How I Moved My Squidoo Lenses - and Other Squidoo Thoughts

Published: Sat, 07/27/13

Oh, Squidoo - It's Been Nice Knowing You...
I received several emails in response to the one I sent yesterday.  Most specifically referenced the PS at the bottom regarding Squidoo.  Some had questions, some wanted advice about how to proceed and some were simply filled with frustration about the current environment. 

It wasn't my intention to leave anyone hanging so I wanted to share some additional information with anyone impacted these days by the changes being made at Squidoo and give some instructions you can follow to protect yourself as much as possible. 
First, let's go over what IS happening at Squidoo.

They got a wake up call in March from Google and have been making drastic changes to the site as a result.  I think that wake up call also drew Seth's attention back to his original goal for the site so - and this is just my opinion - you have the business having to make changes to appease Google AND Seth piling in some other changes in order to redirect the business. 

Combine that with Squidoo's inability to communicate effectively or timely; their history of launching system changes without sufficient testing; and what I believe is some misunderstanding of what Google really wants and you have a tangle of bugs, updates, new requirements, and jangled nerves.

And so the Fallout Begins

I wouldn't put together a list of all the changes Squidoo has made since March if you paid me only because it was nearly impossible to keep up AND get anything else done.  Let's just say it's a LOT.  Most of the changes have required lensmasters go in and fix existing lenses to meet the latest change and then do it all over again when a new announcement comes out. 

I don't know about you but reworking something that was doing just fine to begin with is a giant pet peeve.

Lensmasters began to see warning notices on lenses and lenses getting locked.  That cycle has not stopped.  Each new change seems to have been accompanied by another round of lens warnings and accounts getting locked.  Related forums are literally plastered with threads of frustration. 

Hey, it's Squidoo's site and they can do what they want.  It's not how I'd do things but it's not my site.  The only thing I can control is me.  After a bit of the circus routine, I chose to stop spinning my wheels.

As a Giant, my notices came later than on non-giant accounts.  At first, I had 3 or 4 warning notices on lenses.  Surprisingly, most were not sales lenses.  I fixed or deleted those without any hassle.

A few weeks later and I had 30 some lenses locked.  No big deal.  I had over 450 lenses and the 30 were not any of my top performers.  I moved the content and deleted the lenses.  I then deleted another 50 or so simply because they weren't getting a lot of traffic and I figured they were next on the chopping block anyway. 

My plan was to continue moving lenses that got locked as they were locked. 

The beginning of July I received an email saying my entire account had been locked - all remaining 350 some lenses.  Well, so much for moving them in batches...

Here was the first reason they gave me for locking the account:

Yikes! We've noticed that your Squidoo lenses are violating our Terms of Service. http://www.squidoo.com/pages/tos.

Your account has been locked. This means all your lenses are on probation and invisible to the world. In 7 days they will be deleted.

Specifically, your account was flagged for deletion because your lenses and/or group were flagged as spam. This means your content is recycled, copied from another website, or identical from lens to lens. Or, maybe you created a bunch of uncurated lenses with only one or two modules of content, or content that doesn't add to the value of the lens. Squidoo's TOS specifically prohibits this. Could be any number of things, really. [That last line just covers their rear ends and leaves the whole issue as cloudy as it was to begin with....]

That seemed so far out of whack that I sent a note back saying I believed they'd made a mistake.  I did not have ANY recycled or copied content on my lenses, they weren't identical content from lens to lens, nor were they lenses with only a module or two of content. 

This was their second response (notice this explanation does not match the one given in the first email):

Your lenses were locked after a hand review. More than 80% of your account contains thin affiliate lenses that don't comply with the new standards that were released in March of 2013: http://www.squidoo.com/magictos.

When we see an account like this we typically lock right away. However since you were a Giant Squid we locked a few lenses first, but after looking through more lenses we had no choice but to lock your whole account.

They added to that message that they'd unlocked ONE lens because it was personal (although I had quite a number of personal lenses with no affiliate links).

I have a very LOW tolerance for inefficient processes.

The only thing going through my head at the time was "I would be embarrassed if this were how my company were treating their business partners". 

I'd already decided I was going to move locked lenses so I left it at that and began the process of moving my content.    

Making the Actual Move

The first step was to save all of my lenses to my hard drive.  Squidoo's note said the lenses would be deleted in 7 days.  It took about a day of concentrated effort to save all 350ish lenses.  I brought them up in Firefox, clicked File/Save Page As and chose Complete WebPage. 

I purchased a new domain with a generic name because I wanted to put almost all of my lenses on the same site and that would mean quite a mix of unrelated topics. 

I use WordPress for all of my sites.  Normally I use the Flexsqueeze theme but I wanted one that was responsive.  A responsive theme adjusts the size of your content to fit whatever device is being used to display the content.  Since Squidoo had switched to a responsive layout in December 2012 I figured I'd take advantage of the responsive code I'd included in many of my lenses.

I chose the free Magazine Basic theme.  Easy to set up, responsive, and it looks good on mobile phones, too. 

I then began the process of recreating each lens in the new site.  These are the steps:
  1. Start a new post on the WordPress site
  2. From the Squidoo dashboard, open the lens editor for the lens to be copied
  3. Copy the lens title and put it in the WordPress post title field
  4. Open the Intro Module in the lens, copy the content and paste it into the WordPress post
  5. Open the next module in the lens, copy the content and paste it into the WordPress post
  6. If there's a video in the content, hover over the YouTube logo on the video in the lens editor, right click, and select copy video URL
  7. Paste the video URL into the WordPress post
  8. Continue copying the content of each module and pasting into the WordPress post until all wanted content has been moved over

TIPS:

  1. I used the Clipple plug-in for Firefox to copy multiple modules at a time.  You can copy up to 15 items and Clipple stores them in your clipboard so you can paste any of those 15 items into another location.  This saved me a lot of time in going back and forth between the lens and the WordPress post.  That changes the above steps to "Open a module, copy; open next module, copy; open next module, copy (etc); go to WordPress post and paste in all the things I just copied".  One issue, though.  Once I copied a YouTube video URL with Clipple, it wouldn't copy anything else so I always had to go to WordPress and paste all the recently copied items once I'd copied a video URL.
  2. Any of the lens images that were uploaded to the photo boxes inside a Squidoo module were saved to my hard drive when I saved the lenses as a Complete WebPage.  To replace the image in the content I selected the option to upload a photo to my WordPress post, navigated to the location of that image in my hard drive and inserted the photo to the post. 

BEFORE PUBLISHING:

  1. I decided not to publish until the lens itself had been removed from the Google Index.  This didn't take more than a few days for most lenses.  If the lens had not yet been removed from the Google Index, I saved the WordPress post in draft mode and held off on publishing until the lens was deindexed.  

AFTER PUBLISHING:

  1. I held off deleting the lens until after the next Squidoo payday had cycled.  After that I deleted any lens that had been recreated in WordPress even if the WordPress post had not yet been published.  As long as I had the lens saved in WordPress I felt comfortable deleting the lens.  I may have missed one pay cycle but the payouts had become so dismal it didn't make sense to wait.
  2. Once I deleted the URL for any of my BEST lenses, I went back in and reserved the URL again in Squidoo.  I wish I'd thought to do that before I lost the URLs for my two best lenses.  I may never build the lens but I was really LIVID when I saw the post about people grabbing locked and deleted URLs and taking advantage of the previous rankings and Page Rank of the original lens.  If you don't want someone else being able to do the same to your best URLs, reserve the URL again in your Squidoo account and you can always decide what to do with it later. 

HERE'S THE BIGGEST TIP OF ALL:

There are two ways I know of for saving your lens content - the method I described above and the export content link available in the lens workshop. 

However, neither of those methods provides you with the code in each of your lens modules IN A FORMAT THAT IS COMPATIBLE WITH WORDPRESS.  You can't click the Edit button for your modules when you view your saved webpage.  The source code includes characters only readable by Squidoo's system.  Same with the exported file you may have saved from the lens workshop.  Your content IS there, it's just that you have to do a lot of scrubbing to remove and reformat the HTML to make it work with WordPress.

As soon as I realized that, I stopped focusing on publishing the new lenses and spent three days copying each lens module by module from the Squidoo dashboard to WordPress posts.  I saved all the posts as drafts so I could go back in and clean them up later.  I've found it's much faster recreating the lens this way.
How Is the New Site Doing?

It did very well the first few weeks and I saw lots of 2 and 3 page rankings.  Rankings dropped the 3rd week and have been slowly recovering.  I have a lot of lenses left in WordPress drafts that I need to clean up and publish. 

The best traffic getter for the new site has been the images inside of posts.  The ones with keyword rich image alt tags are getting lots of traffic from Google Image searches.  That means focus on those alt tags in your content!

It takes a lot of time to build up a new site and rankings in search engines should be expected to bounce around for awhile until the site gains some backlinks and traction in Google.
What If You Don't Want to Move to Your Own Site?

Your choices are to try to stick it out with Squidoo or move your content to another site that accepts user-generated content.  Most such sites expect original material so you'll have to wait until your lens is deindexed and/or make changes to your content if someone has copied portions of your content anywhere else. 

If you want to stay with Squidoo, work on your most profitable lenses first.  Delete any sales lenses that aren't bringing traffic or sales IF you have more than 80% sales lenses in your portfolio.  You can always resave the URL and rebuild the lens but this may keep your entire account from being locked (no guarantees). 
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How Is This Different Than What's Available In OBI?

OBI (OnlineBusinessInsiders) is the membership forum where a group of internet marketing experts mentor and support the members with information on subjects like Amazon, traffic generation, authority site building, Clickbank, writing, Kindle publishing, and overall business practices. 

As the Amazon expert for the forum, I share a lot of information with members that I don't share elsewhere.  Regarding this topic, OBI shows the actual URL where I moved my lenses and discusses traffic and income details. 

The actual URL where I've moved my lenses.  Information on stats.  Information on earnings to date.
Keep Your Strategies!

Just because certain strategies might no longer work on Squidoo doesn't mean they won't work elsewhere.  Any keyword strategies and content layout strategies you've used can still be very profitable on other platforms or on your own sites.  Keep that in mind as you start any new projects. 
Will I Build Another Lens on Squidoo?

Anything's possible however, at this point, I would only build a lens that benefited my own sites in some fashion and right now those sites have me much too busy to think about building a lens.

Sincerely,

Erica Stone
erica@extremereviewer.com