I received an email from Squidoo this morning mentioning some changes in their policy. I wanted to share that with you. If you are promoting your opportunity or some related material or products, it may affect your marketing efforts so make sure you read the “new” rules carefully. If you are not in compliance with those new rules, try to adapt your lenses, it would be too bad to have problem for a few minor tweaks.

Here is an excerpt of what they sent. If you haven’t received it you can find all the details on the Squidoo website directly.

1. No Spam. This one’s not new, but it’s worth saying again.

It’s simple: given our pedigree, our point of view and our dyed-in-the-wool, we-will-never-change-our-mind conviction on this issue, spam is not okay at Squidoo. For a few years now we have had a very strict and enforced stance against spam. That’s staying the same, and if anything, getting even more rigorous. If you actively spam people with your Squidoo lenses (by email, in blog comments, by stalking and harassing people on Twitter, by tricking people with the content in your lenses, and more) we’ll lock your entire account.

3. No Junk Topics from our “SquidDon’t” List

Lenses on free movie downloads. Toenail fungus cures. LoseBellyFatNow promotions. Reverse Phone Lookup 4U. You know junk when you see it. And lots more examples.

Unforunately, topics like these are overwhelmingly conditioned and proven to attract spammers. If a topic has displayed enough trickery and spam and bad activity, we choose not to support it. If we find a lens on a SquidDon’t topic or something very similar to it, we’ll lock it. For good. Our best recommendation: Don’t bother with topics like these. There’s plenty of incredible stuff to write about and recommend online without having to go near the edges of what we’re got going here.

4. A new limit on overly promotional lenses

Making a lens to promote or recommend something is a terrific endeavor. It’s a big part of why a lot of our people are here. But: Less is more! Sales lenses far too often turn into junk lenses, as described by the relentless number of outbound links to the same exact domain. Being overly promotional rarely works. “Buy here buy here buy here!” never does.

So to help you focus your lenses, and sell even better–and to help surfers find our pages more useful overall–we’re introducing a limit to the number of outbound links to the same domain that you can have on a lens. If you have more than 9 links to the SAME domain on a single lens, your lens will get locked for review. Of course we’ll have domains that are whitelisted out of this (meaning, you can have as many outbound links to them as you like), as well as sites that are blacklisted (meaning, even a single link to that domain will get your lens locked).

Please read all the important details on how this works.

What now? First, take a deep breath.

We won’t be flipping the switch on these new policies until July 20, 2009 or later. So you’ve got more than a month to review your lenses to make sure they’re playing by the rules.

In the meantime, here are 4 things you can do to get ready for these changes.

Keep the good work with article marketing but make sure you follow the new rules.good

Tags: Article Marketing, article rules, bum marketing, no spam, Squidoo, squidoo rules