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What Does 2010 Hold For Squidoo Lensmasters?

Many people have been shocked by the amazing success of Squidoo. Many of them watched from the sidelines as Squidoo became a favourite of the search engines.

Finally seeing what was happening many of the spammy type of internet marketers decided that they were going to grab a piece of the action! They created or regurgitated content, made a great play of following all the recommended traffic tactics – and then one day awoke to discover their lenses locked and their efforts ruined.

Squidoo has made many changes in 2009 and for very good reason. They were most definitely in the good books of Google until all of a sudden one day the search engine giant decided to effectively teach them a lesson and slapped their search engine rankings into the back of beyond. Previously it has been relatively easy to rank well for almost any search term and certainly for long-tail keyword phrases.

Clealry if Squidoo was to survive and grow they had to combat the effect, They were quick to act and they knew what they had to do. They had to lock down spam lenses, implement some new rules and take down the unsavory content.

Soon the changes started to be seen; gone were the porn lenses that were previously allowed on this site; a new Squid Don’t lens was created and publicised to help guide lensmasters in the how to and how not to of creating a proper page on Squidoo.

Many ClickBank products, which were the bread and butter of some of the internet marketers who acted as affiliates, were blacklisted. No more teaching how to cure toenail fungus or how to lose weight with acai berries. These topics were just too enticing for spammers, so Squidoo had to make them off-limits for everybody – even for those who provided viable content about them.

Squidoo put more emphasis on the Giant Squid program, where lensmasters with at least 50 good lenses were allowed to bypass the filter system they set in place because they had demonstrated that they could be trusted.

Even there though there are some lensmasters who have managed to achieve Giant Squid status with some very dubious lenses in terms of the depth and breadth of content. 2010 will see the Giant Squids being audited and those who don’t pass muster being removed from the programme.

Squidoo also introduced a limit on the number of outbound links to what I consider to be a very generous nine. Even then some people complained about it but when you consider that places like Hub Pages only allow two I think it’s a more than generous number. In 2010 Squidoo will be auditing lensmasters and lenses to see who is abiding by their policy and who isn’t and I predict that there will be some if not many that fall by the wayside.

As with many businesses Squidoo has fallen victim to the economic recession. The combination of advertisers reducing advertising spend and consumers spending less means that in 2010 Squidoo will continue looking for new ways to help them make money.

It’s more than understandable, of course but for many it means that they have to put up with links being inserted into their lenses that they can’t always turn off.

2009 has been a great year for me on Squidoo as I have continued to build lenses in all the areas I am interested in, month on month have increased my direct and indirect income from Squidoo, have spent some time as a Squid Angel with the opportunity to give something back and met some amazing people. I predict that 2010 will be another successful year and one which I am looking forward to!

Let me give you one last piece of advice about Squidoo. One of the best ways to get what you want from Squidoo is to give something back. Why not consider becoming an active (or even more active) participant in the SquidU (http://www.squidu.com) forum. At the forum, you can interact with the people running Squidoo.

They have made great efforts to improve their communication with Lensmasters and it has become more evident that they want to work in partnership. So you will find that they do ask for input from Lensmasters on future decisions, letting you speak out about how it will affect you.

Just as an example, they are considering giving lensmasters the ability to take a live Squidoo lens and purposefully make it a work in progress lens. Now you may have a view on the benefits or otherwise of them doing that. So before they take it forward, they are asking for your opinion.

I would suggest that you take advantage of this open door approach because not many social networks have it – they simply make the rules and you’re expected to follow them. Squidoo is different!

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