Pearl Harbor Day, 2005 marked the opening of Squidoo's public beta testing, so if you're wondering who is a beta tester and who isn't, anybody whose lensmaster page says "Lensmaster since Nov. 2005" (or earlier) is a beta tester.

If you've ever tried to get a website "off the ground," you know that beta testers are hard to come by. Good beta testers are even rarer. So I don't want to paint this "leading lensmasters" screed with too broad a brush. Some of the Squidoo beta-testers have produced some good content.

What irks me is that others are simply getting a free ride at the expense of innocent Squidoodlers everywhere, who deserve better.

Business Logs outlines the first part of the problem with exceptional clarity in Squidoo Says My Lens Needs Improving. There's nothing in the Squidoo terms of service to justify arbitrary deletion of a person's work because it doesn't meet Squidoo's "standards."

There is, however "point 9" reserving Squidoo LLC's right to modify or discontinue the service, so they could fix this. In any case I'm not necessarily advocating the complete deletion of this "content" -- just suggesting that these sploggers shouldn't be "Leading Lensmasters."

Note that having a link from the Squidoo homepage (Google PageRank = 6 ) these blank splogs receive a lot of traffic and consequently a better "lensrank" than a lot of actual content pages. Since the Squidoo Co-op distributes Google AdSense revenue based on traffic, I think this is a serious breach of faith, if not outright fraud.

The Google AdSense Terms of Service specify that participating pages (or "lenses") must comply with The Google AdSense Program Policies which include a requirement to adhere to Google's Webmaster Guidelines. If that seems like a bit much, it may be but those are the rules.

A LOT of Squidoo's content violates one or more of these requirements, and Google has been notoriously slow to enforce them, presumably because it would cut into their advertising revenue. (Since they already spider these pages with two separate 'bots Google is in a uniquely advantageous position to monitor these pages if they choose to.)

The specific problem regarding these "Leading Lensmaster" splogs is that they violate the following Webmaster guideline:

"Do not participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or 'bad neighborhoods' on the web as your website may be affected adversely by those links."

(They also probably violate other guidelines, since they're just blank templates but that one seemed the most applicable to me.)

Squidoo's terms of service state (in part):

You must not abuse, harass, threaten or intimidate other Lensmasters or others who use the Service...

I always thought the appropriate response for this type of behavior was a visit from your local constabulary -- so who knows what Squidoo considers "harassment?" I'm going with the dictum that the truth is inherently non-libelous no matter how embarassing it may be.

Additionally Squidoo requires:

You cannot collect or store personal data about other users...

This TOS is violated regularly, but a deal is a deal. However nobody said you couldn't link to somebody's page.

I've tried to go "through channels" with these complaints using bug -reporting, the lensmaster forum "Squid U," the "report this lens" feature, e-mails -- all to no avail. Did I mention that Squidoo's customer service "sux?"

If they want to terminate me for publishing the following information on their "Leading Lensmasters" I'll be inconvenienced, but I'm bending over backward to comply with an agreement that had I read it closely and understood all that it implied including the complete unwillingness of Squidoo to deal fairly with their content providers I probably never would have accepted in the first place.

Number 4

I suppose hitting edit - publish every couple of weeks complies with Squidoo's guidelines if not Google's.

I can't say this list is exhaustive, but I did try to be fair by including everyone in the category. There could be a few current examples that are missing, because the list is so long it is taxing the ability of Hubpages' page creation software to update it.

This is not a new problem. It was reported before Squidoo entered its public beta phase.

I am not a lawyer, but as I said earlier IMHO this smacks of fraud. Certainly these lensmasters are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to blank pages at Squidoo, but if Squidoo LLC ever hopes to get a handle on this sort of thing, they aren't going to do it by holding up offenders as "Leading Lensmasters."

I'll leave it to Squidoo and Google to fight this out, but if the Westchester county prosecutor's office contacts me -- I'll tell them everything I know. And if the Feds decide it falls under the RICO act as an ongoing criminal conspiracy -- well ask leading lensmaster Martha Stewart what happens to people who alledgedly lie to them.

I hope this article will encourage some of these people to "clean up their acts," but just to preserve my righteous indignation, here is a cached copy of this page as it was originally published.