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Did your lens get a content warning?

Or, let’s use a gentler word for this than ‘warning.’ Heads-up? Early notice? Important info about your lens? We say all of that too, but either way it boils down to an advance warning. A notification that a lens is hitting our radars for questionable content. And, yeah, if you ever get an email about this, it’s important. Not skull & crossbones important, but probably ‘Hey, Will Robinson!’ important.

Here’s what I’m talking about… Today we ran one of our routine policy enforcement scans of a big batch of lenses and sent a warning note to the ones that failed not just one but several of our ‘spam content’ tests. These lenses weren’t penalized or unpublished, simply notified — and given a chance to improve.

A small percentage of the lenses in today’s batch were determined to have some combination of (meaning, more than just 1 case of) these problems:

• More than 10 cases of duplicated content on on more than 10 other websites. We’ve gone into this concept at length here.
• Too many spam words or spam content on the lens. Let’s say your lens talks about viagra and losebellyfat. Sorry, no dice. We can’t support lenses on those topics. This is also detailed at length here.
• Too many spam words on non-Squidoo pages that the lens links out to. This is especially helpful in catching ‘doorway’ pages to low-quality affiliates. The lens might look fine, but then it links out to pages that are up to no good. This check is a new addition to our system.
• Any blacklisted links on the lens. These usually include Adult content, and affiliate sites that have vastly abused Squidoo in the past.
• Spam in your Guestbook module. This was covered in a SquidooHQ post a few weeks ago but I know it’s still new and probably frustrating.  Here’s the problem: When there is comment spam on an unmoderated lens, it hurts your lens more than you might know. Other sites and search engines like Google don’t care who posted the spam, they just know it’s there. And usually take action against it. So if your lens is otherwise great but has comment spam on it, in great number and for too long, please know your lens could get warned and eventually unpublished. We’re really just trying to help…  And there is a really easy way to make sure this never happens. Moderate your Guestbooks, change your settings to require your approval first, and to send you an email for new comments. That way nothing bad can get through and take you by surprise.
• Plus a few other factors that Homeland Security says I shouldn’t give away, lest the spam discover workarounds!

The point here is this: If you got a warning today, please take it to heart and check out your lens based on the list I shared above.  Moderate the Guestbook and change your settings. Add more unique content to your lens. And if your lens has spam words or spam links, that probably means you’re writing near the edges of something we can’t support, so please consider going in a different direction or be prepared to have your lens unpublished.

And remember, right now these emails are just an early nudge to say, hey, heads up! We’ll look at the lenses again in 7 days and will unpublish any that are still hitting several radars, and will send you another email if that’s the case.

If you didn’t get any emails today, a) GREAT and b) definitely do still run your lenses through the checklist above and make sure they’re in the clear.  We run these scans in batches.

Finally: Why not more than 7 days of advance notice on this stuff? That’s crazy, man! Because, well, we’ve said 99% of this over and over and over again already. And second, because our partners and readers and search engines act quickly. If they see something bad on your lens, they penalize it either by leaving or worse.  So we don’t have a lot of time to dance around when our systems have determined something fishy is going on. And third: Here’s your more than 7 days, for those of you who didn’t go first. If you weren’t in this batch… consider yourself nudged!

P.S. I suspect there will be a lot of comments on this post. While we want to have good dialogue with lensmasters about this, we cannot support individual ‘my lens was warned/locked’ complaints or reports here. Comments like that will be removed, unless they are truly illustrative for the conversation. Thanks.