Me Fed Up. Squidoo Sucks.
I thought I'd create a lens and get a couple of backlinks from yet another ip. I thought, why not squidoo. I created the lens, hit publish and got a message that I'm either connecting to a blacklisted domain or else I have too many links to the same domain.
Since the domain in questions is a mere baby, not even 3 months old and this is its first encounter with Squidoo, it wouldn't be barred.
Since I have only 3 links in the lens, I don't have more than 9 (their limit).
So, I figure, I'd dispute. For, you see, some times, I'm just plain loco.
I have to check off that I've read the TOS and the new TOS. So I read the new TOS. It says I'm not allowed to publish anything but original content. If it's mine 100% but I published it somewhere else, it's not original.
People get paid good money to get into that kind of writing agreement. So, what gives?
On the other hand, the businessman in me thinks, If they get away with it, wow!
Anyway, no more lenses for me, not even for a lousy backlink. I'm hereby officially making it official.
By the way, the links were to a local insurance agency.
Live long and prosper.
Doctor D.
P. S. A penny for any of your squidoo-an thoughts.
P.P.S. It's beginning to look to me that pretty soon, the only way I'm going to get me tons of backlinks is if I own a ton of sites that exist just for that purpose.
P.P.S. Three pennies for your thoughts on me having tons of sites for the purposes described above. (By the way, I'm far behind, have only 47. However, I'm allowing myself to post 3 backlinks per post. That helps some.)
If the traffic is not going to articles any more it's gotta be going somewhere so who is getting it now? Maybe it's going to go to our content rich affiliate marketing sites!
I don't think it a bad idea to create your own back linking empire :-)
Might take as long as writing articles x factor 10 'though.
Maybe we need several mini backlinking empires. I bought into Back Linking Demon but found I still need a smart strategy to make it work and that has kind of hit the back burner for the moment.
Since Google made the big change traffic from articles (any directory) is waaaaaay down.
In addition the parameters for submitting articles has changed significantly, as you pointed out.
Conclusion: Every article submission needs to be totally unique to be accepted. Once published expect far less traffic than before. This means to get the same traffic as prior to Google's change you need to multiply your previous article creation efforts by more than a factor of 10.
Or find a better way of driving targeted traffic.