Does the New Amazon Link Limit Affect Lens Traffic?

So now Squidoo lensmasters are required to not use more than 20 Amazon links - this means:

• 20 Amazon modules featuring each 1 product  or
• 10 Amazon modules featuring each 2 products or
• 4 Amazon modules featuring each 5 products, and so on.

However, depending on the content your lens carries, you can also see the Amazon link limit alert. If you write a 400 words article, I'm not sure you'll be allowed to present 20 Amazon products (not to mention eBay modules). 

Does this new limit affect lenses? 

Things Change All the Time...

Things change all the time, we must accept it as it's always for the best.

Hm... Let me doubt about it!

However this is what you can read all around the Web nowadays, said by people who work for Google or simply just want to get in Google's good graces. Not only on Google's graces, though... Even in Squidoo's good graces, or any other web authority that might hurt them.

Some are so blind that they naively think that changes are always for the best. They just don't want to know how horrible changes can be in most cases. Or too stupid to just want to open their eyes?

A Brand New Search Term Introduced by the Lens Locks

While on checking this blog's stats today, I found a brand new search term that brought Web surfers to it. 

This new search term is certainly the result of the many lens locks these past months, lens locks that resulted into multiple forum posts relating to "getting your hands on Squidoo locked URLs" and then on some sales pages relating to "buying Squidoo URL locked list".

But people looking for a quick couple of bucks to make out of other people's misery are always extremely creative. So now one of the popular search terms is "where to buy locked lens URLs".

I'm truly sorry (joking, I'm not, I just don't like that kind of behaviors) for them but this blog will never provide them with the searched information! I don't plan on teaching anyone where to buy such URLs because if I was one of those "punished" lensmasters, I wouldn't want my URLs to be sold by anyone.

Well, there are times when I think that "now I've seen everything, I've heard everything". Nothing can surprise me any more. I've definitely seen and heard anything that's weird on Earth.

Seems that it isn't the case. Every day I keep on being surprised or puzzled with something. If only it could be happy stuff...

Posted by Squidoo Angel Prosperity66

A New Beta-Test Running on Squidoo? Or Does the Locking Madness Still Go on...

I woke up late today because of some family things that happened yesterday. I thus got late in bed and slept late - I'm someone who wakes up very early in the morning in general. Anyways... While drinking my first morning coffee cup, my eyes still half opened, I checked one forum and saw a bunch of threads relating to some kind of locking madness happening once again on Squidoo.

Then I quickly went to the official forums where the news were even worse! 

What happens right now? Well seems that HQ is currently locking lenses which have a lot of "no follow" sites linking back to them. 

But didn't Squidoo not long ago switched all their links back to other sites from "follow" to "no follow"?  Yes, they did !

So what's wrong with having a site setting outbond links to "no follow"?

Who Am I on the Internet?

Today I want to talk about a subject that I already raised on this blog and that led into Google penalizing some sites - Squidoo perhaps? - I mean "expertise".

I already posted in this blog that I don't believe in the word "expert" or "expertise" when it comes to the Internet. Not that I don't think that there are true experts on here - and I surely spoke to some of them in forums or Facebook or whatever other means of communication.

So it seems that Google's putting the highlight on experts - how do they decide who's an expert or not?  That is beyond my understanding since they never met those experts in person.

Therefore they certainly wrote some algorithms that would lead into their robots to differentiate "actual" experts from "false" or "so-called" experts. What's their algorithm? How do they differentiate the fake from the real?

Too Many Lens Locks Lead Into Any Kind of Behaviors

It's been a while that the Squidoo lens locking process has brought some Internet marketers discussions in many different forums. I mean professional forums - most white and black hat forums as well as professional marketers forums.

Not long ago I went to a post that explained how to reclaim a locked lens URL. Naturally the initial post was directed to the lensmasters whose lenses were locked by HQ. However, some marketers took the idea and claimed those locked URLs for themselves in order to make a profit from it.

Suddenly, a new batch of forum posts led into the idea that reclaimed URLS were locked as soon as published. I don't remember if these were the lens' owner new-former-URL or people taking advantage of other's misfortune's URLs. But that is not the point of this post.

Sites To Check for your Stolen Content

Duplicate content is a big no-no on Squidoo these days. However, although some lensmasters-marketers tried to actually game the system using duplicate content, most of us have no control on what other webmasters do with your content.

Stolen content - I mean content from your lens published elsewhere by someone else pretending its theirs or not crediting their source (although once again Squidoo isn't an article directory that would allow anyone to use their lensmasters' content elsewhere even with a credit line) - results into your lens getting flagged, now days more likely locked for duplicate content.

Sadly we don't laways have control on what others do with our work, we can't spend 24 hours a day checking as to whether someone stole our content and published it elsewhere.