Squidoo Is Hunting Down Affiliate Lenses

Squidoo Is Locking Lenses That Are Now In Breach Of Their TOS Here’s Why…

If you manage a Squidoo lens that you use to promote affiliate products… over the last few days affiliate marketers all over the internet would have noticed a big drop in their commissions or website traffic.

Squidoo is locking lenses that they feel are violating their terms of service and if you have been discovered or should I say reported by the community for promoting affiliate products you might want to check your lenses.

The first I knew about all this was an email I received with the subject line: Squidoo Lens Lock Notification For (Lens name)

Dear Squidoo lensmaster:

It looks like your Squidoo lens is violating some of our founding principles and Terms of Service. Lenses like this tend to get locked by the community, for any number of reasons.

In particular, your account has one or more lenses on some of our SquidDon’t topics. It’s simple: given our pedigree, our point of view and our dyed-in-the-wool, we-will-never-change-our-mind conviction on this issue, spam is not okay at Squidoo. Some topics are just so irresistible to spammers that we don’t allow them, even for the good guys.

And when I went to the site this is what I found on the squidoo url…

Locked Squidoo Lens

This also goes with a change they made a few months back telling everyone that they could now only have nine links on the lenses which was sort of falling into line with hubpages. Actually I thought this would have happened much earlier as there have been many lenses that were just solely junk.

These policy or should I say the Squidoo Don’t list has grown very large in the last few months to include a lot of other topics including weight loss in general where it use to only be things like green tea and Hoodia. I have now also noticed that it is also listing E-Books and affiliate programs. So you might want to check it out for yourself here at SquidDont before launching your next Squidoo Lens.

So if you are an affiliate marketer that has only been using these free sites to promote products I would have to say that your days are numbered. To find out more about how to survive as an affiliate marketer you might want to read our post on Evolving As An Affiliate Marketer.

I have be saying this to all my subscribers for months and now Squidoo is also proving my case you have to have QUALITY UNIQUE CONTENT not content that adds no value to the community of Squidoo. The people who only have been using the lens to promote affiliate products for free are the ones that are going to feel the pinch here, they are what I call the Lazy Affiliate Marketers trying to get maximum revenue from minimal outlay.

I am not talking them down for doing this, after all I have more than 40 lenses that do just that promote affiliate products, but I also realize the importance of posting quality content.

Oh and when you get your Lens Lock Notification you will have a chance to have it reviewed and you need to present your case as to why Squidoo should not delete your Lens. If its not important just delete it yourself I once had two separate accounts and had one deleted after asking for a review losing 20 lens all with PR and two as high PR4. Think long and hard about that as they are not flexible on the issue.

A Quick Update To This Post…. I Received A Reply From Squidoo!

Thanks for writing in, Ron.

There are topics we’re just not going to let people write about. We wish we didn’t have to do that, but it’s the best plan available to remove the bad actors that want to take advantage, while keeping the site open for passionate people of all stripes. We’re happy to let these topics exist elsewhere, but not on Squidoo.

It’s simple: given our pedigree, our point of view and our dyed-in-the-wool, we-will-never-change-our-mind conviction on this issue, spam is not okay at Squidoo. Some people disagree, and we’re ok with that. Some topics are just so irresistible to spammers that we don’t allow them, even for the good guys.

So there you have it as I said Squidoo is not flexible on this topic so create quality lenses with useful and quality content or you are going to have your lenses locked and deleted…