No Spam Here

Squidoo makes great efforts to stop spam, plagiarism, and other rule breaking lenses.

Inevitably, some do get through, though. Squidoo only has a small HQ staff and it’s impossible for them to catch all of these pages.

There certainly aren’t enough paid staff to check through all published lenses so they use filters to catch abusive language, spam, spambait, and pornographic subject matter. This is a less than perfect system and, of course, false positives do happen which then require review by a real person.

Continue Reading »

Squidoo user names, the ones that appear on every lens as well as the lensmaster’s page, can tell us something about the person behind the name.

Many people, myself included, use a nom de plume and there can be many reasons for this. When I joined Squidoo, I predominantly wrote elsewhere and I wanted to keep the two activities totally separate so I chose the name ‘Stazjia’ for my writing on Squidoo. I did, however, put my real name in my information. I didn’t feel it was absolutely imperative to conceal my identity.

Continue Reading »

Squidoo - Why Is Your Lens Locked?

Squidoo’s forum has had several plaintive requests from lensmasters whose lenses have been locked. They ask someone to tell them why. As the lens is locked no other lensmaster can read it and give a detailed explanation. All we can say is the lens has tripped a filter or been reported for abuse and so is probably on the SquidDon’t list.

The very first thing I did before signing up for Squidoo was read their Terms of Service (TOS). It’s what I did when before I recently joined Qondio and even Facebook and Twitter. I like to know what I’m getting into. I also like to know what rights I have, to my copyright for example, and what rights the company insists on having. Make no mistake, when you join any online site, it’s their bat and their ball so they get to make the rules. You either comply or go elsewhere.

Continue Reading »

For the past year I’ve been in love with Squidoo. I liked the way it was so easy to make a new page, or lens as they call it, and write about any subject I wanted. I loved the community there – mostly very friendly and supportive. This can be important when you’re working alone from home.

A friend and I have a website called Allinfoabout which has been live online since September 2001 and has gone through many design and other changes since then. Now it needs to be brought up to date. The old fashioned html pages just don’t look right now.

Physically and emotionally, I wasn’t in a good place at the end of the 2007 and the beginning of 2008 and couldn’t face doing it so I discovered the benefits of Squidoo at just the right time.

Now, though, I’ve come face to face with the downside. For some months I’ve been disturbed by the number of spammy lenses and more recently by blatant plagiarism indulged in by some lensmasters. Then there are the lenses that pretend to have content but it is minimal, mostly pulled via links from Wikipedia and overpowered by all the sales modules for Amazon, eBay, Zazzle and other affiliates.

There are some great lenses on Squidoo made by dedicated and gifted people. Some of them are as disturbed by all the trash as I am. In fact there have been threads in the forum about the problem. One thread attracted 165 replies and over 2200 views. Discussion in this thread was effectively stifled by a moderator who very subtlely implied this discussion was not welcome. That put an end to it as effectively as closing the thread to further posts would have done.

So I come to my original question – to Squidoo or not to Squidoo? Do I want to be associated with a network that allows these kind of lenses or webpages to go out under its name?

So there you are – you’ve got the brand new, shiny website, pages on a network or lenses on Squidoo and you sit back and wait for visitors. Maybe you check your stats regularly and they reveal a dismal picture. No visitors! Or maybe you have one or two but you’ve got a feeling that they were your mother and your bestfriend. As an easy, get rich quick scheme, you’re off to a bad start – without an audience, there’ll be no clicks on Adsense or sales on Amazon or other affiliates.

So what do you do? First, register your site, page or lens with Google, MSN and other search engines and directories. This probably won’t act like a magic wand unless you are very, very lucky so you can’t sit back and relax.

We are lucky now, there are so many ways to promote webpages. When I did my first site in 1998, webrings were the best known way. Google didn’t exist, the big search engine was Alta Vista.

Now you can use the social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, etc, to promote your site. You can bookmark it on digg.com, del.ico.us, stumbleupon.com, mixx.com and scores of others. You can write a blog and promote it there. Watch out for a new one called Tagfoot, it should be out of beta testing soon.

You can’t just choose one of these. You’ve got to use as many as time allows. On the social sites, you’ve got to do the friendly stuff otherwise nobody will look at your entries. You’ve need to gather friends on many of them and by that I mean, ask other members to be your friend and then keep up with them. You’ve got to check out their links and reply to messages.

An important point is you must not, under any circumstances, spam these sites. You cannot flood them with your links. If you do, many of them will blacklist you. At best, other members will ignore your links.

If you are, like me, a member of Squidoo, there are many other sites you can use in addition to the ones mentioned above. See the Directory of Squidoo Lens Directories for links to them.

A simple way to promote your website or pages is to include a link in your signature. Be reasonable – if you have 10 webpages or lenses, don’t list them all, that would look silly.

Finally, the best way to keep visitors coming is to provide good content that people want.

Picture: My latest lens ‘Classic Poems for Kids‘.