoo not to allow spam, this continues and will get tighter.
2. No X-Ratings - This area of Squidoo will be closed down forever, the lenses locked. I guess this will disappoint the Squidoo users who took part in this area, the justifications include lack of advertiser interest and increased spam rates in this part of the community.
3. No More Junk - For some internet marketers this may cause a problem. Using a lens to purely promote the following topics in a "salesy" way will no longer be tolerated:
- - Health related topics such as diet pills, hoodia, acai berry, pharmaceuticals
- - Lenses promoting affiliate programs
- - Gambling Lenses
- - Credit Card Debt Lenses, Forex, all those sorts of things
- - Lenses promoting Hate
- - Ilegal downloads, Free ringtones etc
These topics are all referred to as "Squidon't" Topics. These topics generally revolve around heavily promoted affiliate schemes and somewhat questionable practices.
4. No Overly Promotional Lenses - There cannot be any more than 9 outbound links to a single domain from a Squidoo Lens. There is no limit on the number of outbound links, just the number of links out to one single domain.
How the New Squidoo Policy will Affect You
While these new policies may anger or frustrate many people, the Squidoo team have tried their best to be fair. The implementation date for the changes to the guidelines is Mid July 2009, which gives people an entire month to tweak and change any lenses they think may be at risk of being locked.
There is a peer reviewed area within their forum that allows lense owners to seek feedback on their lenses and the new policies. Not only that, but lense owners have the ability to export their content out of squidoo before lenses get closed down, this at least means they will not lose any hard work and are able to move it to a new site.
While there may be some frustration or even some backlash for the decisions Squidoo has made and their new guidelines, overall the Squidoo site will only grow in quality with such guidelines in place.
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