What to do if Your Squidoo Lens Gets Locked and Your Article Gets Unpublished

Let me make your day with the help of an online writer’s scenario.

You sit down at your computer and glance out the window.  The sun is shining and it’s a beautiful day.  

Despite the call to abandon yourself to nature and head outdoors, you power up, log in, and sign on to your account on the writing platform Squidoo. 

Today, however, is not a normal day on Squidoo.  Today you find yourself looking at a Squidoo Dashboard which states that you’ve been issued a WARNING.  

Squidoo is no longer indexing one of your articles on the website, and when others try and access it they’re receiving a notice that it is currently unavailable to read.   Your article is in limbo-land. 

What Can You Do?

The first thing you’ll do is yell at the computer screen, I guarantee you.  Most assuredly, you’ll be angry. 

But now is the time to be reasonable because you now have to decide just how much time you’re going to devote to the problem.

The folks at Squidoo Headquarters will tell you that you have 30 to 60 days to rework your article, contact them for a human review of your revised work, and hopefully work things out and move forward.  This is true in theory, and you can give it a try. 

The reality of the situation is really quite a bit different.   Here’s what I mean.

First of all, your WARNING will give you no clue to what’s wrong with your article.  Squidoo will not detail why their algorithm is unhappy with your article.  You’re going to just have to guess, and guess again, and again.  Many, many, many writers never figure out how to revise their stalled article enough to satisfy the platform again.

But you give it a try anyways.  And you go down the list of suggestions Squidoo often writes about and you add more content, try another Amazon module, check links, and downgrade your marketing techniques.

You contact Squidoo after you rework your article.  Again, however, they won’t send a response or a notification to you to tell you what they’re thinking.  So you can wait and wait, and never totally understand what the problem was with your article in the first place. 

Squidoo HQ states in their tutorial articles that they rarely go back on their WARNINGS.  So even when you revise your work, it may not be enough.  And after 60 days of trying to right a problem that you can’t identify, your article will be now be both unpublished and deleted from the site.

In the end, you have 2 choices.  You can try and fight the system because although rarely, every once and awhile they do reverse an original decision.  Or you can take your article off the site and put it elsewhere.   

We’re back to the question I posed earlier.  How much time do you want to put into solving your Squidoo problem?

Let’s look into moving on.

How to Export your Article off Squidoo and onto Your Computer

The first thing you’ll want to do to claim your work is to Save an XML copy of your article to your computer.  To do this, go into Workshop and look for EXPORT in the right hand sidebar.  Click on EXPORT.   The XML Export contains all of your text and your configuration settings that you have in your article.

Another option for saving your work is to save using your browser.  You do this by choosing your browser’s File -> Save Webpage.  This function will even save your images to a directory.

After saving and storing your content to your personal computer or to your storage, you’ll want to DELETE your article from the Squidoo platform.  This procedure is done from your Squidoo Dashboard. Just locate the article on your Lens List, and click DELETE.

Once you’ve exported your work you’ll have time to make a decision on what you want to do with this former Squidoo content.  You may choose to rework it for another online writers platform.  You might decide you’re ready to experience writing on your own website.  Or you may decide that you will simply delete the material and call it a day.

Whatever you decide with your work, try and give yourself a little time and space to make a good decision.  Don’t make the choice when you’re angry or feeling rejected.   

This is just one article, the others may be fine.  Then again, the issue may help you decide to move in another direction.  You may find you want to take control over the direction of your work and choose to move all your articles to another location at this one time.  There's no one good answer.

Squidoo changes their rules all the time and what was a good match for your talents at one time may turn out to simply be a stepping stone towards something you find better or more fun. 

Enjoy writing on Squidoo for as long as you can.  Just know that at some point things may change, your involvement with the website may end, and you may find yourself moving on like many writers before you. 

It’s fun while it lasts.