Is It Spam or Just Bad Writing?

If you haven’t guessed it already, then you may have figured out that I do a lot of writing on Squidoo. I don’t remember what exactly brought me to Squidoo, but I do remember the potential that saw in it the first day I visited. In fact, I believe that I signed up that same exact day.

One of the first lenses that I built is make money shopping which was intended to help me find people interested in earning cash back from their online purchases. Now, I have to admit that the first version of this lens really stunk up the place big time, but when I posted about it on Squidu there were people that thought it was spammy. At the time I agreed with them based upon the fact that it was pretty much a sales pitch, but looking back, I do not think it was spammy. We’ll take a look at why next.

Search engine spam by definition is the gaming of the search engine algorithms to earn a higher ranking for certain desireable keywords. Squidoo had a real problem with spam before the Google slap in July of 2007 when they decided to do away with the Iframe. Spammers would game the system to rank for good keywords on Squidoo and then use Iframes or redirect pages to send unsuspecting visitors to porn or gambling sites. This is definitely spam because the result the poor search engine user clicked on definitely had nothing to do with where they landed.

On the other hand, my first lens was all about Big Crumbs, and how great it was and how much money someone could make. I repeated the name of the site alot which was a spam technique, but this was the worst thing that occurred within my writing. Was the writing pretty crappy? Yes, the first version of this lens was pretty much one long sales letter for Big Crumbs which made for a really poor experience for the user, but I still wouldn’t call it spam.

I also made a similar mistake with my first submission to Ezinearticles. I was writing a certain article to bring attention to a new idea I came up with for Squidoo lens and my article turned into a sales letter for the product I was promoting. Of course, the article was rejected for being too promotional and when I really thought about what I can tell my readers that will be useful to them and rewrote the article it was approved. Consider I have made this mistake twice when starting to write for two different venues, I can conclude that this is a common mistake that beginning writers make. I am not an expert at writing for the web yet, but I have definitely become more aware of being too salesy or promotional in my writing as of late. This awareness has also helped me write better which has helped me write more often.

Next time you see a bad lens it is probably not spam, but just bad writing. Do you agree or disagree?

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Originally posted 2009-06-15 22:35:58. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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2. Writing Articles And Learning Something At the Same Time
3. Writing: A Necessary Part of Making Money Online