I have several lenses (pages) on Squidoo.  Some of them I’m not particularly proud of because I have not given them enough attention, especially having been away from my normal work due to illness for most of this year.  Others, however, I feel quite content to claim are unique and useful pages (to use their description of what they say they’re looking for).  My pages provide good quality content, researched and written personally by myself and with plenty of outside links to help readers find further information.

But there’s the problem. Outside links! Squidoo in their assumed wisdom have put a limit of nine links to the same domain.  This gives me a problem in three respects.

Let’s take just one of my lenses, the one about Beatrix Potter the children’s author.

1. Beatrix Potter wrote a lot of books, and there have also been many books written about her.  Now I also happen to own an online bookshop so obviously I want to direct people to it.  The Squids have no objection to selling books.  It’s just that I’m probably going to have to change to directing people to Amazon because that’s a domain which they’ve whitelisted. Commercial bias?
2. Beatrix Potter was an early supporter of the leading British landscape protection body, The National Trust, and indeed spent a considerable proportion of the income from her writing to buy up at-risk land, especially in the Lake District, and hand it over to the Trust for the benefit of future generations. In a lengthening Squidoo lens I now have think carefully before creating another link between Miss Potter and the Trust in case the whole lens is banned by the Squid-police.
3. Finally, most of my links (to whatever external site) were passed through my tracking system. I’ve had to stop tracking in order to keep the lens live.

I can only assume that Squidoo only want small amateurish lenses and prefer not to have serious, professional web people involved with them.  Will I abandon all my lenses?  Probably not.  I can see that the content of one or two may have to be moved to somewhere else, probably onto new blogs of my own and just a small proportion left for the sake of a presence.  It’s most unlikely that I’ll be starting any more.  Is this what they really want?

- David Murray -