Squidoo faces a serious crossroads, one that effects our entire community. We’ve got millions of fabulous pages, hand-built by passionate people–lenses we can be proud of. Lately, though, a new tide of pages threatens the overall quality of our site.
As various organizations and individuals have worked to industrialize the human art of creating content online, a common tactic is “spun content”. This has always been a violation of our TOS, but lately it has become widespread. This involves using various techniques to produce thin, almost meaningless text that might read like:
“The best t-shirts, long sleeve shirts, hoodies and clothing for men, women, and kids. T-shirts, hoodies, long and short sleeve shirts and apparel are on sale below. You have watched the series, now own t-shirts for the whole family! Plus the most popular shirts and hoodies.”
Loading text with keywords and writing circular, impersonal sentences used to be able to fool the search engines, but it’s not fair to our readers and it doesn’t work any longer regardless.
We’re currently building tools that will search for lenses that use spun content and either delete the lens or the entire account.
Here’s what you should do:
Go through your lenses. Find the ones where you don’t have anything to say and delete them. For the rest, say something! Make it personal. Highlight your own experiences and your own points of view and make it yours.
As of today, we’ve turned off the ability to transfer lenses, as we’ve found that many of the worst offenders are template lenses that were purchased from other individuals. We encourage people who want to create content like this to go to other sites or to start their own.
Guys, we can do better than this. Without the trust that Squidoo lenses are personal and useful, we lose too much of what we’ve built for so long.
Thanks for your continued enthusiasm and for doing what we all set out to do seven years ago. Share your passions.
The Squids
PS – Curious as to what a great lens with lots of stuff for sale looks like? Take a look at this, this and this.
