I received an email from Squidoo today telling me that my “lens” was in violation of, at least, one of their many use policies:

Dear Squidoo lensmaster:

You’re getting this note because it appears one of more of your lenses are violating our Terms of Service and our SquidDon’t policy which prevents creation of lenses on frequently spammed topics.

YOUR LENSES

http://www.squidoo.com/123affiliateincome

WHAT’S SQUIDDON’T?

The SquidDon’t policy is intended to prevent publishing of lenses on topics that have demonstrated an overwhelming attraction to spammers and spam traffic, even if the technical quality of the lens appears good. Many such lenses are spawned by affiliate programs that produce plagiarized or cloned content on lenses, which is also against our Squidoo terms of service.

Here are the relevant links about our policies should you like to brush up on them now:

http://www.squidoo.com/squidoo-policy-update

http://blogs.squidoo.com/squidblog/2009/06/17/newsflash-a-policy-update-for-lensmasters-who-care/

http://www.squidoo.com/squiddont

WHAT NOW?

You might have already sent in a special request to be exempt from our policy. If you did, we reviewed your lenses and either greenlighted them for future publishing or not. If your lens was not able to be greenlighted, that means the SquidDon’t policy still applies and your above lens or lenses will now be locked from view.

We hope you can understand that every free platform needs a system of checks and balances to keep it working and successful for its community. Fortunately, 99% of our members have no trouble with this policy and are thriving on the site.

THANKS

We sincerely hope you’ll feel welcome to continue making whatever new lenses you want on different, unique, non-SquidDon’t topics.

Thanks for reading, and for your help keeping high standards for user-generated content online.

The Squids

Squidoo.com

P.S. If you believe your lenses should be exempt from our SquidDon’t policy, you’re invited to submit a dispute by filling out this form: http://www.squidoo.com/pages/topicdispute. But please know we overturn very few of our decisions and chances are good your lens will remain locked. Thanks.

So, beware of sites which may be inclined to pigeon hole you for speaking about affiliate content.  The obvious point here is to know that they are not ensuring quality content by managing site in this way, but rather, trying to mitigate the traffic that is caused by affiliate style content – we all know that affiliate marketing is huge and will draw a significant crowd when the right message is presented in the write forum… Squidoo is apparently no longer one of these forums.

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