Sunday, September 29, 2013

An important note from Squidoo

If you're not familiar with Squidoo, it's essentially a user-generated website where users can create pages (called lenses) for subjects that interest them. These pages can then be used to sell products for profit or charitable donation. Topics run the gamut including food, books, travel, arts and many others. And, oh yeah, it was started by that dude named Seth Godin.

I visited the site in hopes of finally participating in the dialogue when a very interesting notification window popped up. Being a content guy myself, I was quite impressed by the notice, as it provided some guidelines on how content should be created on the Squidoo site. Creating engaging, digestible content isn't about trying to game the system; rather, it should be about real, authentic and personal content.

I repeat, it should be about real, authentic and personal content.

So kudos to you, Squidoo for taking this approach with your community. Many other content creators (myself included) should take heed and follow your mantra!

I've copied and pasted the word-for-word text from the pop-up notice below... 


An important note from Squidoo to all of our members!

We have a challenge and we need your help...

Thanks to you and the millions of Squids who have embraced The Scroll of Originality, Squidoo has reached records amount of traffic, charitable donations and user revenue. We stand (we always have) for passionate, original content. Squidoo is about storytelling, first hand reviews and recommendations.

Our site is only as good as the pages our users build, and lately, too many people are taking a short-term view and building pages that don't work, pages the search engines don't like, and pages that are cookie-cutter instead of personal.

We need all of our users to reconfirm that they're committed to our approach to content. The important rules are still the same: share your passions, tell stories and be personal.
Starting in March, 2013, we'll be running scans on all of our featured lenses to more aggressively detect spun content, junk and keyword stuffing. If your lens gets flagged it will get locked (and eventually deleted without notice) but you have the opportunity to fix these lenses and make them better. And you can start right now.

Check out this lens which explains how you can fix some of the widespread problems we're seeing before you get flagged. It's entirely possible that your lenses need no improvement at all, but if you've actively swapped ratings, added countless affiliate links and focused on the short-term, we need you to take action now.

It's simple: go through your lenses, make them personal, delete extraneous affiliate links and ugly buttons. Make them the sort of thing you'd like to see, not the product of gaming the system and industrialized linkbaiting.

98.4% of Squidoo is amazing. If we work together, we take all of our pages where they need to go.

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