All in all, even though the partner wasn't always of the best humor - he now is responsible for more business tasks, especially the one of the car we rent to tourists and residents - and my best friend of an absolutely bad humor for the whole two weeks, it was a great time spent in a lovely country.
However, Squidoo followed me to that holiday spot. Hey after all, I have my laptop on there, I thus can log into my account and see what happens.
And what happened didn't make me happy at all! While on my vacation time, I found out that two lenses of mine were flagged for... er... well, dunno the reason. At least at that time I was clueless because my mail provider didn't allow me to log into my mailbox from abroad.
Since I could not access my mails, I could not learn how many time would be left for me to fix the two flagged lenses. I suspected that one of them was flagged for being over commercial - it was a lens dedicated to Holly Hobbie games available in stores. It got a lot of content although also a lot of products (no more than 10 in any way since one can't find that many different Holly Hobbie games in stores). But over commercial was what I thought of when I saw that lens flagged.
Sadly for the other one, I had no idea what the reason would be. It was a Halloween lensography, filled with lots of content as I always did for lensographies and didn't see a reason for it to be flagged.
Then the very next day of this discovery, I wanted to log into my account and delete the Holly Hobbie lens while trying to save the Halloween one. Problem: my laptop died. So I could not do anything apart from waiting till the day I'd get back home.
I will not pretend that I had sleepless nights on there because of my lenses, but this was a bit annoying knowing that there was something to be done and not being able to do anything.
Given the low traffic and earning figures on Squidoo these days, I decided that I did not want to spend money going to a Publinet - cyber cafe - trying to find out more about the lenses.
Good on me, when I got back home on my desktop computer I could learn why these lenses were flagged, that I was given 14 days to fix them - and the 14 days were just expired.
All I did was deleting both lenses that were flagged. Were they "over commercial"? The Holly Hobbie one, was probably filled with too many products, although balanced content.
However the other one didn't feature a single ad! It was a Halloween lens, that would just feature my Halloween collection on Squidoo and would feature less lenses than in the past since I deleted almost 50% of my Halloween pages on there. Moreover, I always created lensographies WITH actual content as I never liked those that would be only filled with an intro and a bunch of links.
Anyways, even though some seem to be satisfied with the low traffic figures of Squidoo these days - "new lensmasters" for the biggest part of them - I am not. I know what Squidoo was capable of using the power of its best lensmasters. Most of them have left and brought their work along with them while others had it locked and deleted. I am NOT satisfied with the current traffic trends and certainly not with the direction things are getting to.
And because I'm upset with these numbers I don't waste my time trying to figure out why and what was caught in the filters, how to get out of that trap, etc. I can earn money doing other things. I'm upset with the loss of 100 lenses I created these past years but I just cannot think of spending hours trying to save them to see that, in the end, they don't get the traffic they used to generate in the past.
I am today hopeless regarding the future of the site. I think those days of "information" pages are over, they don't generate the kind of traffic they used to. Nowadays people want quick stuff, Google indexes stolen pages before genuine ones, with such bad configurations right from the start, we are all condemned to work for peanuts. Add to that the fact that we are unsure as to whether our lenses are going to be ok for a while and you will understand why I did not really bother saving the lenses.
Ah well that's life. Time to get back to work (on my sites). I'll see you later.
Posted by Holly Day
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